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What did it cost to oust Saddam?
BY MICHAEL BLANDING
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Which would you rather have: a world without Saddam Hussein, or 1.3 million new US schoolteachers? How about a million extra units of affordable housing? Or a year’s health insurance for 30 million more American children? These are some of the comparisons provided on a simple but shocking Web site that purports to show the true price of our recent Middle Eastern adventure. The site, www.costofwar.com, keeps a ticker-tape account of the ongoing cost of war and occupation in Iraq — $71,072,693,004 at the time of this writing, though it’ll likely have grown by a million or two by the time you read this — alongside statistics regarding the domestic causes we could be spending our money on, as well as a pull-down menu that gives the regional costs of the war. "Before the war they were talking about how this was going to be a cheap and instantaneous invasion," says site co-founder Niko Matsakis, a 25-year-old computer programmer and MIT alumnus living in Boston. "It wasn’t until I started doing the Web site that I realized how much they were misrepresenting the facts." The idea for the site came during a late-night gripe session between Matsakis and his godfather, Elias Vlanton, a long-time anti-war activist who lives in Takoma Park, Maryland. In the midst of lamenting the social costs of President Bush’s tax cuts, Vlanton recalled a Vietnam-era brochure that compared the cost of that war to the cost of various domestic programs. In just a weekend, the two whipped up a modern version on the Web, improving on the original with a dynamic counter that updates its numbers with each fraction of a second. The pair started the site in April, but it’s blown up into a cult phenom in just the past two weeks, during which it’s received over 100,000 of its 130,000 hits. One visitor wrote that his eyes welled up with tears just looking at the numbers; another was too disgusted to finish reading. A representative of presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich added the link to Kucinich’s official blog site (www.denniskucinich.us). Another visitor from a small town in Kentucky used the numbers to produce two weeks’ worth of ads in his hometown newspaper. Still, there’s one figure Matsakis can’t get out of his head — $2.20. That’s the amount that the US is spending per millisecond for the occupation. (The invasion itself, he estimates, cost $19 per millisecond.) "When you think about the fact that breathing for just a few breaths expends thousands of dollars," he observes, "it’s really pretty amazing."
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