COMMENTARY
I posted the following as a comment and then in shorter form as a tweet

I am an accountant ... I follow money. So the question that I have is how many huge fortunes have been made by this -trillion war

There is another issue. In the 15 or so months after 9/11 most of the world was on the same agenda as the United States ... most of the world wanted Bin Laden and AlQuaeda to be held to account for the events of 9/11 and the follow up events in Madrid and London. But all this changed when the US leadership ... Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice ... pushed the US to expand the hot war into Iraq.

How many people turned against the United States because of its invasion of Iraq?

How much value destruction is associated with post invasion activities of all sorts in Iraq?

The accountability issue should not be allowed to get 'swept under the rug'
Peter Burgess

Iraq By The Numbers: The World’s Costliest Cakewalk

IMAGE Powell's infamous presentation at the U.N.

The Obama administration’s announcement of a withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of the year offers the possibility of a definitive conclusion for the U.S. military’s involvement in Iraq. But while the return of all U.S. service men and women by Christmas is a cause for celebration, the costs of the war are only beginning to be fully understood. The “cakewalk” to Baghdad, as George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman infamously wrote in February, 2002, has been anything but. The Iraq War, and the faulty premise that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, has had a staggering humanitarian and economic cost.

Here are some relevant numbers:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$3 – $4 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$2.3 – $2.6 trillion in federal outlays for the Iraq war through FY2011

$569 – $934 billion projected costs for Iraq war veterans’ medical and disability benfits through 2051

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq