he Iraq war will likely cost the United States anywhere between one and two trillion dollars, despite earlier assurances by the White House that these expenses would be manageable, according to a new study co-authored by a Nobel Prize winning economist.

The research made public Monday by Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, a 2001 Nobel Prize laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, and economy professor Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, argues current official assessments of the war cost fail to consider key expenses likely to dog the U.S. budget for years to come.

They include rising medical expenses to treat more than 16,000 wounded soldiers, accelerated depreciation of military hardware on the battlefield and the ripple effect on higher oil prices on the U.S. economy, which in part can be blamed on the military venture.

"Even taking a conservative approach, we have been surprised at how large they are," Stiglitz and Bilmes wrote of the costs of the war. "We can state, with some degree of confidence, that they exceed a trillion dollars."

Wow, talk about expensive. Imagine how much good that money could have done on other projects like Cancer research or other causes. You can't put a price on freedom though but it's still a whole lot of money!

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