" THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR "
: BY Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes;
REVIEW by
M.K.BHADRAKUMAR
Indeed war literature is as ancient as war itself and the method of narration differs very widely from gloomy narratives to dramatic accounts of the happenings. Much depends on the authors who produce these narratives ,gifted as most of them are with an enviable clarity and minute details they furnish to the outside world of the gory and grim realities explained in bold and seasoned narration .
Two outstanding books on the Iraq war are : Rajiv Chandrasekharan’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and the other by Patrick Cockburn’s "Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. " Both being gifted journalists ,who lived and worked in Baghdad as war correspondents and their despatches conveyed with a powerful immediacy the horror and futility of the Iraq war in entirely two different perspectives.
. Meanwhile, this brilliant book under review , joined the literature on IRAQI coflict .Unlike the earlier ones, this makes a startling study of the financial costs and may seem quintessentially an economist’s view of the unaffordability of the Iraq war for the ailing American economy.But still , it is much more than an urbane perspective on the tumultuous war. Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate ,with hands-on experience in the corridors of power in Washington,is first and foremost a humanist. In the alchemy of his intellect, cold statistics inevitably assume flesh and blood.The book’s running theme, "NO FREE LUNCH" conveys there are no free wars. In one way or another, today and in the future, we (U.S.) will pay for this IRAQ war, the administration and Congress have chosen to push the bills onto future administrations and to future generations.” The grimness of the situation for America’s future is reflected in Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker, warning "there are “striking similarities” with the factors that brought down Rome. ''Bush administration was wrong about the benefits of this war, but even more disastrous for the American citizen was it wilfully underestimated the cost to make it appear a doable war.By adopting a novel method to estimate the resources required to fight the Iraq and in reckoning the costs MINUTELY vivisected – ranging from the budgetary appropriations for the U.S. military operations to operational expenditure “hidden” elsewhere in the U.S. defence budget, the adjustments for inflation, future operational expenditures, costs of disability and health c
More abstracts about the The Three Trillion Dollar War