THE COST OF ‘FREEDOM’

According to a recent report from a committee of MPs (the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, for those of you parliamentary anoraks who are interested!), the cost to the British taxpayer of our invasions, occupations and ongoing bombing-and-maiming operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has nearly doubled in the past year to more than 3 billion pounds.

On the other side of the pond, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to cost the United States approximately $12 billion a month – tripled the rate of their earliest years – in what he has termed (conservatively) in his new book as 'The Three Trillion Dollar War'.

Can you even begin to conceptualise three trillion US dollars? Can you picture in your mind how many suitcases would be required to carry 3 billion UK pounds? As one commentator in the New York Times recently noted, the human mind isn’t well equipped to make sense of a figure like a trillion (or even a billion):

“We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion – they all start to sound the same.”

So, let’s put it this way. What could the United States spend $3 trillion on, instead of the carnage and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, for a fraction of that amount, it could literally end global poverty, hunger and malnutrition. It could put a roof over the head of every homeless person on the face of the earth, and put food and water on the table of every starving human being in every corner of the globe. The World Bank estimates that the cost of meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals would be an additional annual $40-70 billion between now and 2015, i.e. $500 billion max! That would still leave $2.5 trillion in change (!) – i.e. not simply to build schools and hospitals in every town and village in America but in every town and village in the world. (I feel like Richard Pryor right now, in the classic ‘80s movie 'Brewster's Millions').

Even the UK’s own relatively paltry 3 billion pounds in war spending over the past twelve months could have been better spent halving child poverty across Britain – that’s how much it would cost to lift a million and a half children out of poverty in this country.

So you see: we could have spent our taxes on helping to feed and clothe poor kids here in Britain but instead we chose to spend it on killing kids thousands of miles away; the United States too could have spent its tax revenues on ending poverty, malnutrition and hunger across the globe but instead chose to bring greater poverty, malnutrition and hunger to the long-suffering people of Iraq.