Some will still argue about whether or not the Iraq was was really about oil. But look around the globe, and notice that we haven’t invaded Sudan or Zimbabwe. We haven’t invaded North Korea or Myanmar or the Congo or Somalia[caveat]. All those countries have political situations similar in severity to, or worse than, Iraq before the US invasion.

Now let’s run a few numbers.

Oil is necessary to the world economy, and having reliable sources of oil is, for the moment, absolutely vital. The US consumes in the vicinity of 150 billion gallons of gasoline a year, or 411 million gallons per day. That has a current market value of around $550 billion at current gas prices, which it should be noted are significantly higher than at the start of the Iraq war.

So far, the US has spent about $520 billion on the war in Iraq, and estimates show the cost will likely exceed $1 trillion, and possibly much higher. This does not include the cost of life. 4073 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and 29,978 have been wounded as of the end of April 2008. The value of life at a personal level is infinite, but researchers can come up with a society-wide number, and for military age people it is about $7 million per life. That puts the value of the soldiers’ lives at $28.5 billion. The army also makes payments to injured servicemen and women which average to about $75,000 per person. That puts the value of the soldiers’ injuries at about $2.25 billion (although this figure may be included in the estimate at the beginning of the paragraph).  This equates to a rough estimated cost of about $550 billion.

Instead of fighting a war over oil, the US government could have subsidized free oil for every car, truck, train, airplane, factory, house, office, school, and moped in the country for an entire year at current war-inflated prices.

In such a case, we would also have spared the lives, injuries and psychological damage of our soldiers abroad.

There are innumerable other factors as well, from very complicated financial ones such as the war’s impact on the deficit, interest rates, and cost of credit, to humanitarian ones like how the national guard was ineffective during hurricane Katrina, to simpler ones like lost (wasted) political time in dealing with the war.  We have also utterly soiled our international reputation as a nation.  I could never take them all into account, but it is always an interesting thought experiment.