For What We've Paid for the Iraq War the U.S. Could've Bought...

...Google+Microsoft+Intel. In other words, the U.S. government has shoveled the equivalent of the entire core of the tech industry into Iraq. The Web is starting to bubble with interesting conversation about the cost of the war and how that money could've been otherwise spent. This has been touched off by government figures that show the U.S. has appropriated $523 billion for the war -- and the book The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. As you might guess, the book says the war's real cost to the U.S. alone is more like $3 trillion. (The authors point out that for that, we could've given every one of the 24 million pre-war Iraqis a check for $250,000, essentially buying the country's allegiance one person at a time.)

Whatever figure you pick -- $523 billion or $3 trillion -- the obvious point is that the money could've been invested in technology that would do far more to secure the nation's future. Like, what if that had been spent on building nuclear power plants and electric cars? Could the U.S. have vastly accelerated its independence from Middle East oil? Not to mention what that would do for global warming. The latest Wired argues that nukes are the only way to save the planet.

It's all a moot point, of course. The investment opportunity is gone, the money dispersed to military personnel, defense contractors and all that. (As if, just coming off Memorial Day, the dollars even matter compared to the loss of life and other casualties.) But the debate needs to happen. Maybe it will help encourage better decisions going forward, and it's an interesting question of whether new technology can sometimes solve the same problem as a war.