Centripetal Notion

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Things We Could Have Bought Instead of a War in Iraq

image credit: Daniel Ross

Boston.com estimates the total cost of the War in Iraq at around $456 billion. What could we have bought instead? Among other things:

According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.

1 pings

  1. Pingback: What does $456 billion buy? - The cost of the Iraq War | The Last Minute Blog on 8 May 07

6 comments

  1. hthth 08 May, 07 @ 10:57 am

    Oh man. That’s painful to read.

  2. Jason 08 May, 07 @ 5:21 pm

    Sad indeed and a great way to convey the cost of war. Reminds me of the fantastic graphic in the Times back in January. (Full article here.)

  3. Ian 19 May, 07 @ 8:35 pm

    makes me want to cry…..

  4. Alban 04 June, 07 @ 2:42 pm

    This world is completely insane and everything is upside down. I don’t need anything else to face in order to say and mean, “enough of this shit. I am leaving…”? It is my own attack upon myself and there truly is an alternative to this chaos of suspiciousness and viciousness.
    Thank God. I love my Father.

  5. Julian 07 April, 08 @ 9:40 pm

    You think thats painfulo… try watching the video of the sodier known as motari throw a puppy of a cliff. thats whats taking iraq’s oil…i mean keeping iraq safe that is.

  6. Student 29 January, 09 @ 12:45 pm

    I’m in my science class when i saw this and i thought that this really shows how the soldiers think about hte war, im not sure if its the soldiers or if it was someone else who wrote this but i really feel that this is what we need, iraq is in a depression and we are just putting more pressure on them… but i completely dissagree with Julian because of the video. Its a puppy yes but how many more soldiers are dying for lost cause and if it were a full grown dog, it would have attacked them putting them at risk, people have a cruel sence of humor yes but that doesnt mean that all our soldiers are terrible people

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Justin Ruckman