The war was noted by many in Iran who saw that the United States beat the Iraqis in 100 hours of ground combat while the Iranian armed forces failed to defeat Iraq in eight years of warfare.
It has been part of Jazayeri’s mission to prove that the Americans are a paper tiger and no military threat to Iran despite the message of the 1991 war.
So Jazayeri focused instead on the much longer wars of the past decade and their cost. “Some believe the US economic bankruptcy today, which has struck despair and hopelessness into American society, emanates from the $3 trillion spent” on the Iraq and Afghan wars, he said.
He didn’t identify the “some” who believe this and economists actually attribute the deep recession to such things as a credit crunch, runaway valuations on housing and the creation of bond mechanisms that obscured underlying values, thereby undercutting the foundation of the market, which is based on ascertaining value.
Jazayeri didn’t explain where he got the war cost of $3 trillion. It is actually $1.1 trillion.
Jazayeri said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are second costliest after World War II. That is correct; World War II cost $4.1 trillion when repriced into inflated 2011 dollar values.
But Jazayeri didn’t look at the war as a percentage of gross domestic product, which is a better measure of the burden a war places on an economy. The Congressional Research Service recently calculated those figures for the peak year of 10 American wars.
That calculation shows that the Afghan and Iraq wars combined have been less of an economic burden than any American war except for the 1898-99 Spanish-American War and 1991 Persian Gulf War, neither of which even lasted a full year.
The calculations show the following percentage burdens: 1991 Persian Gulf War 0.3%; Spanish-American War 1.1%; Iraq-Afghan wars 1.2%; Mexican War 1.4%; War of 1812 2.2%; Vietnam War 2.3%; Korean War 4.2%; Civil War 11.3%; World War I 13.6%; and World War II 35.8%.
