By 100 billion.

Look at the CBO numbers, and listen to what this guy has to say.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/iraq_the_war_that_broke_us_not.html

Here is the CBO document that this article uses for its data.

http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11705/08-18-Update.pdf

Scary numbers.

Ok without checking whether the statistics actually hold up or not (so assuming he is correct) he misses two important points I believe.

1) The stimulus helped the economy recover, therefore the costs of the stimulus are at least to some point offset by the stronger economy.

2) The stimulus spending wasn't a straight up loss. The GM deal is a good example of this, $50B outlay and now the govt owns about $100B of GM.

So your saying its better to spend money killing innocent people in other countries rather than trying to reboot a falling economy. I don't know what to say.

Makes you think, how sad of a war is it, that a stimulus packages almost matches it.

A point he makes:

Then you get the argument, "well this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill." Whaddya think a stimulus is? (Laughter.) That's the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That's the point. (Applause.)

No, I am saying it's best to do neither. But yea, we went to war and spend a shit load of money. This means Obama can do whatever he wants.

Great logic. I don't know what to say.

Uh. Spending $572B in two years on stimulating the economy stimulates the economy.

Also comparing now to the cold war on defense spending is obviously going to stuff comparisons up.

Government spending is government spending. If the answer to a bad economy is government spending, then why is the problem government spending?

The point of this article, is to point out that we are in a very bad place today economically, and it had very little to do with the war.

What really got us in trouble, even after the war is over, we are still going to be doing. It's important to know that.

FYI: I think government spending is the 0 wrong way to recover. But don't take my word for it, just look at the last 2 years.

Oh good. The article mentioned Stiglitz's estimate. I'll answer his question about how Stiglitz arrived at that estimate.

Stiglitz thought the Iraq war cost $3 trillion dollars (as of 2008!) because he's an economist and not an accountant. Economists look for indirect costs, opportunity costs, and externalities and try to estimate them, while accountants aren't paid to look past the balance sheet. 

So for example, the CBO isn't factoring a lifetime of productive labour and taxes paid by a young person who didn't die on the other side of the world. Stiglitz is.

I don't doubt that the CBO's account is a perfectly accurate summary of budget appropriations made for the Iraq war.

Edit: And I'll add that neither the CBO's ledger nor Stiglitz's estimate account for the costs to the UK and other allies.