I watched "Meet the Press" on NBC this morning. The guests were Paul Bremer, Dennis Hastert, and Joseph Biden; and the subject was Iraq with a focus on the costs. The transcript's not yet up on the Web, so the following is based on my recollections.

There was a consensus that the US would be occupying Iraq with a high level of military force for at least two years, perhaps more. Bremer was adamant that the current troop level--140,000 soldiers--was barely adequate to maintain security, and wished he had more. The obvious conclusion is that the current cost of $4 billion per month will continue into the indefinite future.

A key question was whether we could get anyone else to share the burden. The prime candidate was the UN, and the possibility of getting a resolution committing UN members to supply enough troops to take over a significant share of the cost in money and blood. I'm not really up on the history of UN peacekeeping troop deployments, but I suspect that >100,000 troops would be the largest UN deployment in its history by far.

There are a couple of issues I'd like to put on the table for discussion.

1) What are the chances of getting the UN to relieve the US of the burden of Iraq? Especially considering that the UN refused to go along with the US invasion and we went it alone in defiance of the UN's expressed will. Will the UN now save our bacon after so many US politicians badmouthed the UN and Security Counciil members like Germany and France so relentlessly for not going along before the war? Or might they want to see us twisting, twisting, slowly in the wind suffering the consequences? Will the "Axis of Weasels" be gracious and forgiving?

2) Is the cost worth the benefits? In other words, if you knew before the war that it would cost an extrapolated minimum of ~$100 billion in occupation costs on top of the direct war costs (as Tom would put it, money "extracted at gunpoint from American taxpayers"); and an extrapolated US death toll of more than 500 killed and more wounded, would that have changed your support for the war? In other words, knowing the cost ahead of time, would you have thought that there might be better uses for the resources to fight the war on terror and enhance US security?

(Also consider the strategic cost of pinning down roughly 1/3 of our combat forces in Iraq for at least two years. Might they be needed elsewhere? There are still two countries left in the "Axis of Evil"...)

A corollary question:
A) Before the war the Bush Administration refused pointblank to estimate the cost of invading Iraq. A.1) Do you think they had a pretty good idea that this is what it would be? A.2) Did they calculate that if we knew the costs beforehand that there'd be far less support for the war?

Let the debate begin.