A "useful lie"? Tom, that figure came from the Pentagon!
CBO:

According to the Department of Defense (DoD), the occupation is costing about $3.9 billion a month to sustain.

Remember, the point was that you said it was going to be $4 billion a month for ten years. And I'm well aware that CBO numbers are, by definition, largely castles in the air. Doesn't keep people like you from using them when they're trying to make your own points, though.

The DOD stated that the current burn rate at the time they were asked was $3.9 billion, based on data from a month or two of operations. It included one-time costs, and it's inane to assume that would be constant for ten years. If you read the quote in my post, the CBO says as much.

The CBO was only analyzing the cost of the military forces stationed there, from the standpoint of what we could afford and not necessarily what those in charge think we need...

...In other words, this is a budgetary exercize, not a policy paper. The reality is that Bremer's been asking for more force than the 150,000 troops he already has. The CBO didn't even try to estimate the cost of that, because it concluded we couldn't afford more than about 106,000 past March of next year anyway. That's the $19 billion price tag.

There is no reason to conclude that we are going to need 150,000 troops in perpetuity, and even an occupation force of 200,000 was reestimated at about $3.4 billion a month in the paper. There are currently 55,000 Iraqi security forces coming on line in the next few months, and this process is continuing.

The handwaving doesn't stop there:
CBO:

"The estimates included in this analysis represent the incremental costs that DoD could incur above the budgeted costs of routine operations. As a result, those estimates exclude items such as basic pay for active-duty military personnel"

"Incremental costs" only. Do you think we shouldn't include the base pay of the soldiers in Iraq in the cost!??! Maybe you're too used to the smoke-and-mirrors of the military-aerospace complex, but in real life no business could legitimately exclude those costs. This thing reads like an Enron financial statement.

You don't include base pay in the incremental costs because one assumes that even if all those full-time military were currently scratching their butts in Fort Dix, they would still be getting paid the same. I assume you would include any special pay they get for being deployed there. The incremental cost also included the costs of activating reserves. We're talking about the cost of the war in Iraq, not the cost of the military in general, which is a whole different discussion.

I agree that some of the procedures for filling out the deployment would not be a good idea if something hit the fan someplace else. Just because the CBO proposes it as an option doesn't make it a good one. I was just trying to show that a number that has currently been carved in stone by the anti-war interests is nowhere near that fixed.

Ya know, Tom, you're still not seeing the forest for the trees. Suppose the CBO's right, and we ignore the hidden costs and the cost of reconstruction, and turn a blind eye to the deleterious effects on military readiness. Suppose the cost is "only" about $24B a year instead of $48B. That only cuts the cost in half..."only" 7,000 to 10,000 times as expensive as purchasing Alaska and the Louisiana territories. How is it suddenly a bargain if you use the CBO's numbers?

I still fail to see what the price of Alaska has to do with anything. I wasn't aware that we were "purchasing" Iraq. For that matter, the price of the war in Iraq is many billions of times more than the price of a candy bar. So what?

If you want to wank with historical numbers, we can look at this little exercise. Makes the war in Iraq look like a pretty good deal historically, doesn't it? And so what? Here and now it really isn't any more relevant as an argument point than th price of the Louisiana Purchase.

Now that I think about it, it would be worth the price of admission to be able to tell Thomas Jefferson that a couple of centuries in the future, over half the Federal Budget of his nation would be dedicated to paying retirement and medical costs for the elderly. If you really wanted to give him apoplexy, you could tell him how much money it was (about $80 billion a month).

If you are looking at Iraq as an "investment," you're out of luck. We don't make money off wars to protect our country. It's a cost of being a free nation. Now, you might look ahead to the potential of a free and modern Iraq adding to the world economy, much as Japan did after it was liberated, but that's just speculation.