Way back when, just after the war, when the Right was derisively laughing its collective ass off over estimates that the war might cost half a $trillion, and official spin-artists claimed that reconstruction would be self-financing from Iraqi oil, I did a spreadsheet comparing the cost of Iraq to the cost of other territories we've acquired through more peaceful means. That just redoubled the hoots and feces-flinging...

Well, I've updated the spreadsheet:

Territory · Year · Price · Adjusted for inflation · Area · Cost/sq. km. · Ratio to Iraq · Population · Cost/person ·
Alaska · 1867 · $7,200,000 · $85,010,736 · 1,482,970 · $57 · 40,366 · 32000 · $2,657
Louisiana Purchase · 1803 · $15,000,000 · $180,791,262 · 2,144,510 · $84 · 27,448 · 97000 · $1,864
Iraq · 2003 · $500,000,000,000 · $500,000,000,000 · 432162 · $1,156,974 · · 24,683,313 · $20,257
Iraq · 2006 · $1,000,000,000,000 · $1,000,000,000,000 · 432162 · $2,313,947 · · 24,683,313 · $40,513

(HTML tables are tricky, so I figure the odds are no better than 50-50 that I'll get this right the first time. Don't be surprised to see a follow-up correction.)

Are we about the dumbest people on the planet Earth to pay $2,313,947 for a square kilometer of land in Iraq? Think Saddam Hussein might've left quietly if we'd offered him a couple of $billion in a suitcase?

Oh but wait, there's more...while searching for the spreadsheet, I came across a copy of a Congressional Budget Office analysis from September 2003 titled "An Analysis of the US Military's Ability to Sustain an Occupation of Iraq". It's on my local hard drive so I don't have the URL handy, but of course I can find it again if challenged on it. It sheds some additional light on what this debacle was supposed to cost us.

More than 180,000 U.S. military personnel are currently involved in the occupation of Iraq—about 150,000 of them deployed in Iraq itself and the rest supporting the occupation from neighboring countries (primarily Kuwait). According to the Department of Defense (DoD), the occupation is costing about $3.9 billion a month to sustain. At the request of the Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has examined the United States’ capability to sustain an occupation force in Iraq over the long term and the associated costs.

In performing its analysis, CBO made no assumptions about how long the occupation might last or about the size of the force that might be necessary. [that's a shame]
...
CBO’s analysis indicates that the active Army would be unable to sustain an occupation force of the present size beyond about March 2004 if it chose not to keep individual units deployed to Iraq for longer than one year without relief (an assumption consistent with DoD’s current planning).1 In the six to 12 months after March, the level of U.S. forces in Iraq would begin to decline as units that had been deployed for a year were relieved and were not replaced on a one-for-one basis.2 After the winter of 2004-2005, the United States could sustain—indefinitely, if need be—an occupation force of 38,000 to 64,000 military personnel using only combat units from the Army’s active component (and some support units from the reserves), the option that constitutes the base case in this analysis. With a force of that size, the occupation would cost $8 billion to $12 billion per year, CBO estimates (see Summary Table 1). Those and other costs shown in this analysis are in 2004 dollars.

I suppose that'd be plenty of raw material for an extended, justified, and satisfying rant, but I think I'll just go hurl instead.