Two major events in American life intersected in March 2008. A major Wall Street investment bank collapsed. And the country marked the five-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The demise of Bear Stearns came amid a national mortgage crisis that has helped precipitate an economic slowdown and rising joblessness. And the war's anniversary prompted a grim accounting: more than 4,000 Americans killed, tens of thousands wounded (plus millions of Iraqis killed or forced to flee their homes) and some $700 billion in taxpayer money spent so far.

Experts differ on the eventual total cost of the conflict, but several projections approach or exceed $2 trillion.

As both parties gear up for the presidential election, foes of the Bush administration are insisting on a direct link between the big issues of the political season.

"There are not two concerns in this coming election. There is one," said economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University in a conference call with reporters. "The war is very much related to the weakness of the economy."

In a best-selling new book, Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, lays out the most detailed and sustained economic case against the Iraq intervention, which he and co-author Linda J. Bilmes calculate will cost the United States upwards of $3 trillion.

President Bush summarily rejects the war-economy link. "I think the economy is down because we've built too many houses," he said on NBC's "Today."

Even some Bush administration critics share that opinion. The war "didn't have much effect on the housing market or on the willingness or unwillingness of banks or others to provide credit," said Robert D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street firm.

Still, the Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, are starting to echo the Stiglitz-Bilmes critique.

And some of their fellow lawmakers, Republicans included, are taking up the simpler argument that the United States is spending money that the Iraqi government -- a major oil producer -- ought to be paying for defense and rebuilding.

"Isn't it time for the Iraqis to start bearing more of those expenses, particularly in light of the windfall in revenues due to the high price of oil?" Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, asked Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S. envoy to Iraq, during an April 8 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Senator, it is," Crocker replied. He and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, said the Iraqi government has agreed to channel $300 million to U.S. authorities for reconstruction projects.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal supporter of the Iraq intervention, endorses that approach. "The Iraqis ... need to move a portion of their growing budget surpluses into job-creation programs," he said at the same hearing, "and look for other ways to take on more of the financial burdens currently borne by American taxpayers."

President Bush had already signaled a shift toward insisting that the Iraqi government lessen financial dependence on the United States.

"The Iraqi government is stepping up on reconstruction projects," Bush said in a March 27 speech at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. "Soon, we expect the Iraqis will cover 100 percent of those expenses. The same is true when it comes to security spending. Initially, the United States paid for most of the costs of training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Now Iraq's budget covers three-quarters of the cost of its security forces, which is a total of more than $9 billion in 2008."

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