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Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate that the United States spends more than that -- $12 billion -- in just one month on Iraq operations.

Their overall estimate of $3 trillion includes interest payments on the entirely borrowed funds for the war, and takes in the cost of Iraq (and Afghanistan) operations since 2001 -- when the global war on terrorism was launched, the Afghanistan intervention began and pre-invasion planning for the Iraq conflict started up -- through 2017.

The Democratic staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee produced a nearly identical estimate of $2.8 trillion. And the Congressional Budget Office came up with an estimate of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion. The CBO's total could rise to as much as $2.4 trillion if future interest payments on borrowed money are added.

Scott Wallsten, a former economist at the World Bank and the American Enterprise Institute who has been tracking Iraq costs for years, told the congressional Joint Economic Committee that Iraq expenses would reach close to $2 trillion.

None of these estimates is easily compared with one another because the underlying calculations were based on different methodologies and time horizons; also, some do not account for oil-price fluctuations, debt interest payments and the effects of inflation. Some of these contrasts are apparent in projections on the costs of veterans' care.

In any event, however much the United States spends in the future, there's no question that it already has spent far more than the administration ever projected.

The closest thing to an official cost estimate ran to $60 billion tops, by Mitchell E. Daniels, then the head of the Office of Management and Budget, in December 2002. Also in 2002, Lawrence B. Lindsey, then director of the administration's National Economic Council, gave an unofficial projection of up to $200 billion. He was fired shortly after that.

The administration's projections "presupposed a relatively short conflict that would have had us out of there in a matter of months," said Dov Zakheim, who was assistant secretary of Defense and the Pentagon's budget chief from 2001 to 2004. Instead, "The war became a lot more intense than people anticipated, and the thing has gone on a lot longer than people anticipated." Zakheim is now a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, Va.-based consulting firm.

Cost figures and economic theories notwithstanding, the Iraq-costs debate ultimately turns on issues of national security policy.

"We're supporting a vital national interest, which is a stable Middle East," said James Jay Carafano, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and a military affairs and foreign policy specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Of the Stiglitz-Bilmes thesis, he said, "These are political arguments, not economic arguments."

Stiglitz and Bilmes began laying out their thesis in a 2006 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan, nonprofit forum. But they make clear they oppose the war. "We've obviously hit a raw nerve," Stiglitz said.

"It was open for people to give us comments, which is in the nature of an academic process. We were very careful in responding to issues that were raised in open debate. The remarkable thing, from the Heritage Foundation or from the administration, is that they won't come up with their own numbers."

White House press secretary Dana Perino said in March, when asked about Stiglitz's calculations: "I'm not going to dispute his estimates. ... But it's very hard to anticipate, depending on conditions on the ground and circumstances, how much the war is going to cost."

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