From RochesterTurning....
A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. You rarely see that number spoken of because it is about twenty times the world's gross domestic product. But if you do the math on some of John McCain's suggestions for Iraq, it is indeed their approximate cost. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that over the next 50 years, our continued presence in Iraq will cost the country about 2 trillion dollars.
You may have heard that McCain proposes that the United States may stay in Iraq for a hundred years. What you may not know is that he didn't stop there. On the "Today Show", a few months ago, he upped the ante, saying that a thousand or million years would be okay, too (hereand here). If we agree on a cost of 2 trillion dollars for fifty years (which seems low to me, that's only 40 billion a year, which is less than a third of what we're spending right now), then a million years would cost 20 thousand times 2 trillion, which is....40 quadrillion dollars. That's five thousand times as large as the federal debt. It's eight thousand times as large as the the projected Social Security deficit over 75 years.
I cite the numbers here not to be hyperbolic, but to make the basic point that the Iraq war is unbelievably expensive. The Republicans can put on their flag pins and sing along with Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith all they want to, but the country simply cannot afford another 100 years in Iraq, let alone another a million, even if these hundred or million years are peaceful, as McCain insists they will be.
Republicans protest that he said that in the context of a "peaceful occupation". Fair enough, but "peaceful occupations" cost money too.
The argument pro-occupation Republicans won't openly make but which is, I think, what they really believe is that we can somehow finance all of by taking all the Iraqi oil. We've debunked this idea before. Currently, Iraq pumps about 800 million barrels of oil a year. Even if the US was able to steal all of it and sell it for $100 beyond what it costs to extract it, that would only net $80 billion a year, about half of what we're spending on the war each year right now.
Iraqi oil reserves are estimate to last about another 150 years. That leaves under 999,850 years of occupation when there isn't even any oil there anymore.