It seems wrong to categorize the war in Iraq as part of The War on Terror(ism), since Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11. The best explanation I ever found as to why the US went to war in Iraq was in the article below. It basically says that the Neoconservative faction of the right wanted to bring democracy to the middle east long before 9/11, but 9/11 was their opportunity to actually do it. Here's an excerpt:<p>"Neoconservatism, which had been around for decades, mixed humanitarian impulses with an almost messianic faith in the transformative virtue of American military force, as well as a deep fear of an outside world seen as threatening and morally compromised.<p>This ideology stated that authoritarian states were inherently destabilizing and dangerous; that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy — and to dominate the world as the unquestioned moral and military leader.<p>Neoconservatism's proponents, for strategic as well as political reasons, would develop an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That obsession would, by the end of the decade, congeal into a policy, explicitly stated: regime change.<p>Their case was always grandly ideological, rooted in highly abstract and untested theories about the nature of the world and America's rightful place in it. Their beliefs were so deeply held that when 9/11 shook the foundations of American foreign policy, they were able to see only validation of their worldview, including their belief in the urgent need to bring democracy to Iraq.<p>It was this ideological conviction, more than any piece of intelligence or lie told about it, that primarily led America into Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were the stated justification, but they were never the real reason, nor was bad intelligence."<p><a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11022104/iraq-war-neoconservatives" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11022104/iraq-war-neoconservat...</a>
Includes the cost of paying and feeding troops. Presumably you have to pay and feed them if you aren't at war and they're playing cards and doing drills in established US bases and hopefully acting as a deterrent to war?<p>I'd like to see the actual marginal cost of the war on terror that excludes money that would have been spent on defence anyway (spent anyway rightly or wrongly, this isn't judgement about whether that spending should have gone up, down or flat).<p>BTW the war against Iraq absolutely was "War on Terror" It was sold as such with "Weapons of Mass Destruction" That justification being entirely false and knowingly to those who made it is beside the point, without the War on Terror existence and used as a justification it is reasonable to assume the Iraq invasion doesn't happen.