"SADDAM Hussein was prepared to take $1 billion and go into exile before the Iraq war, George Bush, the United States president, is said to have told José Maria Aznar, the then prime minister of Spain, a month before the 2003 invasion. During a meeting at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on 22 February, Mr Bush told Mr Aznar that Saddam could also be assassinated, according to a transcript of their talks published yesterday in the Spanish newspaper El Pais." [2]

An assasination wouldn't have been cheap but presumably unlikely to cost more than $1 billion. That sounds expensive until you compare it to the known financial cost of the war.

There are various estimates about the financial cost of the Iraq war to the US, but no comprehensive sum of the total cost to all the countries involved, not least of all Iraq. The true cost of the war is simply the human lives destroyed, but these are of no concern to this US administration. These financial figures are deliberately obscured much like the Iraqi death toll, and like it took epidemilogists to prove the million plus Iraqi deaths it would take economicists to study the financial cost of the war. The closest economic study I can find was released in as of Sept 2005 and relates simply to US costs, estimating them at $1.2 trillion. [3]

While this is a monumental waste of money to the US tax-payer if the aim was regime change, bear in mind this administration and its business allies personally profited hugely from their investments in oil and military and security stocks.


[1]  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9864433/
[2]  http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1543082007
[3]  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html