I hate those little spinning number things that people put on their websites… "the cost of the Iraq war" "number of people dead to date" …Shut up. But this article, about the opportunity cost of the war, is actually really good - and something I think I’ve been waiting to read for quite some time now.

Amongst my favorites, the obvious…

Global warming: When the possibility of invading Iraq surfaced
in 2001, senior Bush administration officials hadn’t thought much about
global warming, except to wonder whether it was caused by human
activity or by sunspots. Today, the world’s scientists and many
national leaders worry that the world has passed the point of no return
on global warming. If it has, then human damage to the ecosphere will
cause more major cities to flood and make the planet significantly less
conducive to human habitation — all over the lifetime of a child now
in kindergarten. British Prime Minister Tony Blair keeps trying to
convince President Bush of the magnitude of the problem, but in every
session between the two leaders Iraq squeezes out the time to discuss
the pending planetary disaster.

And my second favorite (and perhaps less obvious)…

Arms control freeze: Once atop several administrations’
national security agendas, international arms control has received
little White House attention since the Bush administration decided
early on to walk away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. National
security adviser Stephen J. Hadley has extensive government experience
working on arms control and he began to focus on this turf in early
2001, when he was number two at the National Security Council. But
after 9/11, Hadley has had little opportunity to advance international
efforts to control biological weapons, nuclear testing and
proliferation, or the threat of nuclear or radioactive terrorist
weapons. For a long time, the White House outsourced dealing with
Iran’s nuclear weapons to the Europeans, just as the onus of stopping
North Korea’s nuclear development was placed on Asian nations. The
sustained senior-level attention that is needed to stop two nuclear
weapons programs at the same time has simply not been available –
because of Iraq.

I wish I would have wrote that article. Its like when you hear a song, and you say "I could have written that" or "I could have done better"… Yeah… but you didn’t, so shut up and enjoy it.

And while you’re enjoying Washington Post war articles, here is another fairly interesting one.