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Oh yeah...(link to the other 3 reasons the Iraq War was a disaster for the US).
Economic. Remember the Bush administration’s assertions that the Iraq war would pay for itself? On March 27, 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the House Appropriations Committee that Iraqi oil would pay for the costs of the war: “We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” In a press conference on Oct. 2, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted: “The bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis—from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment—as well as some contributions we’ve already received and hoped to receive from the international community.”
This was yet another unforced error by the neoconservatives, the most blundering foreign policy elite in American history. Apart from the more than 4,000 Americans killed, the more than 30,000 Americans maimed, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who lost their lives or have been wounded, a conservative estimate of the costs of the war puts it at $1.2 trillion, although Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate that the long-term costs, including medical treatment for veterans, may exceed $2 trillion. David Leonhardt of the New York Times put this into perspective, back in 2007:
For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.