Special report: Tension escalates in Iraq

    WASHINGTON, Feb. 29 (Xinhua) -- The Iraq war will cost Americans between 3 trillion and 5 trillion U.S. dollars, including military spending, broader economic costs and decades of benefits and medical care for combat veterans, a Nobel prize-winning economist said.

    In a testimony at the Congress Thursday, Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and a professor at Columbia University, gave his latest estimate of the war's economic impact, the Cox News service reported Friday.

    The upper end of the estimate is nearly double what Stiglitz had projected just two years ago.

    He attributed the dramatic increase to the continuing intensity of the war, which will be five years old by next month, and the likelihood that operations there would continue for at least another year.

    The war's gravest toll has been paid in blood.

    Fighting in Iraq has so far taken the lives of 3,973 U.S. troops and left nearly 29,300 wounded.

    Its staggering expense, however, has already dwarfed the 2003 White House war estimate of 60 billion dollars, and the price continues to rise.

    Since the federal government has been running budget deficits before the war began, Stiglitz estimated that the U.S. government has borrowed 1 trillion dollars -- much of it from overseas lenders -- to finance the war.

    By 2017, he said, the country will have added 2 trillion dollars to the national debt to cover Iraq war expenses. That means additional interest payments for taxpayers.