Putting things into perspective, from Metafilter:

Cost of Iraq war may exceed $1 trillion dollars. That number is hard to comprehend. To get a grip on it, observe that the CIA says the average annual purchasing power of Iraqi citizens is $3,400, and there are about 7,500,000 males between 15-65 years old in Iraq. Divide this out, and it turns out that by the time we’re “done” with Iraq, we could have hired each and every man in Iraq and paid them their average annual income for 39 years. Yup – we could have hired every man in Iraq for their entire career. In the past, when great pharaohs hired thousands (let alone millions) of men for decades, he’d have some big damned pyramids or something to show for it.

Perhaps they should have stuck to the original plan:

Nov. 15, 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense

“The idea that it’s going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990,” he said on an Infinity Radio call-in program. “Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”