producer bob english bob great see here so i guess the big question now ten years later is what do we better off economically if the u.s. didn't spend the billions upon billions of dollars on this war the short answer is definitely if you look at the actual numbers eight hundred twenty three billion dollars spent president obama himself expects it to exceed one trillion dollars that's a lot of money and any time the government spends money you expect a certain amount of waste or fraud and what we have in iraq especially with all these private contractors are these no bid and low bid contracts as i would call them and there's been a lot of fraud so just from that angle the u.s. didn't need to spend that much money there and it's unfortunately if you're going to spend money it might as well be spent domestically as opposed to in some foreign nation and we not too long ago reported on the special inspector general for iraq reconstruction estimated that the u.s. wasted at least eight billion dollars that was supposed to go into rebuilding iraq a lot of these projects we never even saw fin