Much has been said and written about the war in Iraq now going into its sixth year. There's been countless debates questioning whether it was right or wrong to invade and topple the regime, as corrupt as it was. On the casualty side we know that the United States suffered about 4,000 fatalities and somewhere around 60,000 men and women serving in the armed forces were wounded. The long-term effect of some of the trauma experienced by combat troops is still to be counted. That will come down the road some years from today.

As for the Iraqi victims no one has kep a complete tally, there are estimates but no precise figures. The London-based non-governmental organization Iraq Body Count has somehow managed to maintain what is probably the most accurate database of Iraqi civilian casualties since the 2003 invasion. Posted on their website, Iraqbodycount.org, they place a number of deaths between a low of 82,249 and a high of 89,760. Those are purely civilian casualties whose deaths have been confirmed. They don't count military deaths or the thousands of Iraqis who have simply disappeared. Nor the two million refugees.

Other sources have placed a number of Iraqi deaths much higher. The World Health Organization, a branch of the United Nations places that figure between 104,000 and 223,000 killed between March 2003 and June 2006.

As for the cost of the Iraq war in dollars that is also a somewhat unclear due to the accounting methods employed by the Pentagon. For example, it is unclear if the figures put forward by the administration includes a huge contracts granted to a third party contractors, such as Blackwater, whose hired guns constituted the second-largest contingent in Iraq after the U.S. forces.

Before the start of the war Lawrence Lindsay, the White House economic adviser estimated the cost that $100 billion to $200 billion. The White House move did not like those figures Lindsay was removed, and new estimates were produced placing the cost between $50 billion and $60 billion. The cost of the war in Iraq today runs above $504 billion.

As an example the war has cost taxpayers in the state of California $66.2 billion; spending a similar amount California could have provided health care to 27,242,554 people. Or, for close to what the war has cost so far to the entire country ($522 billion) health care, and provided nationwide to 153,995,332 people.

To place the cost associated with running this war and a more understandable contexts, in the three minutes it took you to read this article, the U.S. government has spent $580,485 of taxpayers' dollars.