U.S. casualties in Iraq will soon reach another milestone: 4,000 killed. Pundits will moan and groan, but not very loudly. The general public will hardly react since the war has largely dropped out of its consciousness. More disturbing, the Bush administration's reason for attacking Iraq was retaliation for 9/11, even though it has long been proven that Iraq had no connection to that tragic event. How ironic then that the total deaths on 9/11 (not including the 19 hijackers) amounted to 2,974, significantly fewer than the deaths of U.S. servicemen and women in a war that should never have happened. But is anyone making these connections?

Americans pay little attention to the details of the war – or the astronomical number of Iraqi casualties. The remaining few patriots who are still convinced that the invasion was noble long ago managed to stifle the voices who dared question, and criticize, the entire façade justifying a preemptive strike – and, worse, sending young Americans into harm's way.

The U.S. – and unfortunately the entire world – will pay a price for this war for the rest of this century. The literal expenses of the war will cost the country in innumerable ways that few have imagined, not simply in dollars but in human casualties.

First, the monetary cost: Government statistics that are already several months old cite double the requested (and already allocated) figure of $804 billion; thus, $1.5 trillion, if the so-called hidden costs are included. What's hidden? Veteran benefits and expenses for the tens of thousands of injured soldiers – expenses that will certainly last for another 80 or 90 years until the last vet of the Iraq war dies around the year 2100. But many other estimates (the most recent by Joseph Stiglitz a Columbia University economist) say the $1.5 trillion will easily double because it doesn't include a penny beyond the figures cited by the most recent government estimate.

Are we any closer to ending the war? Doubtful. Even if a Democrat becomes president and pulls all U.S. troops out of Iraq (unlikely) what will be the costs of withdrawal including billions of dollars of military equipment and reconstruction for Iraq? We can't simply abandon Iraq's reconstruction after we have destroyed their country.

Thus, the $3 trillion figure looks rather low, even at this time. Already, the costs are so overwhelmingly burdensome that the federal budget has no money left for increases in any other program.

Meanwhile, returning vets are committing suicide at higher rates than in any previous war, suffering drastically higher instances of post-traumatic stress syndrome than ever before, and the thousands of returned vets with brain injuries not officially listed in the Pentagon tally, what about them? The Bush administration and Republicans in Congress and the Senate ought to hang their heads in shame any time they decry the remaining anti-war voices as unpatriotic. What is patriotic about failing to support the needs of these men and women, of leaving them to fend for themselves once they return to America, so maimed and disturbed that entire families are destroyed because many veterans cannot adjust to life outside of the killing fields? (What is it that the suicides and the AWOL incidents tell us about our soldiers that the government doesn't want Americans to understand?)

As a vet recently wrote to me about his time in Iraq, "I gave you my all. I wish I could have given you more. I would die for you. And I tried too many times, but always failed…."

And then there is economics – not just the literal dollar cost of this colossal miscalculation. Consider the cost of food or energy. Look at the ratio of the dollar to any other major currency in the world (the euro is a good start) and the difference between the two in 2000 and now in 2008. Even the currencies of so-called developing countries (India and Mexico, for example) have gained in value against the U.S. dollar during the last eight years, while Americans have been on the wildest buying and killing sprees in recent memory. Virtually all on borrowed money.

Use your house as a piggy bank and take out another chunk of money to spend once you have refinanced again. But since the United States government has done exactly the same thing during the past eight years – enormous tax cuts, printing and printing increasingly worthless dollars, and spending trillions on a war that can only be paid for by inflating our money – why shouldn't individuals do the same? Banks (not just in the United States) are beginning to collapse because of the sub-prime mortgage mess, as the economic cancer begins to metastasize in the rest of the world's economies ("They're all connected," economists tell us.) The icing on the cake: the chairman of the Fed who admits he didn't anticipate the debacle with sub-prime mortgages.

We are told that the mortgage meltdown is far from over; that housing costs will take several years before they will bottom out; that gasoline will be $4 a gallon later this year (it is already that in parts of California) and a realistic striking price for gold is $2,000 to $5,000 per ounce. And the new chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, reduces the prime rate instead of raising it, inflating everything, so that only Zimbabwe is ahead of the United States with inflation at a rate we once believed inconceivable.

Once upon a time, the American dollar was almighty – the world's dependable currency – but no more. Inflation is rising rapidly (especially food and energy prices) all around the world. Think of it this way: If $4 a gallon seems expensive to American consumers, what about the taxi-driver in Ghana or Fiji who also has to fill up his tank? How does he pay for gas at the pump, which is going up at the same rate as it is in the United States? Or what about the fact that commodity prices (especially for wheat and corn) are rising so rapidly that food riots are becoming common in many areas of the developing world and food banks in the United States and those of international relief organizations increasingly lack sufficient money to pay for the increased price of staples?

Is there a solution? A fix? Of course, there always is. But it involves pain and Americans do not like pain. We've lost our esteem in the world. Our currency has tanked and increasingly others do not want to use it. By fighting the wrong war, we've emboldened terrorists.

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Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.