The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Stiglitz, Joseph E., Bilmes, Linda J. Apart from its human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veteran for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.

Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust by Rosen, Robert N., Dershowitz, Alan M., Weinberg, Gerhard Roger Taney was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during most Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, dying in October 1864. Like Lincoln, Taney had had a successful law career prior to his holding office, Lincoln in Illinois and Taney in Maryland. Simon makes both protagonists out to have been principled but also opportunists. They both disapproved of slavery. As a young man, Roger Taney had freed his slaves and announced his opposition to the institution. Ultimately, however, they differed vehemently over an array of legal subjects surrounding slavery. They also differed over the nature of the federal union. Taney had witnessed the growing preponderance in both population and wealth of the non-slave-holding states. He fervently believed the slave states had the right to secede from the Union to escape the political consequences. The decision to be slave or free was and should remain a matter of state sovereignty rather than national dictum. Taney, a generation older than Lincoln, was from the Maryland planter class. He had been a supporter of Andrew Jackson and then his Attorney General. Taney advised Jackson during his campaign against a national bank, arguing that the bank would become a concentrated and unaccountable economic power. Supporters of the bank considered Taney a political hack. To their dismay, he was appointed by Jackson to succeed John Marshall as Chief Justice in 1836. Taney wrote the majority decision on the Dred Scott case in 1857. The author agrees with the critics of the decision. It was, Simon contends, bad constitutional law and poorly drafted, uncharastic of Taney’s previous decisions. A slave’s temporary residence in a free territory (later to become the state of Minnesota) established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had not given him title to freedom that would remain valid upon his voluntary return to a slave state (Missouri.) Taney then went on to declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional because it deprived a slave owner of his property without due process. The Dred Scott decision galvanized abolitionists and even those that considered themselves moderates on the matter. One such moderate was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was by now well-known in his home state of Illinois. He was soon to establish a national reputation based on his opposition to Dred Scott. And soon to win a presidential election. Once the Civil War began, Lincoln and Taney found themselves at odds over the war powers of the presidency. Simon contends that legal challenges to President Lincoln’s war powers would never had arisen without the Confederate army’s string of victories. For one thing those victories made it uncertain whether Britain, France and Spain would recognize the Confederacy. Their recognition would have raised the issue of the legality of Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports under his war powers. In a close decision the court upheld the constitutionality of the blockade. Chief Justice Taney joined the dissent. Taney and Lincoln next clashed over Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus and his use of military courts to thwart insurgents in Maryland and elsewhere. Taney argued that Lincoln’s use of military courts to try civilians was in part intended to intimidate legitimate opposition to the war. In ex parte Merryman, Taney, writing for the majority, denied that the writ could be suspended under presidential authority. Taney and Lincoln were both dead before ex parte Milligan which held that neither the president nor congress had the legal power to institute a military commission to try civilians in areas (Indiana) remote from the theater of war. The issues discussed in Millgan remain troubling in our time. Troubling because the definition of war has been expanded to include any act (or plan) anywhere in the world that threatens harm to the nation and its citizens gives the president opportunity to hold civilians indefinitely.