Getting into Iraq was easy. Fighting the war was expensive in lives and money. Getting out will cost more cash.

In fact, the Pentagon figures that taxpayers will have to spend tens of billions of dollars to bring home or transfer the equipment strewn about Iraq. According to Jason Ditz:

A lot of the cost is going to depend on what the military decides to do with the various items it required to occupy the nation and then fight an insurgency for several years with well over 100,000 US troops. Some of the gear will be shipped back to the US, others will be sent to Afghanistan for the ongoing war there. Still others will just be given to the Iraqi government so they don’t have to deal with the other two options.

The US has spent over two thirds of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq so far (and this is only figuring the direct costs), but while President Obama has already started projecting dramatically lower costs in the near future as the war “winds down” (which so far hasn’t translated to actually removing serious numbers of troops from the nation), the costs just of hauling “mountains of equipment” out of Iraq show that nothing the military does is done on the cheap, not even ending a war.

So much for the occupation that was supposed to pay for itself!