A new report is estimating the true cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end up being approximately $4 trillion — far more than the Bush or Obama administrations have acknowledged. The report also estimates between 224,000 and 258,000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125,000 civilians in Iraq. Brown University Professor Catherine Lutz is the co-director of the “Costs of War” report.

Catherine Lutz, co-director of report and professor at Brown University: “Three of the key things that we’ve found were that the numbers of people who have died in this war are much higher than the American public realizes. There have been many, many deaths in the military and civilian sectors that haven’t been adequately counted or recognized, and so we’ve tried to put that all together. The second thing that we found was that the financial costs are also much higher than people recognize, because people have been focusing overly much on simply the Pentagon special allocations for the wars, and they haven’t been looking at things like interest payment on the debt that was incurred in order to raise that money. They haven’t been looking at future obligated costs to veterans for their healthcare, and a number of other very important parts of the budget that have to be counted in order to say what this war cost.”