(Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

You may be reluctant to be dragged back into thinking about Sept. 11, now that we’ve just completed a weekend of wallowing in remembrance of the tragedy that killed nearly 3,000 people.

No, nobody breathed a word, so far as I can tell, about the more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians who died as a consequence of our actions following the terrorist attacks.

Nor did anyone say much about the nearly 7,000 U.S. soldiers and “contractors” who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since, in wars still going on for no apparent rational reason.

That doesn’t mean Sept. 11’s victims of irrational Islamic terror shouldn’t be remembered. Just that we should not forget that their families aren’t alone in suffering, or that countless other nameless families weep in nameless villages as a result.

And we should remember too, that it could have been very different. What follows is what I wish I could have written this week:

(see above link)