Just when the American public, in an inversion of the old saw about economists, was thinking that the Bush administration professes to know the "value" of everything but the "cost" of nothing, along come Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes - two economists - to restore aphoristic order.

Professors Stiglitz and Bilmes, of Columbia and Harvard respectively, assert knowledge not merely of the cost of the Iraq war but its "true" cost. Of the war's "value", they utter barely a peep: "Our intent is to focus on costs, because they can be measured with some accuracy . . . The benefits are more elusive, but it seems highly unlikely they will be significant."