Fortune’s David Kirpatrick wrote the following after the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. What’s your view?  

By the final day of this year’s World Economic Forum, people were joking that the world had gone through a full economic cycle in the four days the conference had been underway. After a Monday on which global markets seemed in freefall, by Friday the Dow average amazingly showed a tiny gain for the week. Klaus Schwab, the paternalistic overseer of each year’s Forum, was proudly talking of a “Davos effect” on world markets.

That was probably wishful thinking, but it was easy to fantasize that this group could engineer such a transformation. (And it was true that the general Davos mood on the global economy was not as grim as the press would have had you believe.) Here gathered the - mostly Western and developed - world’s bankers, pundits, government officials, corporate executives, and perhaps most importantly, investors.

At one lunch I happened to find myself sitting next to a guy who runs a $30 billion New York hedge fund. At a dinner I spoke to the CFO of Mubadala, the government-controlled Abu Dhabi investment group that owns 7.5% of the Carlyle Group, 8% of AMD, 5% of Ferrari, etc. etc. etc. George Soros roamed the halls, J.P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon sipped water in the lounge, and the Google guys stood on the stairs with their wives.

Five years ago White House economist Lawrence Lindsey ignited a furor with this estimate of the dollar cost of the Iraq war. In this exclusive book excerpt, he tells how he came up with the number and what he thinks now.

We think you’ll find his case for the war’s affordability to be a provocative one. What do you think?