How much is a Trillion dollars?

The Iraq war is estimated to eventually cost the US $1,000,000,000,000. Most people have no idea of the scale of a trillion. Few comprehend any difference between 1,000 and 10,000. It's all just big numbers.

I decided to make some measurements of the scale of $1T. Here are the dimensions of a single US dollar:
2.6" x 6.125"x 0.0045"

If you stack 1T dollars together, on the 0.0045" side (like in your wallet), it would extend for 71,023 miles. The earth's mean circumference is only 24,881 miles. that means a $1T would encircle the earth 2.85 times!

If you carpeted Bagdad with dollar bills, you would be able to do it 13 more times before you ran out of money. It would carpet 2% of Iraq!

On a financial level, if we handed out dollars to each Iraqi citizen before the war in exchange for rising up against Saddam, we could have given each person $33,333. Given that the average Iraqi citizen makes $2900/year, that would be 11.5 years of income! We could have enabled the entire Iraqi population to retire until almost 2014!

And nobody would have died.