That's a good point. To connect that cost to the problems in the economy, it might be more useful to compare it to the mortgage debt in the country (thus tying it to goldsquare's post today).

The total amount is roughly similar to the GDP, so by a back-of-the envelope estimate, I'd say that the amount of money taken out in home mortgages in a single year is similar to the cost of the war (order-of-magnitude kind of similarity). Given that all of that war cost has been financed by public debt, how can all that extra borrowing have not contributed to, say, the mortgage crisis?