"Opportunity costs" are what you could have done with the money, time and other resources that you are devoting to a project if you hadn't undertaken it.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

In the case of America at present, the voracious resource-eater is the war in Iraq, which is causing the United States to let other important issues and opportunities in the country's overseas relations fall into serious disuse because of the all-consuming involvement in Iraq.

The overseas opportunity costs are apart from whatever domestic needs are being ignored or underfunded because of the costs of the war, estimated at $150 billion and rising rapidly. These shortfalls are occurring in education, infrastructure and long-term financing of Medicare and Social Security, as examples.

This assessment is not basically one of gloom and doom. Nor is it one that suggests that the only way out of the dilemma is getting rid of the Bush administration. In fact, both the handover to Iraqis in June and reports that the administration is now looking at troop withdrawal timetables are indications that it, too, may see that it is time to wrap this one up and get on with the rest of our lives.

But here is what we could be doing if the Bush administration -- for whatever reasons -- hadn't led the country into war in Iraq.

The primary opportunity cost that we are paying is in Afghanistan. That long-troubled country was a perfect case for a forward-looking, newly security-conscious America to do something useful in the world. After Sept. 11, no one could or did argue that the United States didn't have a right to do something about al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts. In that effort, we had Afghan allies and the support of the world, even militant Muslim states.

The Taliban were easily driven out of Kabul, the capital; al-Qaida were put to flight; and the Afghans seemed to take readily to political and economic reconstruction. A national conference, the Loya Jirga, was held; a politically savvy leader, Hamid Karzai, was selected as interim president; democratic elections were scheduled and foreign donors pledged assistance. NATO agreed to provide forces to address security, the most severe of Afghanistan's problems and the precondition to resolving its other problems.

But then came Iraq, soaking up U.S. resources, putting Afghanistan firmly on the back burner, where it remains. The recent postponement of its elections to the spring of 2005, a year later than originally scheduled, is perhaps the most dramatic indication of what the United States has not done there, although Karzai's repeated laments about his government's lack of authority due to the omnipresence of armed militias outside of Kabul are as ominous in their implications.

A second problem, less directly related but still relevant to the fundamental U.S. concern with combating terrorism, is the Middle East peace process -- resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.S. attention to it is also a victim of the Iraq war. Because of the Bush administration's unilateral approach to that war, the United States has lost virtually all credibility with the countries that were previously U.S. allies in the effort to bring about reason on the Arab/Palestinian side of that question, countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states.

And because the Israelis know full well that we have no leverage with the Arabs, Israel feels perfectly free to stick its fingers in our eyes on a range of important issues, ranging from the wall and fence across the West Bank, to dismantling settlements in the West Bank or Gaza, now even to meeting with the Quartet -- the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- that devised the road map to two states and peace in the area in the first place.

The disuse in the rest of U.S. foreign policy brought about by the preoccupation with the Iraq war has by no means been limited to the Middle East. Mexico and its president, Vicente Fox, in the process of shaping up as America's best friend at the beginning of President George W. Bush's administration, are now largely ignored, in no small part because Fox's Mexico did not sign on to the so-called "coalition of the willing."

It is hard to say the degree to which the growing problems in the rest of Latin America -- Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil -- are due to America's preoccupation with Iraq, but it is certain that they have received little attention from us since the drum-roll toward war with Iraq started. And they know it. The U.S. quick in-and-out in Haiti clearly indicated a lack of interest and a shortage of forces to use for peacekeeping there.

Whatever the full cost will be, and whether it will also be reflected in U.S. relations with North Korea, Iran and China as well, the United States is paying dearly around the world for the administration's misguided adventure in Iraq. None of this is irreversible, but the drift is downstream and the sound of the falls is audible.