If you’re a shrewd investor with few or no scruples, chances are you beefed up your portfolio’s Halliburton shares right around Q1 of 2003. And why not? Anybody with even a modicum of market sense could tell that the Texas energy giant’s shares would rise like so many Kuwaiti gas fires from the Bush administration’s irrepressible march towards war. And boy, have they: Halliburton stock has more than tripled in value since the invasion began, and has doubled in the last year alone. Its back-room dealings with the GOP along with its overcharging on numerous government contracts have given the company a welcomed place in our Bastard Fund.

But even the most amoral investor must be feeling a bit jittery when looking at America’s economic landscape five and a half years in to the war on terror. Since 9/11, Congress has approved a monstrous $609 billion tab to finance the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with an additional $145 billion tied up in political wrangling between Congress and the Bush administration. And while other presidents have raised taxes in times of war, Bush has insisted on lowering them – which has resulted in unprecedented budget deficits and a swelling national debt.

What’s more, even after the extra $145 billion is spent and gone, the U.S. is going to need still more money to replenish its strained military and pay for the ballooning interest payments on all this additional debt. Many economists fear that the bill for Iraq will arrive just as the Baby Boomer generation exits the workforce and starts sucking up vast amounts of health care dollars, social security payments and other government expenses. Suddenly, the economic picture doesn’t look so rosy – with or without Halliburton in your stock basket.

But Lori Montgomery over at the Washington Post wisely pointed out last week that the U.S. economy has grown significantly since the last major military conflict (Vietnam) and simply dwarfs any price tag for Iraq. In 2006, the cost of war represented less than 1 percent of the total economy, or about half of what we all spent at Wal-Mart last year. Montgomery said that current defense spending is just 4 percent of GDP, as opposed to 14 percent at the height of the Korean War.

Still, the war chest for Iraq has been huge no matter which way you slice it and it will have a long-term impact on the economy. Apolitical investors who are nervous about the future may be hunting for the next no-brainer investment. To that end, there was a vigorous debate circulating the blogosphere this week about what else the government could have done with the money it has spent on the Iraq War – a thread most likely instigated by a slideshow on the Boston Globe’s website. Most of the ideas that the Globe had were typical left-wing fare, such as building nearly 3,000 of Massachusetts’ most expensive high schools and eradicating global poverty by 2015. But for the jaded investor, there was one figure that should have caused a forked eyebrow or two: for just one-sixth of the cost of the Iraq War, the government could convert all cars in America to run on ethanol.

It was not surprising, given the hype surrounding ethanol, that the stock price of agriculture-based manufacturers such as Deere Co., makers of John Deere tractors, has seen some major gains in recent months. Between our wholesale failure to secure Iraq for its oil reserves (and really, why else are we there?) and the growing religion that is the environmental movement, America could soon need untold amounts of corn to be grown to meet the demand for ethanol. Investors smart enough to get in on the agricultural ground floor now will probably make a lot of money in the future.

Of course, the sad thing about being this cynical is you miss out on the bigger picture: Bush and Cheney, so desperate to go to war after 9/11 and make their colleagues at Halliburton even richer in the process, missed out of the most important energy-based statistic of all: if we could just increase the fuel efficiency of the average car engine by a paltry 10 percent, we could all but sever our dependence on Mid East oil and rely almost entirely on domestic or politically friendly suppliers instead. Leading R&D organizations such as the Southwest Research Institute are leading the charge to make our engines more efficient. And even Bush, perhaps ready now to admit that the war is all but lost, announced on Monday that his administration has begun the lengthy process of establishing higher fuel efficiency standards for new cars – a course of action that won’t be completed until late 2008, when he's finally booted out of the White House.