Trump promises 'big decision' on Iran, six months after promising it'd be quick, $121 billion later.

As it ran on the front

On Thursday, a United Nations fact-finding mission said it had "reasonable grounds" to believe two U.S. airstrikes inside Iran amounted to war crimes, and recommended "full reparations to victims." The White House called its own answer "explosive" — the New York Post's word, not mine, though I understand the impulse to reach for a synonym when the noun you actually mean is "crimes." Iran, for its part, called the Pentagon's account of rescuing a downed Air Force colonel "fictional and unacceptable" — a colonel whose F-15E went down over Iran in April, whose rescue the United States has now had to describe more than once. Iranian forces brought down at least two more American MQ-1 drones this week, officials said, declining to specify beyond "at least."

That's the week in denials. Here's the week in arithmetic. On September 9th, a running tracker maintained by Brown University's Watson School put the consumer cost of the war at $101 billion — $776 a household — in extra energy spending alone. Eight days later, Moody's Analytics has that energy figure at $121 billion, $930 a household, with total added household costs, once you count everything the war touches, at $1,760. Whatever this war is doing inside Iran, and the UN's fact-finders have their own accounting for that, it is also doing something specific and countable to the price of filling a tank in Ohio, updated roughly every eight days.…