Yeah, Saddam Was A Bad Guy
He did bad, bad things to his people. This is terrible, yes, but a lot of terrible things happen in the world, and we had a president who advertised "no nation building" as a way to get elected. Matthew Yglesias writes about what Iraq was supposed to buy us:
Bush never said invading Iraq would educate our children or fight domestic poverty, so let’s not even get into that, for now. What the President did promise was the following: that regime change would curb nuclear proliferation, weaken al-Qaeda, and create a shining beacon of democracy. What happened? We eliminated a nuclear program that didn’t exist, encouraged Iran and North Korea to speed theirs along, offered terrorists a gigantic recruiting opportunity and training ground, and turned Iraq into a venue for chaos and civil war plagued by death squads and offering local despots a handy cautionary tale about the dangers of liberalization.
The price tag?
...Before it ends, the war will likely cost somewhat more than the $549 billion spent (adjusted for inflation) in the much more lethal Vietnam War. But even this figure will likely prove to be off by hundreds of billions of dollars because it accounts only for funds directly appropriated for war fighting. As Linda Bilmes, a leading Harvard budgetary expert, and Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out in their January 2006 paper, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War,” the spending captured by the CRS, even in strict budgetary terms, is “only the tip of a very deep iceberg.”Wartime appropriations do not, for example, include the cost of disability payments to veterans wounded in the war, payments that will continue throughout their life spans. Nor do they cover the costs of medical treatment for those seriously injured in the war, or even such basic war-related costs as the replacement of equipment and munitions expended in the conflict or the need to transport soldiers back to their home bases when they rotate out of country. The war has also substantially increased the military’s overall recruiting costs, reflected in bigger bonuses and additional recruiters. What’s more, by combining the war with aggressive tax cutting, the administration has ensured that the operation is paid for entirely by borrowing money on which interest will need to be paid. The shocking truth, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, is that if one applies the Congressional Budget Office’s basic assumptions about the duration of the conflict (“a small but continuous presence”), it will cost nearly a staggering $1.27 trillion dollars before all is said and done.
The number is so high as to defy human comprehension. All the numbers ending in “-illion” sound the same. But a trillion is what you get if you spend a million dollars a day … for a million days. That’s 2,737 years -- a cool mil a day, every day, in other words, until the Year of Our Lord 4743. Or, working backward, from the time when Homer wrote the Iliad up to now. The $270 billion in rounding error is worth another 750 years at the million-a-day rate. That takes us up to the year 5493 -- or back to when Moses fled Egypt.
Anyway you slice it, it’s a lot of money. More than enough to fund any sort of “too expensive” pie-in-the-sky liberal domestic scheme. Universal preschool, for example, clocks in at about $35 billion annually -- cheap enough to get 37 years’ worth.
At the end, take a look at some of the spending alternatives -- where we might have put the money we threw into the sinkhole, Iraq.
I love numbers games. I guess we haven't watched Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" enough yet.
The numbers game looks like this: figure out a dollar amount for any activity you don't like, then use the money as an argument. This is what Edmund Muskie did with the Apollo space program, insisting that those $$ were better spent feeding the poor. Gee, that sure worked, didn't it?
If you counted all the mistakes Windows users have had to deal with, and converted that into dollars, you'd easily "bankrupt" the nation. So, too, would you go nuts if you started cherry-picking other "useless" activities: how important is seeing who can go fastest in a circle in a car, or carry a ball down a striped field against opposition?
War is better measured against its goals and its outcome. Better to ask yourself why Americans died at Iwo and Saipan and a million other nameless islands; in Vietnam; in Lebanon.
So other Americans can drive Toyotas made in Saigon? So some taint of guilt over the Holocaust can be painted over? So we won't have to drill in ANWR for five more years, until the demand just gets too high after people realize cars don't really run worth a damn on alcohol?
Anyway. The "money" argument is junk, because nearly everything we do wastes it. Compare military action with its goals - don't be distracted. The picture won't get any more pleasant, but it will be clearer.
Radwaste at August 2, 2006 3:06 AM
Yes, but I would have paid to flatten Afghanistan, and all the terrorists in it. Instead, it's like Pretty Boy Floyd robbed a bank and instead of pursuing him for the crime we went great guns after the butcher down the block who puts his finger on the scale.
I would never use Windows. I've used Macs since 1984. My original Mac still works. It's in Rome at the apartment of some friends of mine.
As for the goals: "What the President did promise was the following: that regime change would curb nuclear proliferation, weaken al-Qaeda, and create a shining beacon of democracy."
Do we see anything much beyond dead and maimed American soldiers and a civil war in our wake?
Amy Alkon at August 2, 2006 6:41 AM
> we had a president who advertised
> "no nation building"
9/11 changed his mind. You supported war in Afghanistan, right? So you have nothing against nation building per se. Iraq has a blessings Afghanistan can only dream of (an educated class, and all the wealth in the world under the desert floor), so it's a more likely place for success.
Iraq was a shitbath for which we (as Saddam's patron) held great responsibility. People were going to be dead and maimed no matter what. I'm sorry that so many of them are Americans now. But cynical CIA manipulation of these regimes --which is what you seem to be arguing for-- had not brought good results lately.
Crid at August 2, 2006 7:57 AM
Do we see anything much beyond dead and maimed American soldiers and a civil war in our wake?
I'm not surprised at developments, and nobody else should be, because - as I've mentioned before - the infrastructure for supplying weapons is still present.
B-52 Urban Renewal would stop that, but people think that's an even higher price to pay than American lives - otherwise known as The Same Old Story: GI Joe Gets Killed Because No One Else Cares Before Calling On Him.
Radwaste at August 2, 2006 8:03 PM
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