Don’t Talk About The War

Ever since 9/11 there’s been, for understandable reasons, a lot of attention paid to the dramatic notion of a nuclear terrorist attack. At the same time, though al-Qaeda has stated a desire to acquire and use a nuclear device, the path from desire to action on that score has always been a bit unclear. Nuclear weapons are hard to build, and there’s no indication that anyone has any desire to just hand one over to Osama bin Laden. At the same time, very little public attention has focused on bin Laden’s desired goal of provoking the United States into an overreaction that drains our economy and leads to an economic crisis. And yet here were are, over seven years after 9/11 and over five years since the invasion of Iraq, and in the midst of an economic crisis.

It would be silly, of course, to think you can draw a straight line from the Iraq War to the AIG bailout. Or to suggest that prompting widespread panic around credit default swaps was OBL’s idea from the get-go. But at the same time, it can’t really be denied that the economy would be in better shape if the $100+ billion that we’ve spent in Iraq every year for the past five years had, instead, been invested by public and private hands in productive enterprises. If instead of building bombs and Humvees that get destroyed quickly and then replaced, we’d been adding to the national stock of capital and consumer goods. If the people who’d been maimed in the war and are now getting medical treatment were, instead, working productively. Things like that.

And yet this has been totally off the table. Ever since serious political momentum built up around withdrawal, the issue has been discussed in a kind of hermetically sealed “war box” where the only legitimate issue to raise is whether the war is in some sense “winnable” and if the answer is yes than obviously it’s worth throwing an infinite quantity of resource at it. But when you’re talking about any policy undertaking, thinking about the costs is relevant. A Rapid City to Sioux Falls high speed rail link would probably be of some use to someone, but it’d still be a dumb to waste a ton of money on linking two communities of such small size. As the economy looks rocky, and people look to balance considerations about stimulus with considerations about debt and deficit, it’s worth asking how much it really makes sense to be pouring so many resources into a project with little clear benefit.

Ultimately, American military power is built on our economic power and not the other way around. There’s no sense in maintaining a defense posture that ultimately squanders, rather than defends, the real strength of the country.