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.
22 Responses to “Don’t Talk About The War”
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September 17th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Bravo.
I take the silence of the comments thread to be a sign that the majority heartily agrees with this excellent post.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
The post is sensible, but also kind of irrelevant. You just can’t talk about war and peace to voters this way.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
It’s good to see someone else making this point.
And this one:
when I heard O’reilly tell Obama that Iran would give a nuke to Hezbolla I nearly fell out of my chair. I can’t believe Obama didn’t just bitch slap him for saying something so stupid from his influential seat. Why in the name of God would Iran spend billions of dollars and decades of R&D to build a weapon that would get them international respect, a seat at the big boys table in the UN, and security against invasion but then just give it away to someone who, when they use, it will cause the destruction of Iran?
September 17th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Well said, Matt.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
“Ultimately, American military power is built on our economic power and not the other way around.”
yup. wwii was won in the coal mines, steel mills, and factories of america, which managed to replace ships, tanks and planes faster than the nazis and japanese could blow them up. we won simply because of our industrial capacity, and our edge in the high-tech sectors of the day.
and we did it despite having a relatively small arms industry before the war. it turned out that civilian factories could be converted overnight into munitions plants; the same sheet-metal presses that made lipstick tubes one day could make rifle cartridges a week later.
high tech savvy, overwhelming industrial capacity, even if primarily non-military–that’s what the u.s. had in 1939.
it’s what the chinese have right now. and we no longer have.
but don’t worry–we’re not going to lose a shooting war. instead, we’re going to lose to china the way that the soviet union lost to us: we’re going to be hollowed-out economically by decades of republican fiscal insanity, decades of cutting taxes for the wealthy and asking the chinese bankers to loan us the difference.
and, of course, by the unbelievably stupid iraq war, surely the most damaging war we have ever inflicted on ourselves.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I’d say OBL played the Bushies like a drum.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
a really good post, matt.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Mr. Yglesias, that was a dumb argument.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Well said.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:14 am
True, although the extent to which American military power has supported the dollar, particularly through its protection of states like Japan, S. Korea, the Gulf states etc. can’t be ignored.
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