Sunday, November 18, 2007

What Does Iraq Cost? Even More Than You Think.



Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page B03


To: President George W. Bush

Subject: The Hidden Costs of Iraq

You may recall that you got rid of your loyal White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey back in 2002 after, among other sins, he claimed that a war in Iraq might cost as much as $200 billion. At the time, White House staffers sneered that Lindsey was being alarmist. Hardly. One commonly cited estimate of Iraq's cost, based on an August analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, is $1 trillion, and that's probably on the low side. A report released last week by the Democratic staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee put the war's 2002-08 tab at $1.3 trillion.

But all these figures don't quite get at Iraq's real cost. Indeed, we usually don't even frame the question the right way. We'd do better to recognize what we've lost, rather than focusing only on what we've paid.

We often think of cost simply in terms of dollars spent, but the real cost of a choice -- what economists call its "opportunity cost" -- consists of the forgone alternatives, of the things we could have had instead. For instance, the cost of seeing a movie is not just the dollars you plunked down for the ticket, but also the subtler cost of missing a dinner at home or a cocktail party at work. This idea sounds simple, but if applied consistently, it requires us to rethink and, yes, raise the costs of the Iraq war.

Set aside the question of what we could have accomplished at home with the energy and resources we've devoted to Iraq and concentrate just on national security. Here, the hidden cost of the war, above all, is that the United States has lost much of its ability to halt nuclear proliferation.


Mr. President, when the war started, I was convinced by your arguments that we had to stop Iraq's dictatorship from getting the bomb. No longer. Let's look at some of the opportunity costs the United States has incurred so far:

1. We still haven't secured our ports against nuclear terrorism. The

$1 trillion we've probably spent on the war could have funded the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security 28 times over.

2. The human toll of the war is dreadful: more than 3,800 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 28,000 wounded, plus more than 1,000 private contractors killed and many more injured. It's harder to know how many Iraqis have died; some estimates claim that the war has caused a million or more Iraqi deaths, and even if that's an overstatement, the toll is still very high. But it's not just the lives that are gone; we've also lost the contributions that these people would have made to their families and to humanity at large.

3. Another major hidden cost: Many of the wounded have severe brain injuries or other traumas and will never return to "normal" life. Furthermore, Washington will find it far harder to recruit and retain quality troops and National Guardsmen in the future.

4. Don't forget the small statistics, which are often the most striking. According to John Pike, the head of the research group GlobalSecurity.org, an estimated 250,000 bullets have been fired for every insurgent killed in Iraq. That's not just a waste of ammunition; it's also a reflection of how badly the country has been damaged and how indiscriminate some of the fighting has been. Or take another straw in the wind: The cost of a coffin in Baghdad has risen to $50-75, up from just $5-10 before the war, according to the Nation magazine.


5. Above all, governing Iraq has, so far, been a fruitless investment. According to 2006 figures, U.S. war spending came out to $3,749 per Iraqi -- almost as much as the per capita income of Egypt. That staggering sum hasn't bought a lot of leadership from Iraq, or much of a democratic model for its Arab neighbors.

In fact, Mr. President, your initial pro-war arguments offer the best path toward understanding why the conflict has been such a disaster for U.S. interests and global security.

Following your lead, Iraq hawks argued that, in a post-9/11 world, we needed to take out rogue regimes lest they give nuclear or biological weapons to al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups. But each time the United States tries to do so and fails to restore order, it incurs a high -- albeit unseen -- opportunity cost in the future. Falling short makes it harder to take out, threaten or pressure a dangerous regime next time around.

Foreign governments, of course, drew the obvious lesson from our debacle -- and from our choice of target. The United States invaded hapless Iraq, not nuclear-armed North Korea. To the real rogues, the fall of Baghdad was proof positive that it's more important than ever to acquire nuclear weapons -- and if the last superpower is bogged down in Iraq while its foes slink toward getting the bomb, so much the better. Iran, among others, has taken this lesson to heart. The ironic legacy of the war to end all proliferation will be more proliferation.

The bottom line is clear, Mr. President: The more you worried about the unchecked spread of doomsday weapons, the stronger you thought the case was for war in the first place. But precisely because you had a point about the need to stop nuclear proliferation, you must now realize that the costs of a failed war are far higher than you've acknowledged.

Ironically, it's probably the doves who should lower their mental estimate of the war's long-haul cost: By fighting a botched war today, the United States has lowered the chance that it will fight another preventive war in the near future. The American public simply does not have the stomach for fighting a costly, potentially futile war every few years. U.S. voters have already lost patience with the pace of reconstruction in Iraq, and that frustration will linger; remember, it took the country 15 years or more to "get over" Vietnam. The projection of American power and influence in the future requires that an impatient public feel good about American muscle-flexing in the past.


Even if the wisest way forward is sticking to our guns, the constraints of politics and public opinion mean that we cannot always see U.S. military commitments through. Since turning tail hurts our credibility so badly and leaves such a mess behind, we should be extremely cautious about military intervention in the first place. The case for hawkish behavior often assumes that the public has more political will than it actually has, so we need to save up that resolve for cases when it really counts.

So, Mr. President, I wonder: Lawrence Lindsey is gone, but exactly who else will end up getting fired?

tcowen@gmu.edu


Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason

University, is the author of "Discover Your Inner Economist:

Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting,

and Motivate Your Dentist."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The cost of Iraq has been great and the lives of those lost even greater but what price are the American people willing to pay for freedom. This is a war against terrorism. It is not a war against religion. It is not a war against their economy. It is not a war against diversity but it is a battle against the violence imposed on our country on September 11. It is a war to preserve the freedom we live out every day in this country. Money is always an issue but money does not purchase freedom that is already devoured by our conquerors. The real question lies not in the sacrifices that we have already made but in the sacrifices that we will make in the future.

Dorris said...

To start with, all the money that is spent on this war is owed to ourselves, thus it is not a huge deal. Addressing the author's second point, losing 3,800 troops in the amount of time spent over in Iraq is not a justified reason to blame the effectiveness of this war. World War II saw many more casualties in a shorter period of time. It is true that soldiers have suffered injuries that will disable them from living a normal life, but this happened supporting the country they loved, and doing something they loved, which apparently the author does not realize.

The justification of this war should not come down to its cost or death totals. It is a war aimed to destroy terrorism in that part of the world, and prevent it from spreading and having attacks within our own borders. Since we invaded Iraq our homeland has not witnessed any large scale attack. Apparently something has been done right. Also, in Iraq, democracy is getting a start and many areas are final able to experience freedom. This, like many other things, the author has failed to show.

MasterChief said...

Master Chief is glad that there are others that feel the same way. What really stays with me from that article is a part from one of the last few sentences:"so we need to save up that resolve for cases when it really counts". I guess this means that Iraq really didn't count and that Saddam wasn't a threat to freedom and national security. He must have been a really great man and I would have liked to have met him if it wasn't for all those innocent people he so meant to kill. Articles like this get me fired up, and the only other thing I have to say is thanks to those men and women that are everywhere in the world fighting for the freedom that I sometimes take for granted. I am sorry that there are people like this author who have the guts to write something like this, talking about the cost of this war. What he fails to mention is that the cost of standing by and doing nothing will be much greater. Spartan, I am glad I am on the right side of this issue.

HuskerCubs...WeSuck said...

Contrary to popular belief, the Iraq War is not about terrorism. Actually the Iraqi's had nothing to do with 9/11 so please do not bring that up. It is actually about economic gain or oil if you will. We decided after absolutely kicking the crap out of Iraq the first time to go back in and finish the job. So we go and invade the country in the name of "freedom". Even dubbing it "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and forced our beliefs and government on a country that obviously did not want it. Saddam was not a threat to national security and "freedom". He had enough to worry about with Iran. Actually, that's why we did not completely destroy Iraq in the First Gulf War, to check Iran's power. Now there is no check but that's ok because I'm sure Bush has a nice invasion plan for right before he leaves office so we can repeat this yet again.

In conclusion, we have no justified reason of being there. Have found no link of Iraq being involved in 9/11 or any other major western terrorist attack. Found no weapons of mass destruction. There was no threat of them invading a neighboring country. So why are we there again?

Well, we should not be. We need to pull out ASAP or we will be there a long time. A time table will not work. We must leave now and pretend none of this disaster ever happened. Just like it should have never happened.