In theory, some people might say, the choice between securing the United States and fighting a war in Iraq shouldn't be mutually exclusive; if both were pressing matters, battles the U.S. couldn't avoid, of course we'd find a way to do both, and the United States is vast enough and rich enough that it could surely manage it. (World War II cost the U.S. $4 trillion in today's dollars.) The trouble is, says Crowley, we're not funding both the war in Iraq and efforts to secure the homeland. We're only funding the war in Iraq, and the administration has not pursued any policies to bring more funds to domestic security. "This is the first war where an administration hasn't asked the American people to sacrifice anything," Crowley notes. "The administration says we can fight this war both at home and abroad and cut taxes at the same time," when clearly we cannot.

Late in 2002, Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who heads Columbia University's Earth Institute, wrote an influential article in the Economist in which he chastised the Bush administration for worrying too much about weapons of mass destruction while ignoring the potential of what he called "weapons of mass salvation." While the White House is "prepared to spend $100 billion to rid Iraq of WMD," Sachs wrote, "it has been unwilling to spend more than 0.2 percent of that sum ($200 million) this year on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria." Sachs pointed out that such efforts could save millions of lives around the world for very, very small sums of money; and saving lives around the world might provide stability to some of the most unstable regions on the planet, a fact that would surely aid in the fight against terrorism.

A few months after the Sachs article appeared, Bush declared in his State of the Union address that the United States would launch a major new effort to fight AIDS in Africa. But with the costs of war, that plan, too, has gone underfunded.

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the World Bank in early April 2003, just before Baghdad fell, Sachs once again lamented the fact that money for war always seems available, yet money for peaceful initiatives that could yield greater benefits is always sidelined. "I was told by the Secretary of State Powell recently just how hard it is to get the money for fighting AIDS," Sachs said. "We didn't have too much trouble finding money for fighting this war, and the amount of money we're going to be spending is phenomenally large."

To put into perspective how much money the U.S. has spent in Iraq, consider this: Working with researchers at the World Health Organization, Sachs determined that for as little as $40 per person per year allocated for the world's poorest countries, you could save about 8 million lives. That's "roughly 20,000 deaths averted every day" for about $25 billion a year. The United States has currently spent eight times that amount in Iraq. "For the cost of this war, tens of millions of people could be saved if we addressed the health crises with an energy equal to that [with] which we're now invading Iraq and fighting in Iraq. Tens of millions of people around the world could be saved for the same costs of the war that we're fighting right now."

There is something rather visionary-sounding and perhaps too grand to bear about Sachs' pronouncements; it's the kind of plan that might look good on paper, but surely it can't be that easy to save tens of millions of lives, and surely the benefits from it won't accrue directly to the security of the United States. But these same criticisms might be applied to the plan in Iraq -- an idealistic, visionary plan that, even if it went as well as it could have gone, would only have contributed indirectly to America's safety.

Wouldn't it have been better to spend all that money on an effort dedicated to saving lives, rather than on a war that's left us with countless dead Iraqis and more than 1,000 dead Americans?

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