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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Are we safer after invading Iraq? No. Would we be safer if we'd spent the hundreds of billions the war has cost on improving our own security at home? Yes.
Sep 11, 2004 | In September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then the White House's chief economic advisor, was asked by the Wall Street Journal to predict the economic cost of the looming war in Iraq. Lindsey should have expected the question; the Bush administration had long been cagey on the costs of war, explaining that if it decided to invade Iraq, the decision would not come down to money but to principle. Yet Lindsey apparently didn't brush up on his talking points. Instead, he candidly told the Journal that invading Iraq would cost the United States between 1 percent and 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product -- about $100 to $200 billion.
That wouldn't break the bank, Lindsey insisted; considering the size of the U.S. economy, "that's nothing." And let's not forget Iraq's oil wealth, he reminded the newspaper. "When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add 3 million to 5 million barrels of production to world supply" each day, he said. The added supply would reduce worldwide oil prices, and thus "the successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."
As the economist who blessed all of George W. Bush's major economic plans, Lawrence Lindsey clearly made many wrongheaded predictions during his years in office, and his idea that the war would boost the economy was just one more in the lineup. But Lindsey, who was dismissed from his post just a couple of months after his chat with the Journal, should be congratulated for being the only Bush administration official to get something -- anything -- right about Iraq. Lindsey's cost estimate, which others in the administration dismissed as wildly pessimistic, turned out to be right on target. So far, the war has cost the United States more than $140 billion, and $50 billion or more will be needed early next year, regardless of who is elected president.
While we mourn the more than 1,000 Americans killed in the war, the cost in dollars is another, less-sickening yet still illustrative measure of the disaster in Iraq. The sum we're paying for this war is high, and there is no end in sight. Indeed, Lindsey's estimate is most likely too low, as the rate of spending in Iraq appears to be increasing or at the very least holding steady, according to analysts who've been watching the war tab.
In June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a study (PDF) of three possible long-term cost scenarios for the war, ranging from best-case to worst. If everything in Iraq goes as well as we can hope, the bill for the war would total an additional $179 billion over the next 10 years; if it goes as badly as we fear, the 10-year cost could top $392 billion. "Unofficially, the Pentagon expenses have been running higher than the amounts that have been calculated to date," says Gordon Adams, a defense analyst at George Washington University. "All of the services are complaining that Iraq and associated costs with Iraq are eating their lunch."
The money, furthermore, is likely to be an all-American affair for the foreseeable future; so far, few significant sums of international aid have come in to fund the military or reconstruction efforts in Iraq, and Iraq's own oil industry has proven far less capable of footing the bill than administration officials had predicted. International oil prices, meanwhile, have risen, not fallen, since the war began.
Was it worth it -- the lives and money spent in Iraq? Responding to the news that American deaths in Iraq had surpassed 1,000, Bush administration officials have insisted that America is safer because of their sacrifice. It's beyond the scope of this piece to examine this claim from the geopolitical perspective of the "war on terror," although it's worth noting that many analysts have concluded that the Iraq war has actually made America less safe, by taking away resources that could have been used to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere and by mobilizing Muslim and Arab rage against the U.S. But putting that issue aside, when one counts the money that has been spent in Iraq, and considers what it might have been spent on instead, one is hard pressed to see how our billions were at all well used.
Late in August, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, compiled a list of all the security initiatives that the U.S. could have purchased with the money already spent in Iraq. The list will cause you to weep -- billions and billions of dollars are needed to secure U.S. seaports, airports, flights, roads and railways, to fund police and fire departments, to secure nuclear stockpiles around the world, to invest in Afghanistan's security and reconstruction, and to provide aid to the world's poorest people, thereby possibly improving the United States' standing in the world. These initiatives would seem guaranteed to make the nation safer; to use a business term that might be familiar to George W. Bush, the first president to hold an MBA, they provide a clear return on investment. Yet these blue-chip plans are not being funded. In an age of record budget deficits, paltry sums are available to fight the actual war on terrorism. Instead, money we don't have -- thanks to Bush's tax cuts -- is being spent on a war we don't need, a war of choice whose return on investment looks about as sure as that of a 1990s Internet firm.
"The president says that because we've invaded Iraq, we are safer," notes P.J. Crowley, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former staffer in President Clinton's National Security Council. "Our response is, 'Not necessarily so.' It's fair to ask the question: What were the other alternatives to invading Iraq that would have had an impact in making us safer? What were the other possible choices?" Crowley answers that question, in part, by pointing out that "what we have right now is the veneer of homeland security -- we don't have genuine homeland security." There are, for instance, 140,000 American troops in Iraq, "and yet we have fewer police officers on the streets of America than we did on Sept. 11." How can we call that money well spent?
