Endless War: Can We Afford It?

Endless War: Can We Afford It?

Yesterday General David Petraeus briefed Congress on U.S. military strategy in Iraq and provided a sober but overall positive assessment of the success of the surge in the numbers of soldier deployed to Iraq. Although Petraeus was unwilling to commit himself to any specifics about when the U.S. might begin withdrawing troops, the consensus of Senators, reporters, and pundits was that we are likely to have 140,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2008, a figure higher than when the U.S. began the surge in 2007.

The problem with taking General Petraeus's testimony as a guideline for future Iraq policy is that it obscures the forest while focusing on the trees. After five years, the U.S. remains committed to a “stay the course” policy of establishing security in a country that many military analysts believe will require at least three more years of a U.S. occupation to achieve that goal. That assumption doesn't include the growing evidence that the current Iraqi government under President Nouri al-Maliki is completely incompetent and has made little if any political progress towards a genuine power-sharing agreement between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. We could achieve stability only to have it quickly disintegrate if the political situation remains as chaotic as it has been for the past five years.

This is not to discount the real moral dilemma that many Americans, particularly those on the ground in Iraq feel, as a result of the instability, civilian deaths and general trauma that the U.S. invasion has precipitated over the past five years. They may refer to the “Crate and Barrel” ethos of “you break it, you pay for it,” as a reason for the U.S. staying in Iraq, but the analogy falls short as we enter a sixth year of occupation. You may well pay for a piece of crystal you break at a department store, but you don't have to provide security when thugs break in and destroy most of the store's contents, nor volunteer to protect the store while its management ineffectively struggles to find a new security system.

The problem with the “endless” war in Iraq – and that is precisely what General Petraeus's testimony tends towards – is that it provides no accountability and no real way of measuring progress. As long as we narrowly pursue the will-o-the-wisp of security in Iraq, we fail to debate the larger questions that are far more important: For example, can Iraq, a deeply factionalized and tribal country be preserved as a nation? Is the U.S. occupation simply keeping at bay an inevitable civil war or at least civil dissolution? Are there other ways that Iraq's security could be achieved, such as through multi-lateral talks with its neighbors, including Iran?

General Petraeus argues that the current policy in Iraq is “worth it,” but he provides no evidence and no quantification of how we might measure that “worth.” Do we really believe that if everything goes perfectly in Iraq, we will really win the global war on terror? Is such a war even winnable in military terms?

Finally, what no one seems to be asking is the trillion-dollar question. Can we really afford this war? Are we sacrificing our economic security for some chimera of national security?

Currently the Iraq war is costing roughly $200 million a day, or $6 billion every month. But it's not just the fact that the billions of dollars we are spending on this occupation could be spent on roads, schools, health care etc. It's much worse than that. We are already failing to spend this money on our own domestic needs.

If you look at the budget that President Bush introduced in January, it includes $200 billion cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years and a $2 billion reduction in funding to Health and Human Services Department. Even if Congress rejects those cuts, it can only do so by pursuing two politically unpalatable paths: either to raise taxes or to continue borrowing money, creating an even larger budget deficit, already at $163 billion in fiscal 2007.

The whole Iraq adventure has been based on a dangerous economic fallacy: that we can supply the soldiers to fight the war on a volunteer basis and that we can finance the war by borrowing money abroad, instead of passing the burden to taxpayers.

The result is that we have an exhausted, nearly broken army, and compromised readiness to meet any other military crisis in another part of the world.

Moreover, the recent credit crisis should give our leaders fair warning that even the faith and credit of the United States government is not limited. Do we really want to become the world's biggest debtor nation? Are there not risks to national security in that very dependence on having foreign banks and foreign governments as our creditors? With its economy headed for recession, a weak dollar, and little leverage abroad, the U.S. will find itself in a very tight spot if those we are indebted to for this military adventure decide to call in their chips.

And what will happen to the American economy and the American taxpayer when the war bill finally comes due at the very same time as we expect to confront significant spending pressures from the Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security programs?

It is time for opponents to the war in Congress and the media in general to start asking tough questions of candidates related to their support of continuation of the war. If any presidential candidate were to propose a national health care system, the first question out of every reporter's mouth would be, “Senator, how do you propose to pay for that?” And yet Senator McCain, who has said he could see an occupation lasting ten years and who would like to see more soldiers sent to Iraq, has been given a free base on the crucial question of how he intends to fund this continuing occupation. Is he going to raise taxes? Reinstate the draft to provide these additional military resources?

These are questions that the media and voters need to be asking, just as they should be demanding a wider debate among all the presidential candidates on how they plan to balance domestic needs with foreign policy objectives and how they might going about addressing national security and the need to confront terrorism in ways that are both more effective and less costly that this endless war in Iraq.