We could have colonized Mars with the money we spent on the Iraq war -- what else could we do?
Charlie Stross is hosting an open conversation on other things we could have bought with the money wasted in Iraq: for example, we could have sent a colony of over 500 astronauts to Mars, provided modern nuclear power to the USA and shut down its coal plants, built modern cities for 600,000,000 Chinese people to live in, and so on:
For $6Tn we could buy a lot of juice — a quarter of our global civilization's energy budget would go carbon-neutral at a stroke. (Yes, we just solved our carbon dioxide emissions problem by switching to a nuclear economy.) This probably isn't the ideal way of dealing with our environmental problems, and it's a naive treatment of the costs (has anyone done a proper treatment of the economic implications of shifting the planet over to a nuclear economy, say to the same extent as France?) but it's thought-provoking.LinkFinally, there's all the other little stuff we could solve by pointing $513Bn at it, never mind $6000Bn. Eliminating childhood diseases in South-East Asia? Piffle — Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to do that out of their pocket lint. Build first-world grade housing in shiny new cities for 600 million Chinese peasants, nearly a tenth of the planetary population? Yes, this budget will cover that. What else?
Yes, I'm asking you: what would you do with the cost of the Iraq war (take your pick: $513Bn or $6000Bn) in your budget? Colonise Mars? Solve our carbon emission problem and fix global warming? House half a billion people? Or something else ...?
(And what isn't going to happen now, because we pissed it all away on the desert sands?)
But of course, no we couldn't have ... because we would have been overrun by a population that does not believe in space exploration.
We could always by popcorn and sit back and watch Hussein and his goon thrw ppl nt wd chpprs nd lt hs sns rn thr rp rms.
Oh, yeah. That's buy not by.
An alternative analysis, with suggestions:
"If Bush had spent that $3,000,000,000,000 on shoes, no American child would ever have to wear the same shoes more than once. Or he could have bought everyone in Iraq an Aston Martin. Those would be the actions of a madman, of course, yet still more sensible than what he actually did do."
The US government should set up a Ministry of Hate / Discord / Strife / Intereference etc with an annual budget. Its job being to identify possible hotspots of the imaginary kind or to manufacture such (like in the past) and follow it up with large scale destruction (which it does)
They have managed splendidly to generate hate which will take some years to wilt, wash and disappear. Hillary already has said that she wouldn't mind bombing Iran and Mcain wants to remove Russia from G8.
Does it look like ending anytime soon. NO. It seems the most popular album of US Presidency is 'Appetite for Destruction' Ax, Slash etc etc
Truly a sobering read. But I have to keep reminding myself that it's not the money that is the biggest loss, it is the hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, homeless or orphaned human beings.
@1: True. So much better to do those things ourselves.
Thekin:
Good point. For $6 trillion we could buy 25 billion metric tonnes of maize with which to make it. (today maize is trading at ~ $6 / 25 kg).
That's enough to give every person on earth 3.7 tonnes of popcorn, which (if it were ever possible to grow that much maize) would instantly alleviate world hunger. But what's that compared to getting rid of Saddam, eh?
Come now- without this war, where would be Homeland Security? Don't you want us to be safe from the terrorists? You must be anti-American!
Besides, we don't need a Ministry of Hate. Are you crazy? We already have the Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, and Ministry of Peace- and the Ministry of Plenty is set to be in power by this time next year.
No matter who gets elected, the Ministries will be in power to protect and guide the citizens- so of course this expenditure was all worth it!
I think Charlie doesn't have the slightest clue about how economics work. Does he think that money being spent in Iraq is being loaded on a rocket and launched into the sun, never to circulate in global markets again? While he might have his own agenda for how to spend US tax dollars, the fact that they are getting spent at all should be a clue that someone, somewhere, is receiving a paycheck. That someone buys cheap Chinese HDTVs, uses electricity from Saudi Arabian oil to power it, drives a Japanese hybrid, wears trendy sandals from Amsterdam, and dines on fish and fruit from South America. Globalization, baby!
Why not complain to the fat, rich Saudi royal family that THEY aren't spending enough on hydrogen fuel cell research? Why not prod the Chinese to spend their gigantic trade surplus on going to Mars? Why not get the emerging democracies of South America to dispense clues to the corrupt dictatorships in Africa? Why does it fall to the US to wipe the noses and bottoms of the rest of the planet, Charlie? Those high and mighty expenditures of US capital you cite are just as ethnocentric and jingoistic as pissing it away in a big military/industrial circle-jerk in the Iraq sandbox. They are just wrapped in a hypocritical cloak of righteousness. The net result is the same. US tax dollars are being recirculated in a global economy. Maybe those other countries with stronger currencies, richer oligarchies, and huge trade surpluses should get off THEIR greedy asses and do something worthwhile for the planet for a change. Time for a new attitude, here.
Well, assuming that my hasty internet figures are correct*, we could have bought out all of Iraq's oil for just $3Tn in 2003 prices. Then we could have swum about in our pools full of oil, spitting fountains of oil into the air. Those less inclined to enjoy swimming in crude oil would be allowed to build Scrooge McDuck-style swimming pools full of money with the remaining $3Tn.
Yes, I'm being somewhat facetious, of course. Buying the entirety of Iraq's reserves would likely have caused an insane surge in oil prices, which, given that the $6Tn figure is based in part on "loss of economic productivity attributable to instabilities in the supply of oil from Iraq" might not be the solution we're looking for. It would also be a gigantic payoff to a dangerous dictator. I'm just sayin'.
*Internet numbers: Oil at or under $25/bbl from Wikipedia x Iraq oil reserves as of 2007 at 115 Bn bbl from CIA world factbook = $2875Bn
woah, thats alot of lotto tickets..
To be fair, it's not as if the US had $6T (or $513B) lying around waiting to be used. Then a case could be made for spending it on something else. Instead, the US essentially printed that money, choosing to go into public debt. I hardly think that the US would go $6T into public debt to send astronauts to Mars or feed the Third World. So it's really a false comparison.
Cshotton, #9:
Paragraph 1 - But if we did fire it into the sun, that would be fine of course, as the rocket manufacturers would still be getting a paycheck.
Paragraph 2 - let's summarise your argument here.
"2 wrongs = 1 right"
@ Robert, #12
It's not that the government chose "to go into public debt" over this war, it's that it chose to greatly increase the public debt. The already phenomenally huge public debt.
Were you or I asked in 2002 to choose what to spend 513 billion imaginary dollars on, I hardly think this would be it.
Seems to me they could at least have put some of that money into a reliable infrastructure in Iraq. Why has there been that much money spent there, and there is still not consistent electricity? Couldn't they have at least bribed all the insurgent leaders with a couple billions to stop fighting each other?
But to answer more directly, I would have spent that money on some really good scotch.
Oh, I don't think all that money was pissed away into the desert sands, never to reappear.
No, that money was placed into the pockets of the Chinese and our other debtors, and into the pockets of a lot of Dick Cheney's friends, and all of those people will one day (soon) step forward and announce, "Attention slaves: You now belong to us. Assume the position."
In fact, with talk already having gone on for some time that the retirement age will have to go up to at least 75, and possible 85, I think the first announcements have already been made.
I did a similar "what else could we buy" thing based on the per-day cost breakdown for a small forum I run based on some earlier numbers from Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes at the tail-end of last year, placing the cost at $720 million a day.
Using the per-day figure, it included things like feeding about 3,000 Americans from birth to death (based on an 85 year lifespan), putting 36,000 Honda Civic Hybrid cars on the road, or funding the Arecibo Observatory for the next 270 million years.
Page is here, if anyone is curious.
And I even figured out how much butter you need to build a castle on the same thread. Yeah, we're strange folk.
Haliburton, Black Water, and several others are certainly not doing their part of taking all that money paid them and recirculating it back into my economy. Don't they know how much good they could do with that money?
I'm still waiting for the invisible hand of capitalism to bring the greatest good to the world. You'd think with trillions of dollars of capitalism from the Iraq war alone, we'd have some awesomely good stuff trickle down by now.
Maybe Haliburton didn't get the memo?
I would buy a sweet car and go trolling for chicks.
And with the change take them to Taco Bell or someplace nice like that.
I think buying 600,000 houses for China is the most likely - since that's who we borrowed most of it from.
CSHotton @9: Has the money spent on Iraq done anything other than send US currency on a trajectory into the Sun? I can't remember when the dollar was last worth as little as half a pound sterling, and it's not as though sterling is doing all that well either.
The cheap chinese HDTVs happened despite Iraq, and the next big thing out of China will happen in China and not the US because of Iraq.
Why aren't we complaining about these other injustices? Well, we do, but at the moment we're complaining about this one, which is pretty enormous and hard to ignore. Especially since it is hitting us so hard in our wallets.
We could have spent the money researching a new form of energy that wouldn't need oil, put it on the market, put Saddam and the other oil leeches of the world out of business and put the States at the top of the world, making everybody richer.
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been."
P.G. Wodehouse
John Davis
"I think Charlie doesn't have the slightest clue about how economics work. Does he think that money being spent in Iraq is being loaded on a rocket and launched into the sun, never to circulate in global markets again?"
We have no way of knowing, due to the fact that KBR is unaccountable and all those pallets of bundled hundreds could have gone anywhere - unless you're speaking figuratively, and "the sun" is the bottom of the relative-worth chart for the US dollar on the open market.
Of course, it's not as if people attached to the US government's operations overseas have ever before set up massive criminal trafficking groups before **coughcoughAIRAMERICAcoughcough**, by (ab)using US military resources and US taxpayer funds.
-------------
I stopped my fundamentalist conservative mother cold in her rhetoric about the war: Three minutes into " ... and we /have/ to support our troops because ..." - I pointed out that for what we have spent on Iraq, /we/ could have fed the /entire/ world for over a /year/.
MY MOTHER, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE, CONCEDED AN ARGUMENT. I'm fairly certain this is prophecied in the Book of Revelations, folks.
I think it is important to criticize this situation , but I also think that it's important to try and fix the problems and discuss solutions. I have no idea really at this point what we could do, but I know that our government, (maybe theoretically), receives its power from citizens. Surely there is something we can do to end this. It just seems, (I'm probably off in some way), that if these loses of life and money bother us so much, why don't we take more action to stop it. Is it because we feel we are helpless or incapable? I hope no one takes what I'm saying offensively, because that is not my intention. I'm being self critical as well.
Ths my nt b th mst pplr f sttmnts bt th rsn w spnd s mch mny s tht w'r bsy bng s P.C. s pssbl- dncng rnd prblms nd strtgc cptrs nstd f gttng th jb vr nd dn wth.
Drng th bgnnng f th S prsnc n rq thr ws n fnny bsnss nd n mssn' rnd. G G G. nd th cmpgn ws vr vry qckly. Nw tht w'r cddlng ppl's mtns hr n th S nd ppl hv bcm cmplcnt bt thngs n th hmfrnt gn w blv tht w hv n bsnss thr. k s w sty t- dd th vnts tht tk plc bfr nd ftr rq nt tch s nythng. Trn th rgn nt sht glss. Lt lh srt t t. Prblm slvd nd lss xpnsv thn nw cty, nw shs, r stck f gm.
Interesting to see how strongly nuclear
everyone gets when gas is over $3.00
I wonder if anyone noticed how difficult it
is to mine uranium. There is a pretty
good study about this, which indicates that
if the world went 100% nuclear energy, the
fuel would be exhausted in just a few years.
Interestingly, I can't find much about this
in more recent studies which mostly seem to
written by industry boosters.
ref: http://www.stormsmith.nl/publications/EnergyPolicyJune85.pdf
@9 (cshotton)
It's fine to point out that the money spent is still in circulation, but:
1. There is an opportunity cost. It could have been spent on something more useful (the point of the article).
2. If the same amount of money was spent on something else, that money would still be in circulation anyway.
There is no way to justify the war in terms of economic benefits.
Please have a look at the parable of the broken window:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
#25 - we spent all that money to displace dictators whose mindset your comments recall.
Chrl Strss ws spwng crnl drrh n thrtcl vcm.
t's nt n wrld, nd th bd 'l S's wd-cd-shd dn't mn sqt f t dsn't mntn ts glbl strngth & pwr t fl ts mssv cnmc ngn t vn ~thnk bt dng stff t hs n bsnss dng. Lk bldng mythcl chns cts, r nclr pwr plnts whch th dmcrtc sclsts wll snk lk cmnt bg.
And what the h3ll does this utopian twit Stross think is going to make 500 'nauts on a barren wasteland productive or profitable?
nd gss wht, mr. cry? ll ths bllns pssd wy n th snd r jst drp n th GDP bckt - nd wll sly gt rmd thsnd tms vr n yr lftm.
Kryk.
Rebuild New Orleans levees out of pure gold. Heck the whole city.
Fried@25: During the beginning of the US presence in Iraq there was no funny business and no messin' around. Go Go Go. And the campaign was over very quickly.
Any fool can tell you that invading is hella lot easier than occupying. The only problem is our administration is run by super-fools who swore up and down that we'd be out in 6 weeks, 6 months at the most.
Now that we're coddling people's emotions here in the US
coddling?
and people have become complacent about things on the homefront again we believe that we have no business there.
complacent?
Ok so we stay out- did the events that took place before and after Iraq not teach us anything.
Well, for one, the events before told us that Iraq had disarmed its WMD program. The weapons inspectors repeatedly said this prior to the invasion. The events after the invasion only confirmed this.
For another, the events before consisted of a lot of handwaving to say that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. And the events after taught us that some people will believe anything if you say it often enough.
Turn the region into a sheet a glass. Let Alah sort it out. Problem solved and less expensive than a new city, new shoes, or a stick of gum.
Right. Given that the current hawk excuse for being in Iraq is that saddam was a dictator and tortured his own citizens, the best thing we could have done was to nuke the entire nation, killing everyone there, and saving those poor iraqis from such a terrible dictator.
"We could always by popcorn and sit back and watch Hussein and his goon thrw ppl nt wd chpprs nd lt hs sns rn thr rp rms."
why not, you did with rwanda.
MDHatter @28: One dictator. Still a few more out there. I don't think we can afford to bring freedom to the world at this price.
Locomotivebreath1901 @29: How has the mess the US has made in Iraq helped maintain its "strength & power"? The dollar is sinking like the Titanic and your natural allies are avoiding you as if you were a friend who has sadly gone mad.
Fried @25: You are an advocate for nuclear terrorism. No one will listen to you. Except, possibly, the FBI.
Greg @31: I think Fried meant the whole Middle East, not just Iraq.
Farmland in Canada sells for about $1200/acre on average, and there are about 130 million acres of it, therefore we could have bought every inch of farmland in Canada for only 155 billion dollars! Gee, what would we do with the other 5.845T?
#33 - Saddam was our man. The Shah of Iran (who started their nuclear program) was our man. The Saidi sheiks? Our men. Pakistans generals, many are our men.
We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them.
and we've been at it for 50 years.
I think Fried meant the whole Middle East, not just Iraq.
Doesn't that make the argument just that much more crazy?
If the U.S.A. had colonized Mars instead of Iraq we would be fighting a Martian insurgency. I think we should just let things be and allow Mars to continue to be ruled by the Supreme Martian Counsel. One only needs to look at the NASA pictures their Martian rovers have beamed back from the Red Planet. There has been absolutely no development of this planet. Martians are simply not ready for Democracy.
Cool idea for a site, but the implementation is godawful.
Among (many) other issues I encountered, I amassed close to $3 trillion worth of items, then added one more item that took my tally slightly over $3 trillion, and it mysteriously emptied my shopping cart.
Not ready for prime time.
It's 20-20, I know, but you could've offered half a million bucks to every man, woman and child in Iraq, provided they would houst their own regime, embrace democracy and set up trade negociacions with the West.
My guess is the U.S.A. would have made a lot of friends, have a great deal on the oil, and be cheaper off.
On the other hand, conflict is more dramatic, and drama has our fascination.
ned613 wins, comments over.
Reminds me of an old National Lampoon story encouraging America to just buy the rest of the world so we can make them shut up. Dig that change out of the sofa. Check the pockets of sport coats for stray twenties and run the Visa up to the limit. Ought to be enough to get a controlling interest in any country that ever gave us any static. Then just make them STFU and GBTW.
IIRC, that story was in the '70s and was by P.J. O'Rourke.
Money doesn't solve anything
For a miniscule fraction of all that money, couldn't we have just bought Saddam off? I mean, he was essentially a gangster -- ruthlessly committed to the sole purpose of increasing his own personal riches and power.
Surely, he and the Bush administration would share enough philosophical common ground to come to some sort of meeting of minds.
On the other hand, it's not like we had all that discretionary cash to begin with...
@ Doc Tourneau, #44
That was my first thought as well. Even strong opponents of the war, however, tend to agree that the man was more than just a gangster. He was a despot, and one that caused the painful deaths of a lot of people. While there are already plenty of folks like him who are astronomically rich and powerful, I would rather not add him to the list.
I ask the question, where has the 6 trillion dollars gone? What, specifically, was it spent on, and who received it. I think, unless the soldiers who deserve it got a hella raise, most of the money is going into the diseased coffers of some little known corporations like Halliburton, KBR, and a beast called Blackwater securities. Oh, I forgot that some of the money is going to Iraqi warlords, to keep them fighting on our side.
See Economist Bjorn Lomborg's TED talk on priorities. It turns out that doing a lot of good in some cases is pretty darn cheap. (Like fighting diseases and providing clean drinking water. Tremendous bang for the buck and pretty darn cheap in comparison.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8730688320934276492
@WIL9000, # 46
Six trillion dollars hasn't actually gone anywhere yet. The number is an estimate that includes both direct expenditures and "indirect costs, and factor in the long-term additional expenses that the war has accrued — everything from caring for brain-damaged soldiers for the next 50 years through to loss of economic productivity attributable to instabilities in the supply of oil from Iraq."
As many others have mentioned this hardly means anything in the real world because the real world doesn't really do things like this. However I do find that just as a indicator of what the numbers could have done in any one endeavor is quite interesting. It reminds me of a ad I saw in a climbing magazine for Mountain Equipment Co-op. It lists if you sacrifice something you pay for on a regular basis you can use that money to climb for X amount of days, sacrifice coffee in the mornings climb for an extra two days etc... the last one is sacrifice rent, climb for an extra 31 days. Which is where we change the formula due to reality circumstances, as we all know reality does alter how everything works in our head. However it would be interesting to see if someone did take that amount of money spent over there to do one grand human endeavor, one great thing that is economically "super human" and changed the course of humanity with it, it would be something to see, really something to see.
For that much money I cold employ a hitsquad to remove all the right wing nuts, looney-lefties, religionazis, criminal gangsters and still have enough left over to get rid of all the politicians. And pay redundancy to the TSA.
There. Problem solved!
Thekin @1, I can't find a source on the wood chipper story that's better than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin. Do you have one? All the more responsible sources I can find say the story is fiction, long since debunked, and that it traces back to Ahmed Chalabi's people.
As for "rape rooms": son, not sons. Uday and Qusay were two very different people.
I won't argue that Uday wasn't a monster. However, at the point that we invaded Iraq he'd long since been recognized as a sociopath and political liability, was in permanent disfavor with his father, and had been quite obviously removed from the succession. He failed to reinstate himself via either of his two politically significant marriages, since both had to be dissolved after he mistreated his wives. He'd also been badly crippled since 1996, when gunmen shot up his car. It was only a matter of time until someone finished him off.
We didn't go to war over Uday Hussein. But if we had, we wouldn't have much room to complain if someone else invaded us.
No one is assuming it is the USA's duty to do anything. This started as a discussion of what the dollars spent (or to be spent) on the Iraq war would buy. More economic or mathematical than political.
As far a Bush being visionary and courageous, I completely reject that. Bush and his cronies wanted a war in Iraq long before he took office and long before 9-11. He is only following his personal agenda, consequences and the opinion of the majority of his constituents be damned.
I'm not sure Bush and his "soldiers" will be "heralded" by the generations to come who will have to pay for this war.
WWEBoing, #51:
I'll happily get my head out of my arse when you get yours out of the clouds.
"You start with the assumed premise that it is the USA's duty to give orange juice or clean energy to the world, but balk when we try to staunch the tide of jihadism while we still can."
1) Don't give anything to the rest of the world - spend it on your own social problems. Whatever, give it straight to Halliburton if you want, just don't use an insane and unjustifiable war as a conduit.
2) If you think that invading Iraq has done anything but swell the tide of jihadism around the globe then I'm surprised that you can even type.
6,000,000,000,000 bucks hey? What's that in dead people?
@cshotton:
For someone who accuses others of lacking clues, you seem rather, ah, differently clued yourself.
You point out that the money finds its way into paychecks and then trickles down into the global economy. Sure it does. The clue you are missing is that money spent on solar energy, education, health, and other non-destructive and sustainable efforts also makes its way into paychecks and into the global economy. So while you pretend that your point matters, it actually does not.
The question is, which agendas do we want to advance? The agenda of deepening our dependence on big oil by further committing valuable resources to it? Or an alternative agenda that includes any of a number of much better ways to spend the money?
Well we could make a few people very, very rich while propping up an ailing economy by vastly expanding national debt and turning it into military-industrial spending.
Oh. Wait.
Shame we can't do that without also killing people.
what else could we do? Mass produce nuclear fusion rocket packs? Nanotech powered flying carpets? hello? anybody there, U.S. government? It seems wrong to subsidise weapons manufacture if you don't also subsidise what people really need.
There's no way, I'm getting into an Iraq war was a good idea debate. Whoever still thinks it was a good idea after the mountains of evidence demonstrated that not only was it a mistake, but government intelligence knew knew it was a mistake and did it anyway, isn't about to change their minds now, neither of them will. Really they should show some dignity, fess up and cut their losses. We all had to put up with 'oh but they still might find weapons of mass destruction' for years, for years Iraq war apologists said this. So our turn now. Bush effed up by any standard. No two ways about it.
I do love how every time newspapers mention Bush's foreign policy they always talk about his vision, and if there's a photo, it's of Bush staring off into the horizon. Classic cliché of journalism. how heroic of him to sign a few pieces of paper and make a few phone calls. Ill bet his mum is real proud. You'd think he was Nitro off gladiators from the heroism he gets levelled with.
"military-industrial-congressional spending"
I don't know that WWEBoing is being serious. That's very elegantly written for such a nutso statement. I call shenanigans.
ahh... how much do congressmen go for these days anyway?
$6T = issue 'free gasoline for 10 years' cards to everyone in the USA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
388M gallons/day * $4/gal * 365 * 10 = $5.6T
CShotton @9:
That would be why Paul Krugman reads his novels, and praises his use of economics in them?Not the money; the value. Wars destroy value. They require huge amounts of man-hours, resources, and manufactured goods, and what they do with them is largely destructive, or of use only to the military for the duration of that war or that campaign. They also consume young, fit, well-trained personnel, quite a few of whom get sent back damaged or dead.Among the second-order effects: We've lost a huge amount of international credibility and good will, built up over centuries. All kinds of deals go bad when that happens. Our loss of credibility has also hurt the US dollar.
Money spent on the war wasn't spent in productive ways that would have created value, so that's all lost too.
Lastly, the war has been ruinously expensive, far in excess of cash on hand. We essentially wind up borrowing money to pay for it, which means we're saddled with repaying both debt and interest in the years to come. More potentially productive uses of that money will never happen.
The fact that "...someone, somewhere, is receiving a paycheck" is not the whole of the story.
No. The fact that this makes you angry doesn't make him wrong.Robert @12:
No. His premise is that these are some of the things we could do by spending the same amount of money. If we can will to fight an unwinnable war on false pretenses, we can will to colonize Mars. The fact that we did choose to fight the war and did not choose to colonize Mars is a separate issue.Kibble @16, always be suspicious of assertions that there won't be money for your own retirement. Variants of that story have been the subject of a fully-funded disinformation campaign for at least thirty years now. Partly that's because usual pack of vultures would love to get hold of Social Security funds. Even more, though, it's because the fear of not being provided for in old age is such a reliable way to damage intergenerational faith in the social contract.
MaryofKentucky @24, don't apologize. Those are the right questions to be asking.
Brilliant intervention, as always, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Not to suck up to the mod, but you really can set a standard for reasonable debate
This money spent has meant the terrorists can't make a dent against a U.S. resident.
Repeat when needed during the day ...
It's not surprising, or particularly worrisome, to see the broken-windows fallacy in a blog discussion thread. (See Zepelini @ 27 above for a recap).
It is more worrisome, if perhaps not too surprising at this point, to see an argument for the continued military occupation of Iraq, by one of the primary architects of the US's Iraq strategy, lead off with the same broken-windows fallacy most people see in their first few classes of Introduction to Economics.
(I'm referring here to a National Review article from last month, which can be seen here.)
But this is just one of many cases where the advocates of Bush's international policies have failed to consider the benefits of alternatives, and the costs of not taking them. We see another example up-thread, where Wweboing @ 51 praises Bush for "staunch[ing] the tide of jihadism" and "getting democratic momentum underway in the Middle East", without considering whether we might have more effective and less costly ways of accomplishing these than invading and occupying Iraq.
The invasion and looting of Iraq began long before Bush. "Whirlwind"is a good read.
Greg @37: It's pretty far out into bat country whichever he meant.
Update to Thekin @1: Alexander Cockburn, who is imperfectly reliable but a vastly better source than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, comments the wood chipper story:
Perhaps more usefully, he cites the story of Jumana Hanna, the source of many colorful stories about the Hussein regime, and Sara Solovitch, who was hired to write Jumana Hanna's memoirs but wound up debunking her story in an article published in Esquire. It looks to me like Uday was still no prize, but his genuine bad deeds have been buried under a heap of lurid and salacious propaganda. Someday, a historian will get his Ph.D. by sorting out which is which. A few links on the Solovich story:Phenomenological Analysis of Obscured Events.
Wikipedia on Jumana Hanna.
Journalism Prof. W. Joseph Campbell on the story.
Sara Solovich's article in Esquire.
The Washington Post retracts the story.
Research: it's not hard to do. Ideally, though, you should be the one doing it.
Colonize Mars?
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact it's cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.
MarlboroTestMonkey7 @43:
Fine. Give me all of yours.We invaded because Saddam was a gangsta who tortured his own people?
Then why must we torture people who torture people to show people that torturing people is wrong?
I'm not entirely sure that Justice can always boil down to the simple cry of "He started it!"
Tim @50, please don't propose plausible violence. If you're going to do it, make it grandiose, or silly, or otherwise out of synch with reality.
Nuclear power like the French?
Oh yeah. We should all do nuclear power like the French... Not!
We could eliminate the potential problem of one of the "axis of evil" by flat-out buying North Korea, backed up by a ubiquitous economic development project there and funding immediate reunification with South Korea.
We could spend a trillion to produce, bypassing the "free market", the industrial capacity to truly mass produce lithium-ion car batteries, driving the unit cost down to the point at which subsidy would no longer be necessary. And for that matter, given the batteries away for free. For a trillion, we could replace all the gasoline cars in the world with free electric cars. With the money we wasted, we could have taken the world off the gasoline drip. We could have flooded all those plucky electric car companies with hundreds of billions to build the Tango and all the other cars that are stalled because they can't tool up on the profits from hand-built production models. Let them build the cars. Give 'em all they need.
And as we wouldn't have invaded Iraq, practically stopping the flow of oil from there, and kick-started the present global meltdown, oil would still be around a dollar a gallon. Best of both worlds.
So we subsidized the oil companies for a few trillion instead by invading the Middle East... and they raised their prices 400 percent, just to start, as a token of their gratitude.
Teresa
If we can will to fight an unwinnable war on false pretenses, we can will to colonize Mars.
But we didn't will this war. It was chosen for us and sold to us on false premises. It was con right from the start. And I'm still surprized that people think Saddam is why we went into Iraq at this late date. It was really about that 50 trillion lake of our oil they happen to be sitting on.
This country is very nearly finished with. One more presidency like that of Bush or McCain will complete the job. What we'll end up with is a global Feudal economy. America and indeed much of the world will be of third world status with pockets of ultra wealthy "green zones" scattered around the world.
There are people who want this and have been working for a long time to bring about a global aristocracy for a few and grinding poverty for everyone else, including the US. To them that would be a really sweet deal. I'm not sure it can even be stopped.
I've always considered the Iraq war to be predicated on the belief that the U.S. needed to have full control over the dwindling supply of oil in the world in order to ensure it's continued status as the worlds only superpower, as the supply of oil is exhausted. (Which is strangely always predicted as 25 years from now, at least since the 80s, but I digress).
All the 9/11, WMD stuff, I didn't think anyone really believed...; scratch that, I didn't think anyone with a brain really believed that.
The basis of all of this is the control of energy supplies; if the U.S. had sufficient "cheap" supply to meet it's voracious demands most of these issues wouldn't exist.
I agree with CSHOTTON, in that the 6T wasn't shot into the sun; but to suggest that this was a "good" investment of America's future (remember this is debt spending) it was used to actually destroy capital value of Iraq infrastructure, the lives of Iraqi people, and probably created thousands more terrorists than it ever destroyed.
Further, if you are going to invest in this kind of debt spending, it would probably be a better idea to do something that will provide tangible value to the U.S. in the future; control of the oil supply in Iraq is in my mind not a sufficient gain for this type of investment, although I admit I don't understand enough about the Iraq supply to quantize that value, but I do know that both Canada and Saudi Arabia (already U.S. controlled supplies) vastly outstrip Iraq.
Frankly the money would have been better spent providing a distributed, deregulated and divested power-supply infrastructure to the U.S. Coupons for household investment in wind/solar; some nuclear deployement, some tidal energy deployment. And better research funding for alternate energy sources; fuel-cell technology; and public transportation. Attempt to limit oil consumption to what can be imported through Canada (NAFTA is pretty sweet to the US here). You win on the environment; you win energy supply; and mostly US companies benefit (GE, Applied Materials), so the US economy benefits; the distributed household power generation makes it impossible to knock the grid out, and so you make yourself more secure. The only real losers are foreign oil supply, (the refiners are already hedging their bets on the "alternates", so they'd likely benefit as well).
Not to nitpick....ok, ok, ok, precisely because I like nitpicking, I think it a tad optimistic to think we could colonize Mars for any of the monetary amounts mentioned here. Consider that simply to launch a space shuttle into low Earth orbit costs around a quarter billion dollars. This is with nearly 30 year old technology.
Consider that it cost around a half billion dollars to send Phoenix, an unmanned, low powered, non returning spacecraft that doesn't need to support life to Mars, and that's *after* figuring out most of the tech to build it.
By conservative estimates, sending a single robotic sample return mission would be a couple billion bucks.
At bare minimum, I'd place a single crew mission to Mars at around 5 trillion dollars, with only a short duration stay on the surface.
That being said, colonizing Mars with 500 people with even the most pessimistic version of Iraq war costs is just plain silly.
We could even have rebuilt the World Trade Center.
Aw, heck. If we'd colonized Mars, we'd have people bitching about how the money could have been used to hand out welfare checks to all of Africa.
@CSHOTTON #9
Perhaps Charlie has no such clue. It's not quite clear. What is clear is that neither do you - you have just succumbed to the Broken Window Fallacy.
Google it. Or use one of these pre-googled links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm
Essentially, that money was going to circulate. That's not caused by the Occupation of Iraq. The only difference is that instead of causing useful work as it circulated (if we pretend for a moment that moeny causes anything and isn't just an orgnizational aid), it merely caused the destruction of a country and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Honestly, it would have been better to shoot that money into the sun or spend it all on breaking and mending windows.
That's before even considering what could have been done with the amount of human effort and resources (the stuff that money is used to organize) if it would have been directed at something actually useful instead of merely pointless, or directly destructive as has been the case.
Thanks to people responding to #9. I think the gist of my point was missed, namely that there are other wealthy nations who choose to do nothing of value as well. That we choose to squander national treasure directly on unproductive endeavors is our fault. But why is it the sole burden of the US to advance the noble causes of humanity?
Charlie's indictment of the US is hypocritical in the extreme when you consider the vast amounts of wealth pouring into the pockets of A) Middle Eastern royalty, B) ex-USSR criminal enterprises, C) Chinese oligarchs, D) 3rd World dictators, E) European social welfare programs, F) well, you get the point (hopefully).
thr thn th smplstc, vcrs thrll f S-bshng, what is the justification for doing it while letting all these other (arguably larger in aggregate) wastes of human and financial capital continue unremarked and without apology?
Hmmm... #83, perhaps the underlying criticism is that the US could choose to lead the world with ideas and technology and solutions rather than with fear and domination... ?
yeah, but where's the money in that?
and that, Tak, is why it'll never happen. :-)
I know this is just a long laundry list of things we would do if we ran the circus (and some of them are really brilliant) but one of my pet issues would probably be the cleanup of the huge plastic continent that's forming in the middle of the Pacific.
And some left over to make sure it never happens again, maybe.
@83
TAGETODM = There Are Greater Evils so This One Doesn't Matter
But better argued than most.
DRINK!
Pizza party!
to CSHOTTON,
But why is it the sole burden of the US to advance the noble causes of humanity?
Well, ignore lets ignore the fact that its the most powerful nation in the world, and the most scientifically advanced. And focus on my favourite of quaint American notions, "Manifest Destiny" or are you a tarrist? And don't believe in "Manifest Destiny"?
Rossindetroit @ 88 -
I think you might need to spit that back out. CSHOTTON @ 83 never mentions "Greater Evils" in the world (e.g., "why do you care about global warming when children are dying in the Sudan" argument, he refers to other agents. More like There Are Other Nastier People In The World With The Capability To Solve Problems As Well so Maybe We Shouldn't Worry That We Only Try To Some Of Them, but that would make for a nasty abbreviation.
I can only give you love, Teresa. Is that ok?
#71 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator , May 27, 2008 10:10 AM
MarlboroTestMonkey7 @43:
Money doesn't solve anything
Fine. Give me all of yours.
Chuck @83: Unless you're suggesting that Charlie Stross is a Russo-Sino-Arabian third world dictator, where does this strawman charge of so-called hypocrisy come in?
As I said above, right now we're talking about this colossal waste of wealth, so why don't you address that point before trying to get us to charge off in all directions?