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An unaffordable war

There are many ways of looking at a modern war. The perspective of Bernard Shaw’s chocolate soldier dramatically varies from Siegfried Sassoon’s gloomy narratives from the World War I trenches or Ernest Hemingway’s angst in the Spanish civil war. Indeed, the corpus of war literature is as ancient as war itself.

The Iraq war has produced two outstanding books: Rajiv Chandrasekharan’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Patrick Cockburn’s Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. By a curious coincidence, both the authors are gifted journalists who lived and worked in Baghdad as war correspondents and whose despatches from the killing fields conveyed with a powerful immediacy the horror and futility of the Iraq war. Yet they took different perspectives.

Chandrasekharan of the Washington Post newspaper lived and worked within the high security Green Zone in Baghdad and saw at close quarters how the American viceroys assigned to Iraq went about their business with brazen arrogance bordering on stupidity. He has given us an insightful and well-informed account of what went so horribly wrong with their vanities and naïve assumptions. The Independent’s ace Baghdad hand, Cockburn, on the other hand, opted for the dangerous path of living among the Iraqis. Indeed, he couldn’t think otherwise. Mesopotamia is his old haunt. He has had several trysts with instant death in the past five years, but he carried on regardless with an Irishman’s unique sensitivity, delving deeper and deeper into the Iraqi civil war. He came up in April with a compelling political profile of Muqtada, the kingmaker who represents the dispossessed and impoverished Shias of Iraq.

Meanwhile, this brilliant work has joined the literature on the Iraq war: The Three Trillion Dollar War—The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, co-authored by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. Unlike the earlier two books, this one makes a startling study of the financial costs of the Iraq war. It may seem quintessentially an economist’s view of the unaffordability of the Iraq war for the ailing American economy. But it is much more than an urbane perspective on the tumultuous war. We know Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate with hands-on experience in the corridors of power in Washington, as first and foremost a humanist. In the alchemy of his intellect, cold statistics inevitably assume flesh and blood.

The book’s running theme is as follows: “There is no free lunch – and there are no free wars. In one way or another, today and in the future, we (U.S.) will pay for the war. In this particular war (in Iraq), the administration and Congress have chosen to push the bills onto future administrations, perhaps onto future generations.” The grimness of the situation for America’s future is such that the Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker, has warned there are “striking similarities” with the factors that brought down Rome.

No doubt, the Bush administration was wrong about the benefits of this war, but even more disastrous for the American citizen is that it wilfully underestimated the cost of the war so as to make it appear a doable war. The book adopts a novel method to estimate the resources required to fight the Iraq war. Arguably, the anatomy of a war has never before been so vivisected – ranging from the budgetary appropriations for the U.S. military operations to operational expenditure that lie “hidden” elsewhere in the U.S. defence budget, the adjustments for inflation, future operational expenditures, costs of disability and health care for returning war veterans, costs of restoring the U.S. military to its pre-war strength, cost to the economy, macroeconomic impact and so on.

Through a meticulous tabulation, the authors estimate that the total cost of the Iraq war ranges from $ 2.7 trillion in strictly budgetary costs to $ five trillion in total economic costs. “Under the circumstances, a $ 3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and in all likelihood errs on the low side.” That’s how the book takes its title. The book devotes a chapter on the “macroeconomic effects” of the war and it explodes the common myth that wars are good for the economy, an idea that gained prominence in World War II. The authors estimate that over the time horizon of their study – through 2017 – the increased debt to the U.S. economy due to increased military spending and the cumulative interest on the debt-financed war borrowing alone exceeds $ two trillion. Their “expenditure-switching” methodology reveals that if only a half of the $ 1.6 trillion of direct military costs of the war was put into investments, “America’s output would be greater by $56 billion a year – forever; every American family would, on average, have an income that was $500 greater, forever.”

The chapter “Global Consequences” makes grim reading. The jump in oil prices alone is estimated to represent a direct cost of approximately $ 1.1 trillion to the world economy. By last September, 4.6 million Iraqis – one out of every seven Iraqis – had been uprooted from their homes. “It is difficult to estimate the financial cost – let alone the human toll – of this humanitarian catastrophe.” Then, there is the enormous damage to the U.S.’s global prestige and influence.

The book discusses an Iraq exit strategy. It concurs with the prevailing perception that the Bush administration seeks a long-term military presence in Iraq. However, the authors underscore that given the overwhelming Iraqi opposition to the presence of the U.S. forces, the U.S. can never hope to accomplish its “mission” in Iraq. No matter when the U.S. finally decides to exit Iraq, “our withdrawal would make the flight from Saigon look easy by comparison.”

To be sure, Bush is leaving a tricky legacy. If the next President orders a rapid withdrawal, he will be blamed for the chaos and violence that might follow. But, the alternative is that the war may become the new President’s war, diverting his attention from the “myriad other critical problem our country faces.”

The Iraq war, in other words, is a classic quagmire. But does it mean Washington has learnt a lesson? The answer is a resounding “no.” The authors conclude, “With all the precautions and caveats, the United States will, someday, go to war again, and so we need to start thinking now about how to avoid the problems that have contributed to the failures of this war.” They, therefore, sum up outlining 18 major reforms that “will help us avoid becoming embroiled in another Iraq or Vietnam in the future,” and ensure the U.S. would embark upon its next war with “greater sobriety, greater solemnity, greater care, and greater reserve than any other.”

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