For those of you just waking up from a coma or returning from a sensory deprivation chamber, the last “US combat brigade” officially left Iraq last week. 
It seemed an appropriate time for a pause to reflect on the cost we've incurred.
I heard someone remark on TV the other day about over four thousand lives lost and a trillion dollars spent. The four thousand people I understand. It's a lot of people, but I can conceive of it. Forty rows of a hundred people each. Or perhaps eight or ten large passenger jets full of people. That's a lot. Each was a person, with a life, probably a family, all affected.
But I don't think that's the full count of lives lost. I hope to convince you it's a terribly low number. I think the number of casualties of this war was much, much larger. And I didn't mean the injured or those with psychological damage, such as PTSD. Those are also costs, and I don't mean to discount them. But those are not the ones I mean. I'm actually meaning to count deaths. And yes, there are Iraqis dead. They're often not counted. That's sad as well. But I mean the count of American deaths is low, at least as I tally it.
But first, let's return to the trillion dollars. That's an incomprehensibly large amount of money. A million dollars is hard for many to comprehend. A trillion is a million million. It makes it seem almost quaint to think back on the late Senator Everett Dirksen's familiar quote, “A few billion here, a few billion there and before you know it, you're talking real money...” A trillion is a thousand billion. That's a lot. It's more than seventeen times the wealth of Bill Gates.
To understand this number better, I'd like to speak for a moment about something called opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is not the direct cost we pay out, but is a measure of what we lose by not doing something else. One can't do everything in life. Usually making a choice to do one thing locks out the opportunity to do other things. So sometimes you can't just look at what you got by taking a certain choice, but you also have to look at what you lost.
For example, there are 310 million people in the US. Instead of going to war with Iraq, we could have borrowed a trillion dollars and just given $3226 to each person (man, woman, or child). We'd still owe the trillion dollars, just like we do now, but everyone in the US would be that much richer. We didn't choose to do that. But one way to conceive the cost of the war is to say we denied ourselves that money.
It's unlikely we'd have ever had such a handout, at least not like that. But here's another thought: Lots of people get sick and don't have health care. Sometimes they get sick because they don't have health care—maybe they weren't getting screenings for things they should have. So the cost of saving them might be trivial. Perhaps a few hundred dollars. Or maybe it would be a simple procedure or some medication. Perhaps a few thousand dollars. Maybe it would require serious surgery. Let's be very, very conservative and guess that it takes $100,000 to save a life. It will make my point and then we can come back and look at the other possibilities.
Instead of paying a trillion dollars on a war, if it cost $100,000 to save a life, there are ten million $100,000's in a trillion dollars. That means we lost the chance to save ten million lives. Let me say that another way: Ten million people died who didn't have to. Or maybe more, if you think my $100,000 number is high. If you could find a way to save a life for $10,000, there are one hundred million such bundles available in a trillion dollars. But let's be conservative in our back-of-the-envelope calculations here and say just ten million. It makes the point well enough. Either way, we didn't spend our money that way. We made our choices, and those who could have been saved were not. We spent the money on the war instead of on them.
So going back to where I began and trying to fathom the depth of meaning in “a trillion dollars and over four thousand lives,” one way to conceive the phrase is to say “ten million civilians dead and four thousand military dead.” And, in a sad irony, if the money had been spent on those ten million, the four thousand military would probably still be around, too.
Ten million people. That's six times the population of Manhattan.
Let's not forget the chilling imagery created by Condoleezza Rice when she said, “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” We didn't want even the chance of losing one actual city to terrorism, yet in order to avoid it, we spent enough that we could have probably saved that many people six times over. That was a lot to spend, both in dollars and in lives.
And if you don't like me making up numbers about how much it costs to save a life, another way to sum up the human cost is by looking at the cost of universal health care. It's estimated to cost somewhere around $70 billion (annually). So we could have paid for universal health care for 14 years with that same trillion dollars we borrowed to help out Iraq. That would, again, be a lot of healthy people. At no more cost than we're paying today.
Oh, right. I'm being unfair. We supposedly gained something from the war. We didn't fight it for no reason. We were told we were fighting the war in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight the terrorists here. Is it likely that we're safe now? After all that expense, did we achieve that goal? Bush said “mission accomplished.” (I've noticed that Obama has avoided that phrase, even as he pulls so-called “combat troops” out of Iraq.)
Are we safe now? Do we have no more risk of terrorism here now that we fought that war? I don't know about you, but I think not. It's not the soldiers' fault, of course, but we didn't accomplish our mission, not that one. That mission was not possible to accomplish. We couldn't rid ourselves of terrorism by fighting with people in Iraq. And we won't be free of terrorism if we keep on in Afghanistan. We'll just be poorer, and that makes us less safe.
The big risk to our national security is wasting our wealth. We neglected the lesson of the Cold War, that one can lose a war by simply overspending. We've squandered our dollars and, I claim, in ways that we'll never bother to tally, we've squandered lives.
Yes, a lot of our military died. We should mourn them. But there are hidden casualties—really a lot of them. We should mourn them, too. Many Americans died here at home but won't be counted as war dead, even though if we hadn't fought this war, they did not have to die. We could have been wealthy enough to afford to spend that money on life.† But we gave up that opportunity. That is the true cost of the war.
†Yes, you're right that the Republicans would have opposed spending the money on such saving of lives. They're not that kind of “pro-life.” But letting such people have a say in our government is still a political choice we make. Electing them at all may indeed imply that such opportunities are lost from the outset, but I still feel obliged to point out that the opportunities are there to decide these things every time we go to the ballot box. We're just locking in that cost earlier by letting them be involved.
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I think the true cost of any war is never counted. If you count the munitions, transport, the cost in the lives of the ones who suffer from PTSD and commit suicide, I am sure the figures were double or triple. Yet as you say clearly, figures so high are hard to grasp or imagine.
I do like the way you link this with missed opportunities. If you enter one door, the rest close automatically. You can never go back and change the door or the results. TY.
The war cost
Rated with hugs
The only obvious reason for the wars is the control of the oil wealth in the Middle East and I have not heard of a movement to close the many huge and elaborate and very expensive US military bases in the area.
Should American soldiers die for that?
But you have done more than any writer I can think of to get behind that handle of "a trillion dollars."
And no, sadly, as you say, we are not safer.
The literary canon currently divides at 1914 because the lasting effects of WWI changed the worldview of almost everyone. They just were not the same as they had been in 1910 in heart, mind, and life experience. I am positive that in the future 2001 will be the next divide in the canon. Kubrick picked the right year for the wrong reasons. We did not become a better more technological society. We became a vicious and self-destructive one. The pain of the Iraq wars will be felt by all who follow and most will likely see it as unnecessary pain.
Linda, thanks. I don't know if you meant your brief remark to imply it or not, but indeed there are other reasons we're in dire straights as well. Ugh. Blog topics for another day... Anyway, thanks for visiting.
Jan, while I'm not a Bush supporter, I don't think he did it for his re-election. He did it because he was he was elected as part of a fixed set of people working together (see my article Election Stratego); he was a sort of puppet, I think. I don't think he saw himself that way, but especially in his first term he let them just kind of tell him what to do. The split between him and some of his advisors suggests he grew up slightly in the second term, though not enough. He was out of his league all around. Still, my point is that his advisors wanted this war before 9/11 came along and jumped on the chance. I strongly recommend the book by Ron Suskind titled The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, which offers the very elucidating account of happenings at that time from the point of view of a Bush administration insider (Paul O'Neill), which is probably our best shot at a view that offers a fair account, since he had no a priori axe to grind. He was merely educated by circumstance and he shared the experience with us. I listened to it on unabridged booktape and quite enjoyed it.
we need new ways of cost accounting, your piece is a start
You could also add the BP spill in the Gulf and many other environmental disasters which is a result of or continued reliance on oil. These are also ignored by “Pro-life” Republicans and even referred to as beneficial for business which is all they seem to care about.
Rated
Steve, I tried to use conservative numbers, if that's what you meant by understated. It's enough to make the point that even with very conservative estimates, the cost is staggeringly high. If we assumed the additional tail cost of caring for troops that come home, of secret ops not accounted for, etc., or if we assume you could save a life for less than $100K, it would be even more dramatic, at the risk of someone nitpicking that I somehow overreached. Sigh.
al, the reason such lousy choices are that people don't stop to have a debate about things like this. The war rivals the financial bail-out in terms of how little discussion preceded how much spending. There were occasional attempts to suggest that the war shouldn't go forward, but no one was willing to take the political consequences of being called cowardly or unpatriotic. That would be veritable political death. And yet, politics sometimes calls for patriots. We did not find them in our elected officials. What we really need are people willing to lose office for their beliefs. Of course, they have to be good beliefs, so that means we have to carefully scrutinize who's going in, too. We have trouble on both fronts. Your national citizen initiative cause might have helped, had it been in place. I'm surprised you didn't take the opportunity to push that. It would be well-placed in this venue.
FLW, thanks for the strong support.
Duane, it's an integrated part of our economy. The so-called military-industrial complex. Traditionally (in the mid to late 20th century) the rule has been that what's good for war is good for the economy. But as with so many rules, it has exceptions and this was one.
Dorinda, that's an interesting insight. Thanks. :)
This is a brilliant piece Kent. Trying to get a handle on opportunity cost is always such a hard thing, but you done a wonderful job analogizing it.
This summer I sat on a beach (in your neck o' the woods) and had a conversation about space with my stepson. When I used the time worn picture of there being more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the beach I saw the lights go on in his head - it was amazing. I think thats what you've done here, and while I congratulate you on the EP I think its shortsighted of the Salon folks to not move this piece over to Big Salon.
One little anecdote if I may. 20+ yrs ago I was in a men's discussion group. One guy, a college prof was a Vietnam vet special forces guy who suffered from nightmares that had him wake up grab a weapon and go crawling out into his yard. He was in the group because he had put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, but the gun failed. He said that the group he was in at the VA continually lost members due to suicide and that since the end of that war, the VA estimated over 50,000 suicides amongst the soldiers who returned home. We will never know the real cost of the Iraq and Afghani wars, even in lives of Americans.
I do think you're right that too much of the mainstream media is controlled by too few people, and that them being multinationals compounds the problem in certain ways. I do think you're right that Powell's evidence was a contributing factor, though I personally think he was kept in the dark deliberately and ultimately made to look like a fool for it; my sense is that he offered the best information he had but that people didn't trust him with the truth, so I don't think that's treasonous.
Michael, funny you should mention not feeling good aboutbeing American. The Right gets all up in arms about statements like that, which they regard as unpatriotic. Even the rallying cry “my country right or wrong” admits the country can be wrong. We don't yield our citizenship when it makes a mistake. But we should know right from wrong, and just as we teach our children they should feel queasy about telling a lie or hurting someone, collectively we should have some sense of moral compass that helps us from floating adrift without a sense of right and wrong.
designanator, I think I had seen that show. This is a blog topic I have wanted to do for a long time (years) and I seem to recall when I saw it kind of wincing and saying “he stole my idea” but then thinking “at least he has an audience.” My audience here is way smaller, so it's good for that word to be gotten out. Sadly, even his voice on the matter hasn't affected much.
Roy, I agree with you we need new ways of accounting. I want to blog about that sometime. Thanks for mentioning it here, though. I bumped the priority in my blogs-to-do list.
Libmom, I agree the cost to the psyche is real. I have no idea, offhand, how to quantify it, though, so I simply didn't try.
In fact, my bet is the real cost of the Iraq was will be precisely in the failure of the United States to demonstrate ongoing cohesion and resolve, not the dollars. But the rest is quite reasonable, there just is that alternative benefit we never collected, that and developing more of the Iraqi oil supply.
1) Your theory that 10 million lives could have been saved assumes that 10 million people had an upcoming death that could be avoided by spending more money (i.e. you assume the opportunity exists). We have already wiped out most of the simpler ways to die in the US so most remaining deaths are already unavoidable (old age, certain cancers, etc) or are already being avoided through the existing health care spending (some at tiny costs, like vaccinations).
2) Given that people in poor countries still die of common ways, the bigger opportunity would be to spend the money outside the US to save hundreds of millions rather than only saving 10 in the US. However, others at OS (don't know your views) have gotten mad when I suggested that if healthcare is a right, then we should start sending money overseas where it will have a bigger impact (note: I do not believe healthcare is a right).
Now, why do these comments matter? Because you tried a nice bit fo slight of hand. You tried to create an emotional comparison of millions of people dying (a terrible thought) compared to war (which very few people ever want). But, you did so in the disguise of logic and rationality. It shows intelligence and cleverness but doesn't actually present us with real, actionable alternatives. There were plenty of more specific reasons to be against or for the Iraq War. Conjuring the deaths of ten million people from unrelated causes isn't the best way to debate this.
Tim, thanks for the observations and support. Yeah, that whole PTSD and other stuff is not something I don't believe in or meant to slight. I just wanted to cut past the “known” stuff and focus on the actual significance of the money.
Retablo, no, I didn't say any such thing. I pointed out that the advertised reasons were not convincing and/or not effective, but really only because I imagined someone would poke at that. It wasn't my point. My point wasn't what was a good or bad reason, but rather what was an effective expenditure of money. If our goal was to penalize people who attacked us, we went after the wrong people. If it was to stop terrorism, we didn't. Yes, we did regime change, but that was not the originally stated reason; and it's not clear the regime we put in place will hold.
Don, I recognize there could have been other such aims, though they're hard to evaluate since they would necessarily not be out in the open. But as to your specific example, if our goal was to convince China, from whom we were borrowing truckloads of money to finance this war, that we are a powerful country capable of mounting very expensive efforts, that'd be ... kind of weird. And regardless of what our plan was, our real failure was in managing it. One might say we failed on the Powell Doctrine in that we did not have a clear and achievable mission. The closest we had to one was the one that led to the Mission Accomplished banner. In fact, if we'd pulled out then, others might have puzzled at what we'd accomplished, but from a poker point of view we'd not have exposed our hand, we'd just seem a little unpredictable about which game table we chose to sit at. (I think this is agreeing with what you said at the end, but I'm not 100% sure.)
Jan, I largely agree with you on your criticisms of both Bush and Obama. I think the notion was maybe that spending on the military is both (a) necessary and (b) helpful to jobs in the military-industrial complex. Certainly (a) is questionable and (b) is something that even if it is sometimes true should not be held as necessarily true in all circumstances.
Jack, I stand by what I said, though I certainly agree he should have done some asking of hard questions. I think it was the yes-sir military man in him that took the order he was given and faithfully tried to execute it; but I think much more was needed of him by the nation in that case. It felt afterward that Powell had been so embarrassingly duped that (in my opinion) his chances of running for office (which had once been talked about) were shot.
Also, please note that at least part of the exercise here was not to say we would have done these things, but to give tangible feel to the magnitude of what it means to say such a compact phrase as “a trillion dollars.” Even if you were right that the act couldn't be done, everyone could still look at that problem and say “my God, that's a lot of money.”
To your second point, my previous paragraph also explains why I didn't go out-of-country in my remarks. The point was to personalize the money, and if I suggested giving it away abroad, that wouldn't feel personal and people wouldn't perceive the loss. Saying something like “that money we spent abroad could have been spent abroad” wouldn't have been compelling. What I could have done was talk to how much education it could have paid for, how many roads and bridges it could build, how much seed money it could offer to American business trying to get started, etc. But I felt this would be easier to perceive, and it seems to have resonated with a number of people.
We acted, as a nation, to avoid death. My point was that there were ways to save even more lives with the same money and we don't take that option on a regular basis. In an earlier draft of this post, there was going to be a reference to the Trolley Problem, a problem in ethics you may be familiar with. Somehow that got lost in the piece, but this is a good place to mention it. It affects reasoning about the choices in curious ways.
Anyway, I wouldn't call what I offered slight of hand, though I can see why you might disagree. I may not be able to convince you to change your position, but I hope you can see that my intent here is not at all to pull anything shady.
It seems quite fantastic but the total sum of US government activity both within the US and outside seems to be directed at impoverishing the country economically and socially and this makes no sense to me at all. It is not even in corporate interest to destroy the country so I cannot figure what is going on.
Thank you for your painstaking insights. Rated!
As anyone knows, you can't unite a people without an enemy. That's where we came in! We were the great Satan.
Saddam kept egging us on sort of like that high school bully who wants you to swing at him so that he can get into a fight. And he played a lot of the US public pretty well in this fight.
He certainly played games with UN inspectors, unless you think if I have a bomb and I say "come on over and check!" and one day I let you check my basement but not my attic, and then the next day I let you check my attic but not my basement! What a good neighbor I must be!! Really puts you at ease, doesn't it?
George W., after the 9/11 attacks (which in my memory were pretty horrific) decided to call the guy's bluff. Intelligence isn't perfect, but many agreed that it seemed to point to Saddam having weapons of mass destruction and he certainly boasted about having them. I guess Saddam thought that "baby Bush" wouldn't call his bluff.
Iraq, as a secular country, had the best chance of any of the Arab nations at becoming a functioning democracy. Democracy's, as history shows, make better neighbors. Take the U.S., for example. We have nukes, yes, but everyone knows where they are. No secrets there. (That's how you ratify treaties with other Nuclear nations, the U.S.S.R, like Salt and Salt II., because we actually want less nukes in the world, not more.)
So here's something only history will be able to tell: if democracy in Iraq works. Here's another thing history will tell: if democracy, working in Iraq, does more for US-Muslim relations than a certain proposed mosque in NY, and thus ultimately improve the chances of actual peace between the Arab world and Israel. If so, count on the diminishment of terrorism as a useful weapon.
Put me on the side of hopeful - no matter what the cost. That's a better side to be on than the one that would have preferred doing nothing which by the way also has a "hidden cost:" one that is ultimately much worse.
As you point out, we are no safer today than on 9/12/2001. The aim of Al Qaeda was to bankrupt us and they have succeeded. We still have a mindset and military approach of fighting land based nations with territorial ambitions. We are supremely poised for that, but since the end of WWII we have been involved in applying conventional military strategies to situations for which that was either ill suited or completely inappropriate. The sad thing is that some individuals involved in the military industry become very wealthy with this approach, and if we could put a spotlight on them I suspect they would be the ones working to prevent spending on things that would benefit everyone.
Think where we could be now if we had put a trillion dollars into developing non-petroleum based energy sources. That would have made us safer.
My only complaint is why no-one sees fit to question retablo a brand new "much (sic) thanks" contender for catnliar's crown.
retablo's ill-informed knowledge has been challenged from his first day here; and now he contends that Saddam Hussein hampered the search for WMDs, when Hans Blix, head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, claims:
"In the buildup to the war, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis WERE COOPERATING with U.N. inspections, and in February 2003 had provided Blix's team with the names of hundreds of scientists to interview, individuals Saddam claimed had been involved in the destruction of banned weapons. Had the inspections been allowed to continue, Blix said, there would likely be a very different situation in Iraq today. As it was, America's pre-emptive, unilateral actions "have bred more terrorism there and elsewhere."
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/07/iraq-blix-cooperation-thought
Elsewhere, Blix, clearly states the war was illegal.
Who has more legitimacy to comment on this matter, retablo or Hans Blix? More and more uninformed OS posters are tolerated pulling disinformation from Lord knows where, which is allowed to go unchallenged, and we, who fail to refute the lies are forced to have Goebellian (wd.?) theories prevail.
-R-
Jan, I suspect they are posturing for a position in the Middle East in case of some sort of oil shortage. I'm sure we want to maintain a presence there for some strategic reason. I think they think we can't be trusted to know. See my post Is Democracy Dead? ... although it was written before the election and I must say that Obama has mostly continued rather than repaired Bush's foreign policy. (Still, though, he's done better than I imagine McCain would have.)
BB, I'm glad I could help you get a sense of it.
RW, thanks for the support.
Retablo, I don't know if I'd call Iraq a secular country. The fact that its religious structure is broken up into pieces doesn't make it secular. I also don't agree with your characterization of Blix. At the time, I kept hearing the media make subtle insinuations that he wasn't doing his job; I later came to see that was just someone's spin. Certainly when we got in there no one could find evidence he had been wrong or lazy or whatever it was that people were trying to claim. And, finally, the phrase “no matter what the cost” is a dangerous one. There are always going to be cost-effectiveness issues; ignoring cost will not make them go away.
Rodney, indeed, that much money spent on new energy development would have been great.
Mark, thanks for taking up the cause of rebuttal. As to the legitimacy (for the sake of making arguments in this forum), I think we're all legitimate. Some of us just have better arguments than others.
Of course I agree with you, but my main points are ...
1) There is also a cost to doing "nothing" and that needs to be considered (for example, there's a "cost" to doing nothing with your money by putting it under the mattress. It will lose value due to inflation.)
2) Agree or disagree, the administration calculated cost, and a cost they were trying to avoid was the higher cost of allowing Saddam to go unchecked. As Condi Rice argued to the president, that was the mistake on WWII: not acting sooner. Thus, greater loss of life (cost).
Anyway, thanks for your post and comments.
As to your second point, my understanding is that the war recommendation had nothing to do with 9/11 and didn't have to be done then. They had a theory that somehow democracy was a virus that if they could just simply implant, it would spread gratefully. They were naive in so many ways. The “shock and awe” campaign was an example. I could go on, but this is perhaps not the place. My goal here was to discuss cost, and the only way to reasonably evaluate cost was against stated goals, not hidden goals. We could discuss another day whether we needed an elective war to satisfy other unstated strategic goals there, or whether it's reasonable in a democracy to have such unstated goals. But let's not do it here in too much detail. If you want to make a reply to this to cover some new item I raised, feel free; I'll just let it stand and then we can drop the matter for now. Thanks for keeping the discussion civil. I know that's always tough on a matter of such importance.