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One of the
major surprises in recent weeks was the arrival of a
28-page document, the product of the Joint Center, an
affiliation of the Brookings Institution and the
American Enterprise Institute, two of Washington’s best
known, veteran think tanks.
It leaves me
puzzled. The document deals with the “economic costs”
of George W. Bush’s Iraqi war, but in several places it
mentions, with a hopeful touch, economic benefits as
well. It is not the polished reasoned scholarship one
would expect. One possible conclusion is that the
Center has run out of worthy causes to examine.
Another, more likely, is that it has embarked on a
scheme to elevate the war to standing as a normal
business venture that needs periodic cost-benefit
examination.
The document is
replete in caveats and demurrers on its own work. On
page 19 appear these words: “We recognize that our
estimates are incomplete and crude. Nonetheless they
show the substantial costs in fighting this war. Some
costs are already sunk, but the analysis suggests that
that future costs may be significant.” The authors
deserve a salute for skill in understatement. Future
costs will be significant indeed.
The final
sentence on the page reads: “Hopefully policy makers
and others that have better data than we have can refine
our approach and assess whether the benefits justify the
cost.” Maybe I am a hopeless romantic, but expending
energy trying to determine if economic benefits of the
war justify the economic costs strikes me as an example
of poor taste to say the least. I do not believe any
sensible person can conceive of benefits that can
justify America’s invasion of Iraq.
At one point, the
study attempts to put a dollar value on each person
killed in the war, as if human beings are nothing more
than an expendable raw material in a manufacturing
process. According to the Center document, the
price-tag of each person killed can be fixed through a
process called “monetizing statistical lives by
measuring how much people actually pay to reduce risks.”
If I read the document correctly, this “monetizing”
process yields a value of $3.5 million for each Iraqi
killed and $6.5 million for each coalition-force person
killed. Whether the process is sound analysis or not,
the predictable headline emerging from the study will
shout the assertion that each coalition-force person
consumed by the war is nearly twice as valuable as each
Iraqi corpse.
This ghoulish
differential aside, how can anyone put a price tag on
the unavailing shrieks of widows and the lifelong
handicaps of amputees and others with debilitating war
wounds? Are these shrieks and handicaps more pricey on
one side than on the other?
The study
scratches around for items to list on the benefit side
of war. Its short inventory includes such things as the
value of Iraqi lives no longer slaughtered by Saddam
Hussein and the “benefits” yielded by the termination of
the U.S.-British decade-long aerial monitoring of the
no-fly zone in Iraq. The list could also include as
“benefits” the employment required in the manufacture
the lethal instruments of war, as well as non-lethal
jobs like those needed to make and bury caskets.
Has humankind
entered a brutal new era of survival of the fittest, in
which war is accepted as a proper, indeed necessary
instrument of public policy? Perhaps the application of
cost-effectiveness to war became inevitable when
President Bush issued in October 2002 his little-noted
but far-reaching new security doctrine for the United
States. A cardinal feature of this new doctrine was
presidential power to make war at will. By then
Congress had conveyed to Bush not only the authority to
make war in Iraq but to initiate war measures anywhere
else in the world that he alone determined to be threats
to the security of the United States. Bush proclaimed
himself policeman of the world and pledged to maintain
U.S. forces and military bases at levels sufficient to
that task.
It was the most
massive conveyance of war-making authority in human
history. Bush has at his fingertips the mightiest
navies, air and ground forces ever, plus the most
formidable inventory of nuclear warheads and delivery
systems ever assembled. Only the Congress has the
constitutional authority to stay his hand. The Supreme
Court traditionally keeps hands off issues relating to
war powers. But, in the wake of 9/11, instead of
guarding this congressional duty rigorously, our panicky
legislators simply washed their hands of it. They wrote
out a blank check, signed it, and handed it to George W.
Bush.
This conveyance
deserved, at minimum, a robust debate over war powers,
but there was none. Senator Robert Byrd of West
Virginia provided a lone voice of reason and alarm,
addressing a virtually empty Senate chamber. Except for
Byrd, few voices challenged this doctrine on Capitol
Hill and scant mention occurred in the editorial columns
of U.S. magazines and newspapers. The only major notice
I found appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, where this
fundamental change in policy was reported briefly
without a syllable of reproach.
Under the
constitution, Congress alone has the authority to
declare war. Declaring war, the operative term, is
often interpreted as the equivalent of making war. The
legal relationship between the president and Congress in
the realm of war-making is spelled out in the War Powers
Resolution that was enacted over the veto of President
Richard Nixon while I was in Congress. I helped lead
the resolution to enactment.
But with the grim
scene at Manhattan’s Ground Zero fresh in mind, the
war-making authority suddenly became the exclusive
province of one person, the president. Instead of
being reserved as an instrument of last resort, to be
employed only when the territory of the United States is
threatened with imminent assault or in compliance with
treaty obligations, war-making became the exclusive
province one person, a man who had never observed war at
close range, much less participated in it. It became
just one more ready instrument of presidential
policy-making, a deadly new arrow in the presidential
quiver, his to use at will.
Bush would be
wise to study Abraham Lincoln’s counsel on war powers.
As a Member of Congress, Lincoln spoke out as a war
protestor, challenging the authority of President James
K. Polk to engage Mexico in war. He explained: “The
provision of the Constitution giving the war-making
power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by
the following reason. Kings had always been involving
and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending
generally, if not always, that the good of the people
was the object. This our convention understood to be
the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they
resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man
should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon
us. But [President Polk’s] view destroys the whole
matter and places our president where kings have always
stood.” In the 9/11 aftermath, Congress gave Bush
kingly powers. It was a major misstep. Bush’s decision
to assault Iraq, I believe, is the worst mistake in U.S.
history.
War is sometimes
called the failure of diplomacy. I call it the failure
of common sense. Although the political scene sometimes
degenerates so far that war is unavoidable, the
application of common sense at an early stage could have
prevented all of the wars that have occurred in my long
lifetime. As Winston Churchill once observed, even
World War II could have been prevented without firing a
shot by timely, sensible international leadership.
The American
Enterprise Institute is a major breeding ground for
super-hawks, so it is not surprising that, in company
with the Brookings Institution, it is now trying to
apply a scholarly patina—thin and tentative as it is--to
the Bush doctrine. The Joint Center could invest its
resources more usefully by exploring and exposing the
faulty reasoning that led George W. Bush to order the
invasion of Iraq. Trying to put together shaky, imagined
economic benefits that may make the war’s economic costs
seem worthwhile is time wasted. The economic costs are
staggering, but they are trivial when measured against
the incalculable human agony, loss of life and limb on
both sides of the conflict. | 
