Can countries make New Year’s resolutions? Probably not. But if they could, here’s one for the United States: Avoid unnecessary and costly wars.
We have just emerged from our most recent round of governmental dysfunction: the farce known as the fiscal cliff negotiations. I call the talks a farce because the “fiscal cliff” was wholly self-inflicted; it grew out of that earlier farce known as the 2011 budget deal. We are now lumbering toward another self-inflicted crisis, this one associated with a fight — again! — over the debt ceiling and some resolution of the sequesters mandated under the 2011 budget deal; last week’s agreement merely pushed the sequesters a couple months down the road. (File under: can, kicked.)
I will leave it to others to parse the wisdom or foolishness of the recent agreement; to predict the course and outcome of the next crisis; or to explain — if they have the stomach for it — how a great nation has been reduced to government-by-circus.
But I will add my two cents to the current hysteria over the budget deficit: wars are too expensive to be fought for no good reason. The direct cost of the war in Iraq is in excess of $800 billion. Throw in debt service and long-term care for the many injured and we will be well over that figure. We don’t know how much we will end up paying for the war in Afghanistan. It is, after all, still going strong. But the direct cost may approach $750 billion before we depart, as planned, in 2014. Again, the total bill will be higher. The first couple years of the Afghan war were perhaps justified by our efforts to root out al-Qaeda. But, at a minimum, the last five years — including President Obama’s much-vaunted “surge” — represent a fruitless effort with scant strategic justification. The bottom line: the war in Iraq and the unnecessary extension of the war in Afghanistan will end up costing the U.S. taxpayer perhaps $2 trillion. This does not include the terrible human cost, of course, not just to American service-women and -men but to Iraqis and Afghans, many of them civilian, as well.
We might as well have taken the money and burned it.
Let us argue, if we must, the merits of cutting expenditures and raising taxes in the midst of high and stubborn unemployment; let us debate the proper way to bring our medium- to long-term budget deficit under control; let us, if we are of a wonkish bent, discuss the advantages of shifting to “chained CPI” in calculating Social Security benefits or the advisability of capping the deduction for state and local taxes in the federal tax code.
But first let’s resolve never to repeat our errors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.