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By: Paul Findley


  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.

   

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