When the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration estimated that it would cost $50-60bn to overthrow Saddam Hussein and establish a functioning government. This estimate was catastrophically wrong: the war in Iraq has cost $823.2bn between 2003 and 2011. Some estimates suggesting that it may eventually cost as much as $3.7tn when factoring in the long-term costs of caring for the wounded and the families of those killed.
The most striking fact about the cost of the war in Iraq has been the extent to which it has been kept “off the books” of the government’s ledgers and hidden from the American people. This was done by design. A fundamental assumption of the Bush administration’s approach to the war was that it was only politically sustainable if it was portrayed as near-costless to the American public and to key constituencies in Washington. The dirty little secret of the Iraq war – one that both Bush and the war hawks in the Democratic party knew, but would never admit – was that the American people would only support a war to get rid of Saddam Hussein if they could be assured that they would pay almost nothing for it....
With the Iraq war treated as an “off the books” expense, the Pentagon was allowed to keep spending on high-end military equipment and cutting-edge technology. In fiscal terms, it was as if the messy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were never happening.
More fundamentally, the Bush administration masked the cost of the war with deficit spending to ensure that the American people would not face up to its costs while President Bush was in office.
Despite their recent discovery of outrage over the national debt, the Republicans followed the advice of Vice-President Dick Cheney that “deficits don’t matter” and spent freely on domestic programs throughout the Bush years.The Raw Story
How Americans were swindled by the hidden cost of the Iraq war
Michael Boyle | The Guardian
7 comments:
Maybe a little less policy space would have been in order?
It's always a question of use of policy space. In wartime,govt greatly expands policy space with emergency measures, which was the case with the Global War on Terror, as it has been with the Global War on Drugs.
The question is whether either were and are good uses of policy space, especially when creates through emergency measures that not only expand policy space but also restrict rights and liberties.
"It's always a question of use of policy space. In wartime, govt greatly expands policy space with emergency measures, which was the case with the Global War on Terror, as it has been with the Global War on Drugs."
Tom - I can't argue with you. Big war and big government seem to go hand in hand.
"Big war and big government seem to go hand in hand."
If you look at levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP and try to see if there is a correlation with the amount of wars that the country is involved in over time, you will find that there is no correlation whatsoever. So the idea that "big government" goes hand in hand with "big war" seems to be lacking in any factual basis.
For example, Canadian government spending is a higher proportion of GDP than US govt spending. By your definition Canada has "big government".
y - My point is that BIG WAR seems to pave the way for BIG GOVERNMENT..... but not necessarily the reverse.
In a way it was America's destiny rather than choice. American's have traditionally been wary of foreign entanglements, but, other than the brief flirtation with empire in the Spanish American War and the annexation of the Philippines, the US remained out of the Great Game until drawn into WWI and then WWII. After that, as the Free World's champion against the USSR-China alliance, the US developed into a superpower and got itself entangled in empire-building. It's pretty much only the libertarians of left and right have mounted opposition to this trend.
Unrelated: Nice take-down of Cameron's austerity policies by Salmon via Wolf.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/03/13/britains-fiscal-failure/
"Cameron’s speech is basically the horrible personal-finance metaphor writ large: he’s trying to persuade people that solutions which make sense on a household-budgeting level can scale up to the national-accounts level. He’s obviously never heard of the paradox of thrift."
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