TheAgitator.com
Responding to Respondents
Monday, March 17th, 20031)
I’m not going to address the personal attacks. Water, duck, blah, blah, blah.
Also, if you’re so offended by my anti-war position that you feel the need to never visit this site again, well,
a) Grow up — this site is intended for debate.
b) My objective in starting a weblog was to influence people, not to capitulate to them so they’ll keep reading.
c) Just leave. No need to inform me of the whys or hows of your leaving. If you can’t engage in civil debate, you won’t be missed.
2)
I’m not going to go over the whole anti-war position. I’ve done it dozens of times on this site. Here’s my original piece coming out against the war. Here’s a most comprehensive anti-war manifesto from Gene, most all of which I agree with. And here’s James Fallows’ lengthy description of just how big we’ll have to grow the government to “rebuild” a post-war Iraq.
3)
Nor will I once again defend my patriotism. Yep. I’m disappointed in my country. Sorry, kids, but part of loving your country is recognizing and warning of its pending mistakes. Sanctions were a mistake. War is a mistake. Yes, Saddam sucks. Yes, America is wonderful. That doesn’t mean America attacking Saddam is always a good thing.
4)
One argument I will address, briefly: Jane Galt’s challenge of my assertion that this whole thing could end up costing us $1 trillion.
By most estimates, Gulf War I cost about $61 billion. By most estimates, Gulf War II is a vastly more expansive undertaking. More troops. More bombs in the first 48 hours than in all of Gulf War I, a longer engagement, and more sophisticated (read: expensive) weaponry. Since we’re after regime change this time, and not merely chasing Iraq out of Kuwait, I’d imagine we can expect more resistance.
And that’s just for the fighting.
By conservative military estimates, the first year in post-war Iraq will cost somewhere around $20 billion (see the Fallows piece). About $17 billion in security alone.
Now, we can all take President Bush at his “one year to rebuild” plan, and assume the best. I’d prefer to look at history.
President Clinton said we’d be out of Kosovo in less than a year. We still have troops there, five years later.
Ten-plus years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we still have troops in Germany, and all across Europe, for that matter.
Twelve years after Gulf War I, we still have troops in Saudi Arabia, and in Kuwait.
Fifty years later, we still have troops in Korea.
Sixty years later, we still have troops in Japan.
A Turkish newspaper reported today that the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey said he expects the U.S. to be in Iraq for at least 25 years.
We’ll be in for well over one hundred billion by the time the fighting is done. Adjust for inflation, and one trillion dollars over ten or twenty-five or fifty years seems a rather conservative “upper limit” to me.
5)
To those of you who disagree with me on Iraq and are still reading, welcome.
Yes, but that’s not a useful number.
An absolute amount of $1 trillion over fifty years is fairly trivial; assuming that GDP grows at an average of 2% a year, that’s a 0.1% of GDP, less than we spend on corn subsidies. It’s also wildly unlikely; assuming the occupation costs us the same as the invasion every single year for the next fifty years is extremely implausible. We are not spending the same amount every year on Korea as we did on the Korean War, nor on Germany as we did on the European Theater. We’re not even spending a big fraction of it. If you’re trying to argue that that’s the discounted present value, you’re going to need some wackily large numbers in out years to overcome your discount. I can certainly conceive that we might have troops stationed in Iraq fifty years from now, but I’m not buying the idea that we’re going to invade every year. Plus, you may have noticed that a lot of the troops going to Iraq are the troops that used to be stationed in Germany, so in invading Iraq, we’re scaling down the German presence you dislike, and which probably would have remained without this fracas for at least the next ten years (which make up the lion’s share of any appropriately discounted spending calculations, just like your car loan) so the net increase for “foreign stations” is much smaller than you posit.
Also, remember that having troops overseas is a vital part to our defense. Don’t think for a minute that our troops are primarily in Japan to defend that country. We require a Asian presence, just as we need a European presence. Both of which were rather important during the cold war.
More importantly things went pretty well with the way Japan and Germany turned out after WWII as opposed to the mess in Germany after WWI. Do you think that we have not gotten more back economically after all these years from Japan and Korea in terms of a world economy to cover the cost of our troops.
And our troops in Iraq will serve the same purpose, a presence in the Middle East that is needed to start the change necessary in the Arab world because without some sort of democratic change that is WWIII will start.
It just occurs to me that it’s a mistake to call post-war Iraq the 51st state. That would imply representation in Congress, which it won’t have. Instead, it’ll be controlled by the Federal government, and/or Congress, and funded largely by Congress.
So instead, I propose that it be called District Of Columbia East.
Perhaps Marion Barry would like to run it?
I’d pay a trillion dollars for a capitalist democratic republic in Iraq….well worth the investment. In 50 years the entire region will be overwhelmingly capitalistic western and free markets make for a free and safer world my friends.
came across your site through weird random links and i just thought i’d like to commend you on having the courage of standing up for your views, especially on such a controversial topic as this. i do agree with you and believe that a war on iraq is unjustified. however, this entire matter is so complicated that there would probably never be a right or wrong, but that’s the case for most issues in international politics.
consequently, there would definitely be a lot of people disagreeing with you and even flaming you. but just address the former and ignore the latter. people who stoop to personal insults in a debate are simply not worth your time. and sometimes, even if you do try to clarify your stand, it’s ultimately useless. what a person reads is coloured by personal bias and if that person’s determined to disagree with you, no matter how clearly you stand your stand, that person would never be able to understand or accept what you’re saying.
the war on iraq seems inevitable now, but i believe that that’s no excuse for people who are against it to just shrivel up and shut up. at the very least, we should make some noise, even if we eventually don’t manage to do very much. sigh.
All I can say is that our military had better lay hands on a number of outlawed weapons. Unless we can prove we were right all along, we will look foolish.
While I disagree with much of your position, I agree with some. Just found this blog today, adding it to favorites.
At least you do have a reasoned position, and not a completely bad one. But I also remember that after taking Kuwait the Hussein scared the crap out of Saudi Arabia by moving troops to that border, and that is probably why they went along with Gulf I. This time around, he would probably need a couple of years without sanctions to get to that point, so he is not perceived as a threat by them. But the US is, politically and economically – and indirectly religiously if Iran manages (and they are trying) to take power from the unelected shadow government and keep it for the elected government and Iraq isn’t allowed to fragment into civil war, the fact that the Saud power is based largely on a sect that is regarded by other Moslems as heretical may become important in the area.
I’m no fan of war other than in the movies, and I think this one has been made necessary by diplomatic blunders and such – which is not a very good reason, and I certainly wish Saudi Arabia and Egypt would undertake it instead of (or at least with) us, but I do believe the current Iraq is a threat to US interests even more than North Korea.
I’m still with you Radley. It’s the level of debate that draws me here, not the simple fact that we agree most of the time.
The money is no big deal…this country has an unlimited capacity to make money.
Do you really think that what we are doing with troops in Japan and Europe is “rebuilding”? The good part about having bases in Kuwait “12 years later” is that we have a platform to operate from when we need to go into Iraq. We WANT troops in other parts of the world…its called “sphere of influence”. With bases in Iraq we could be a stablizing factor in the region for the next 50 years. My guess is we will never actually leave.
Iraq is a state that aides and gives comfort to terrorists. That is a threat to our security. Saddam enslaves and murders his own people. We have the ability and resources to liberate them. I think we should do it.
After having spent 6 long years covorting about the seven seas under the guise of ‘forward presence’, I feel compelled to comment on the post conflict Iraq (it is not a war until Congress says so). Expect ‘rebuilding’ to take about a year or so, which means, set up a provisional government, hold elections, and infuse the economy with a few billion dollars. Expect a new air base to pop up along the Iraqi coast (oh, yeah, it’ll be ‘leased’) that will be our new forward presence center, thus lightening the load off of Turkey. Once we’re in, we’ll never let go.