A Force That Gives Life Meaning

We’ve reached the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Iraq war. It’s easy to look back on that time and blame the Bush administration, various politicians, and media pundits for selling the war to a credulous population still reeling from the attacks on September 11, 2001.

But according to Chris Hedges this would be a mistake. Mr. Hedges was a war correspondent for 15 years, and in his 2002 book War is a Force that Gives Life Meaning he tells how war brings a sense of purpose and comradeship to people. He noticed that at the end of a war, people felt a sense of deflation. Even those who were the victims of the violence felt this emptiness. Yes, life is safer when the war is over, but it seems flat and stale. There is an intoxication to war, an addictive adrenaline rush of living life fully.

Mr. Hedges shows how leaders bring about war to solidify their position or prop up a failing regime, but he also shows that it is wrong to think that citizens are blameless in the calculus of war and peace.

For most of human history, the force that gave life meaning was survival. Since the very beginning of life on this planet the meaning of life was to survive and to reproduce.

At a certain point religion emerged as a force that gave life meaning. People believed that the gods had arranged the world and everyone had their place and purpose.

When nation-states emerged five centuries ago, kings learned that there was nothing like war to solidify a people’s identification with the concept of “country.”

We saw it in this country after 9/11. Anyone too young to remember Pearl Harbor finally got a lesson in how an enemy attack can bring a country to an almost complete unity of purpose. I can remember thinking, sometime right after the attack, that this was blowback for the things the U.S. had done in the Middle East over the previous decades. But this thought was unsayable at the time. Bill Maher was kicked off television for a couple of years for daring to say that flying into a skyscraper was not the act of a coward.

Mr. Hedges writes about living in Argentina before the Falklands War in the early 1980s. The ruling junta was faltering, and there was widespread and open discontent with the regime amongst the educated classes. But as soon as the army invaded the Falkland Islands and claimed them for Argentina, all dissent ceased and the entire populace united behind the government. No one spoke against the junta, even in private, and Mr. Hedges felt that, as a foreigner, if he had said anything negative he would have been physically attacked.

The sense of victimhood and unity brought by 9/11 was exploited by the Bush administration to sell the Iraq war. My husband can clearly remember how CNN had the sound of war drums accompanying their news stories during the “march to war” ten years ago.

Obviously leaders of governments use their power to manipulate people into war, but we the people are manipulatable. Why? Because so many of our lives are empty of meaning and purpose. This emptiness is reflected in the large number of people taking anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications in this country.

The human race desperately needs a new vision, a sense of purpose that is constructive, not destructive like war. How about working together to build a sustainable global society of opportunity and equality for all?

As a coda, in this time of budget deficit hysteria, let’s not forget how much the Iraq war has contributed to the federal debt. The Bush administration estimated the cost at $50 billion (do you remember officials saying, “it will pay for itself with oil revenues,” and the firing of the person who estimated the cost at $100-200 billion?). In 2008 economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the true cost of the war would be $3 trillion when long-term care for veterans and interest on the debt were factored in. In 2010 he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying $3 trillion was looking optimistic.

Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies released a “Cost of War” study that raises the price tag to $6 trillion. Mother Jones has a graph that breaks down where the money goes.

The Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress never included the costs of war in their budgets so all of this is going on the national credit card. Just remember this when you hear a Republican talk about fiscal responsibility.

The Bill for Iraq

The latest talking point for the right-wing is that the total cost for the war in Iraq was$750 billion, less than we spent on the stimulus last year. This figure is a complete fabrication. It doesn't even come close to covering everything; it's just what Congress appropriated specifically for the war. There are a lot of costs of the Iraq war not contained in that figure, most importantly,the costs of caring for wounded vets.

Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have been working on establishing a more accurate figure for the cost of the war. In early 2008 they published articles that asserted the true cost will be $3 trillion. In this weekend's Washington Post they published an update, in which they state that further investigation has persuaded theythat the cost will be even higher.

The new analysis includes these costs: we're still embroiled in Afghanistan which probably would not be so if we hadn't diverted our attention to Iraq; the wars were accompanied by tax cuts which caused a sharp rise in the federal debt which means higher interest payments; the price of oil jumped after the invasion of Iraq which slowed the world economy; and the global financial crisis was worse than it would have been and we had fewer options to combat it.

When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.

In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.

The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.

Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.

The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession.

With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.

Deficit Scare Tactics

Paul Krugman’s column “Fiscal Scare Tactic” today confirmed my assertions below that the deficit news stories are a political tactic:

Many economists take a much calmer view of budget
deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates. The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t — and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe…

Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.

The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?

The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.

For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria, Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price.

I’m also reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book on the financial meltdown of 2008, Freefall, and he confirms my assertion that President Clinton was distracted from his campaign pledges by warnings about the size of the federal deficit after he became president. Stiglitz was part of Clinton’s economic team in the early years of his administration along with Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. Stiglitz wrote, “Bill Clinton had sacrificed much of his presidential ambitions on the altar of deficit reduction.”