(Untitled)

[pmb]

Y'know, we could have just given every Iraqi citizen $37 336.58 and we'd still be ahead by 3,000 american lives and 500,000 iraqi lives. A trillion is a very large number. I bet that, for a flat rate of 37k per capita, we could have gotten the entire Iraqi army to overthrow Saddam all on their own

Comments

[dragonmudd]

While I agree with your sentiment, the argument is terrible. Spending this money is not the same as sending it to Iraq, and it's not the same as just burning it. Most of that money in one way or another is going back into our economy, whether it's going into supply manufacturing or salaries for the personel or whatever. There is definitely a non-trivial portion that is being 'invested' into Iraq I am sure, but you can't just write off every single dollar that's spent as being a waste.

[drinkywinky]

I disagree with your sentiment and the argument is also terrible.

PMB's point is that we've dumped a huge amount of money into Iraq, and it could have been spent a hell of a lot better. If we're going to try to figure in money that comes back to the gov't, we should also figure in loan interest and opportunity cost, both in where the money could have been used and where the resources could have been used. I think we could ignore less tangible economic effects, and the number would still be about the same.

I do disagree with the 500k Iraqi deaths. That's over 11k deaths a month, every month since the invasion. I know where the number comes from, but it is too high to believe.

[pmb]

but it is too high to believe

Why? We had shock and awe, and we radically destabilized their society to the point where they are finding dozens of dead bodies with holes drilled in their necks every day. Morgues are full way past any reasonable point. As far as I know, there's not been any credible critique of their methodology. There was even a This American Life episode ( http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/06/320.html ) about how the number was too high to believe. Subsequent studies seem to have born out the previous one, but everyone just dismisses their results as unbelievable because they differ from expectations so much. But data is data, and their methods seem really sound.

[snailprincess]

Yeah, I was annoyed at how dismissive people were of that number. Basically everything I heard was 'that's way too high, it couldn't possibly be true' but pretty much no one presented any evidence or arguments to discredit it.

President Bush even dismissed it saying 'their methods have been widely discredited' and left it at that. Of course as near as I could tell they used the standard method for identifying death rates after large disasters.

It's possible they've overestimated somehow; I remember thinking their estimate for the death rate prior to the war seemed awfully low. But I'm guessing that wouldn't throw their data off by more than a factor of 2 or 3. And even if their estimate was 3 times too high, that's still 200,000 civilians, which is like 4 times the 'official' numbers.

The rate at which that story was buried and ignored was really frustrating to me. There was no actual discussion, people just dismissed it because they didn't want it to be true.

[clipdude]

[Y]ou and I and everyone we know in this country has paid or will pay 4,000 dollars each for this useless war.
Because much of the money will have been borrowed, people who haven't had a chance to vote yet--even be born yet--will be paying for it. Yet, the administration wants more tax cuts. Basically, what they're saying is that we should spread the costs to future generations rather than take the costs on ourselves. I think it makes the whole thing much, much worse.

[freyley]

That would have been capital flight. The $37k/iraqi was largely spent on American weapons and equipment, which mostly went to American companies, or on Iraqi infrastructure, which also largely went to American companies.

[freyley]

that's not really that true, as there isn't that much infrastructure in Iraq to allow for that much in the way of purchases, and with all the sanctions and Saddam, there probably wouldn't have been much infrastructure built to do so, so the end result would have just been inflationary, at least in the immediate term, and then deflationary when the infrastructure was built. (there are cases, by the way, of stockpiling of dollars and using them primarily locally as an internal currency, resulting, effectively, in currency flight, albeit minor, though not capital flight

[akjdg]

This is hardly a useless war! This war has enabled us to definitively label Bush 43 as an incredibly bad american president, and provided myriad specific examples to support this assessment. Why, withouth this war we would be left dithering about faith based social initiatives, no child left behind, stem cell research policies, and the farce of republican fiscal conservativism. No, this war most definitely has a use. Even better, this useful war can be nicely summed up in monetary costs to the american public, at the bargain price of only $4000 each.

:)

[boojum]

"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."