Click Here to Learn More

• 



• Goin' Broke Paying For War

• Annual Conference Speaker Details Iraq War Costs

• Congress Approves More War Funds

• As of May 2008, the Iraq War had cost Nebraskans:

• It’s the War, Stupid

• 




Resources

• National Priorities Project

• The 3 Trillion Dollar
  Shopping Spree

• Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes on the True Cost of the Iraq War

• Costs of War

• The American Empire Project

• 




The Candidates on Iraq

• Barack Obama

• John McCain

• Ralph Nader

• Cynthia McKinney

• Bob Barr

• Chuck Baldwin

It’s the War, Stupid

Paul Olson
NFP President

“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Sign in the headquarters of the 1992
Clinton for President Campaign

During Vietnam, President Johnson told us that we could have both “guns and butter.” Richard Nixon told us the same thing in different words. But after the Nixonian price controls to contain the economic fall-out and the stagflation of the Ford/Carter years, we found that we had too much civilian and military demand chasing too little productivity, too much easy credit and a resulting 21 percent inflation. When Reagan shut down the easy money and ag-land prices fell, farmers found their farms not worth as much as their mortgages — hence, the ’80s ag crisis.

We have two new ‘guns and butter’ fairy stories that promise to dominate the fall elections:

1. The Iraq “surge” has worked pretty much, and it will work completely soon (the gun myth);

2. The economy is the fall election issue, and ‘our candidate’ — Republican or Democrat — can bring prosperity back (the butter myth).

These are myths.

One, the surge is not working, despite what Bush and McCain claim. We have achieved three of the 13 goals we projected: less than 25 percent (hardly a passing grade). We have bought off a few Sunni tribal leaders in Western Iraq, men who will stay bought off as long as we bribe them. We have brought a culture of bribery and corruption to our companies and to their government. Muqtada al-Sadr has called off his Madhi army for a spell while he reorganizes it to be more unified under him, but his Shiite dominance goals have not altered. Al-Qaida in Iraq is still active. Deaths in Iraq are down only as low as they were before the Golden Mosque’s bombing. What can put a good face on things is that some weeks Baghdad’s former violence seems to have moved to Mosul or Afghanistan or Northeast Pakistan. Moving the violence, though, does not end it.

Charles Sennott, an embedded Boston Globe reporter sympathetic to the surge’s goals, said recently on NPR that he’d encountered no Iraqis who believed that pacification would last after American divisions pulled back. But we in America, we are told to wait at a little longer and give the surge a chance to work — just like we had only to wait for the Iraqi elections to work, or for the Iraqi Army to be trained, or for the capture of Saddam Hussein to break the back of the insurgency. Now, we are told, we must wait again “lest we lose the purpose of all those lives lost.”

What we should be waiting for is a UN-sponsored police action and negotiation to stabilize Iraq. We should be waiting for a peacekeeping mission from Iraq’s regional neighbors. We should be waiting for our bases to close, and for Iraqis to control their own oil. We should herald Chuck Hagel though the streets of Lincoln and Omaha for his honesty.

Two, the economy is NOT the issue. About half of the people in the U.S. believe the economy is the issue because that is what the media and the politicians are telling them. The candidates are campaigning as if the credit crisis and home foreclosures have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. One can understand how citizens losing their homes — after gaining easy credit, variable-rate mortgages and then seeing, in the last two years, interest rates rise while the value of their homes fell below the size of their mortgages — might think the economy was the issue. They’re being told that a moratorium on foreclosures or cutting the interest rates or going after predatory lenders or tax rebates will solve things. But these bandaids will not work.

They will not work because the economy is not the issue. The war is.

The war created this economy. We have borrowed over $500 billion to pay for the war already — this whole war has been fought on borrowed money. Five hundred billion is ten times what Bush-Cheney told us the war would cost. And Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel Prize-winning economist) and Linda Bilmes, in their new book Three Trillion Dollar War, show that — the with interest on debt, intelligence costs, costs tucked in departments other than defense, off-the-books costs, and the costs of medical injuries to U.S. service veterans — this war will cost at least $3,000,000,000,000. That translates into an eventual debt of about $100,000 for each family of three in America.

To try to pull off this ‘guns and butter’ scenario, the Fed made easy money available just as it did before the farm crisis. It encouraged massive investment in housing to create civilian contentment. As Stiglitz explains, because of the war’s cost, the “Fed sloshed credit all through the system… The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anyone this side of a life support system” (The Australian, 2/8/08; see also The Three Trillion Dollar War, pp. 125-26). The Fed also relaxed credit controls. As Stiglitz argues, the war is the reason for the recession, and we will pay not only in foreclosures and bank instability, but in inflation and general fiscal instability for years, perhaps for decades. That is what we have bought with this endless stupid war — beyond the deaths, injuries and refugee camps.

So when presidential, congressional or senatorial candidates try to tell you, “It’s the economy, stupid,” tell them where to get off. There are no ‘guns-and-butter’ wars. Wars mean sacrifice, either now or later. We can choose to have schools, universities, roads, healthcare, thriving family farms and productive households, public transportation and green energy. Or we can choose to cry ‘Terror’ endlessly, worsen the causes of unrest in the Middle East, forfeit our civil liberties and squander our blood and treasure while making ourselves into a military state.

It is not the economy; it is the war. And if we do not pin back the ears of our Democratic and Republican candidates on this issue, we will deserve the wasteland we will get.

HOME      |      ARTICLES      |      CALENDAR      |      THE NEBRASKA REPORT      |      DONATE      |      CONTACT

This site is made possible by the peacemakers. Site Design by