The High Cost of War

Very little public attention has focused on bin Laden’s desired goal of provoking the United States into an overreaction that drains our economy and leads to an economic crisis. And yet here were are, over seven years after 9/11 and over five years since the invasion of Iraq, and in the midst of an economic crisis.
It would be silly, of course, to think you can draw a straight line from the Iraq War to the AIG bailout. Or to suggest that prompting widespread panic around credit default swaps was OBL’s idea from the get-go. But at the same time, it can’t really be denied that the economy would be in better shape if the $100+ billion that we’ve spent in Iraq every year for the past five years had, instead, been invested by public and private hands in productive enterprises. If instead of building bombs and Humvees that get destroyed quickly and then replaced, we’d been adding to the national stock of capital and consumer goods. If the people who’d been maimed in the war and are now getting medical treatment were, instead, working productively. Things like that.