The cold price of hot blood

This is a useful exercise, since for anyone who isn't an original employee of Google, any figure above $10 million is almost incomprehensible. Reading this book, I had to keep repeating to myself: A billion is a thousand million dollars, and a trillion is a thousand billion dollars. But even that didn't really help me visualize the numbers, so I turned to specific issues. For example, the state I live in, California, is suffering a serious budget crisis that has resulted in major cuts in education and other areas. California has a vast economy, and the shortfall is massive: $3.3 billion. That's a lot of money -- but just reallocating about one week's worth of Iraq funding would wipe it out.

Domestically, the authors note that a trillion dollars could have fixed the Social Security crisis for 50 years, built 8 million housing units, or hired 15 million public schoolteachers for a year.

Abroad, "[t]wo trillion dollars would enable us to meet our commitments to the poorest countries for the next third of a century." For a "mere" $8 billion, the cost of two weeks of the war, we could have fully funded the world campaign to eradicate illiteracy. And imagine the benefits if we had used some of that money for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East that "might actually have succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the people there."

It is too late to do any of that now, and too late to bring back the more than 4,300 Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died. But the authors want to make sure that future wars come with a full disclosure statement. Their aim is to restore financial responsibility. But they also have a deeper purpose: to prevent America from cavalierly rushing into war. To that end, they propose a number of reforms.

• Wars should not be funded by "emergency" supplemental spending bills, as Iraq has been for five years in a row, because such funds are not subject to the same oversight as regular appropriations.
• War funding should be linked to strategy reviews. If a war is going badly, the administration should be required to explain why and present strategies for improving it.
• The full costs of war -- present and future -- should be clearly presented. The Department of Defense should be required to present auditable books to Congress. As the authors note, "the accounting practices used by the government are so shoddy that they would land any public firm before the Securities and Exchange Commission for engaging in deceptive practices."
• Congress should cut back on the excessive use of contractors in wartime. The heavy outsourcing of military tasks to the private sector has driven up costs astronomically, led to massive corruption and incompetence, and "limited the extent to which America has felt the human toll of the war ... the percentage of the U.S. population bearing the cost of a conflict is the lowest ever."
• Finally, the authors call for current taxpayers to be required to pay for any war lasting more than one year, by levying a war surtax. As they point out, "[w]ar has become too easy for America ... The war has been financed by debt." This not only burdens future generations with debts they did not incur, but it makes it all too easy for Americans, especially in the absence of a draft, to sign off on wars. "As the United States has emerged as the sole superpower ... spending 47 percent of the total for the entire world on armaments, there is no last line of checks against its abuse of military power -- other than the active involvement of its citizens."

There is no free lunch, and there are no free wars. Wars do not stimulate the economy: They drag it down. We will all be paying for this disastrous war for decades. With Americans disillusioned about the Iraq war, and the economy tanking in part because of it, the cold, undeniable economic message of "The Three Trillion Dollar War" may finally sink in. Perhaps it will make it harder for governments to wage future frivolous wars. But even if it only succeeds in forcing our society to honor our commitment to take care of our veterans, this book will have succeeded.