Relative Costs

Last night, over drinks, I wound up in one of those "if liberals like humanitarianism, why don't you want o indefinitely prolong the hopeless and catastrophic war in Iraq?" arguments and I have, naturally enough, a bunch of Iraq-related answers.

When Gene Sperling got to talking this morning about his work with the Global Campaign for Education, aimed at ensuring every child on the planet a chance to go to primary school, though, I got downright anrgy about this sort of humanitarian rationale for Iraq. The crux of the matter is that Sperling's big, longshot legislative dream is this bill sponsored by Senators Hillary Clinton and Gordon Smith "to require the United States to do its fair share -- up to $3 billion dollars by 2012 -- in meeting the Millennium Development Goal promise of universal education by 2015." He was very excited that Senators Obama and Edwards have also committed to spending $2-$3 billion on this.

Meanwhile, for 2008 the White House says we need to spend $5.3 billion on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, making me fairly certain the Iraq share alone is worth more than $3 billion. The National Priorities Project sees about $450 billion as having already been spent on Iraq. If you'd taken that as a lump sum and put it in a safe investment vehicle that secured you a very modest 2 percent real rate of return per year, you'd have about triple what Sperling was looking for.

Now, obviously, you wouldn't actually want to finance global education spending that way, but it's telling as a thought experiment about the bankruptcy of a lot of the "humanitarian" rationales that have been offered for the war.

Comments

Now, obviously, you wouldn't actually want to finance global education spending that way

This isn't really obvious to me at all. Of course, I'm not an economist or anything, so I may be missing something ...

An investment of this kind would do more to combat violence and extremism than spending it on various kinds of arms, IMO.

Posted by justinb | August 4, 2007 12:05 PM

justinb, I assume MY means that you wouldn't actually take $450 billion and buy a CD with it, you'd just appropriate the amount of money equivalent to the income you'd receive if you did.

Posted by Glenn | August 4, 2007 12:11 PM

I think all Matt means is that you wouldn't fund global education spending by suddenly ceasing to fund landmine protection in Iraq while maintaining the rest of the budget intact - you fund it by, in part, withdrawing wholesale from Iraq.

Posted by DivGuy | August 4, 2007 12:12 PM

The fact that the US could have invested the war money and gotten a return illustrates "the bankruptcy of a lot of the 'humanitarian' rationales that have been offered for the war"?

Say what?

The bankruptcy of the rationale can stand on its own. There is no humanitarian rationale for war that has any value, there are only economic and power ones. Over 600,000 people have died from war-related activities in Iraq, thirty percent by coalition troops which continue to kill more every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least four million Iraqis have been made homeless, depleted uranium is giving kids cancer and bombs are blowing off people's limbs.

It's silly to even raise the possibility of a humanitarian justification for war.

Posted by Don Bacon | August 4, 2007 12:19 PM

Last night, over drinks, I wound up in ... arguments

From the description, (and Brian Beutler's post)it sounds like the think-tank centrists (or MSM reporters/opinionators) have taken control of our precious left bloggers - at the price of a few drinks and some munchies.

Posted by JimPortlandOR | August 4, 2007 12:21 PM

3 million children die globally each year from diarrhea. The problem could be fixed with salts that cost pennies a dose. Fix that before talking about spending billions on global education. Paul Wolfowitz taught at Johns Hopkins, Condi Rice was provost at Stanford, Michael O'Hanlon has a PhD from Princeton (I think he sat next to Gen. Petraeus in class...seriously). Education ain't fixing the world.

Humility might.

Posted by joejoejoe | August 4, 2007 12:30 PM

A full 24 hours without any references to either The New Racists or any of Marty's Minions. Well done, Matt, it seems travel becomes this blog. I hope you get out more. Though the cocktail wienies from the centrists will come at a price, don't they taste much better than the poisoned Kool Aid they serve up over at The New Racists?

Posted by mrs. ibrahim al-jafaari | August 4, 2007 12:32 PM

Hey, so like I just watched your video bit over on TPM and here's why your commenters seem to hate you:

It's a well-known phenomenon. There's a threshhold of effort required to respond to something, and if a commenter simply agrees, theyre not going to go to the effort of saying, "Yeah, you're right! W00t!" Which would be boring anyway.

Only disagreement tends to give enough momentum that someone will actually bother to comment. This is also why letters to the editor in a newspaper always seem so cranky.

Posted by Enoch Root | August 4, 2007 12:57 PM

The question of American humanitarianism does not arise in Iraq. The policy of the Bush Administration is the opposite: they are working to impose a theocracy and then cut and run.

The cutting started with the election which put the theocrats into government, allowing America to duck out on the responsibility ("You break it, you bought it...") to put in a General MacArthur or Paul Nitze style Occupation.

Bush presumably could not stomach the fact that, to succeed, the policy of such an Occupation would have had to be one of Ba'ath without Saddam: the renaissance of Arab civil society and reformation of Islamic culture.

When they had an occupation, of course, they showed they didn't have a clue, running it as a summer holiday for Young Republicans, rather than as anything to do with the governance of Iraq.

The way forward, then, is clear: Cheney and Rumsfeld to The Hague. One assumes that George Bush is mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Posted by David Lloyd-Jones | August 4, 2007 1:32 PM

Matt, I agree with your sentiment but I think you misnamed the post. It's not relative costs, it's opportunity costs. Sometimes when I hear war supporters talk I wonder if they've ever heard of the concept.

I agree with joejoejoe about targeting the low-hanging health and nutrition problems in the developing world before education. (Also about the humility, but if our Iraq experience hasn't convinced the leaders and citizens of the US to pursue a more humble foreign policy, nothing will.)

Posted by synic | August 4, 2007 2:14 PM

I will say that war does, like a Kos convention, have its lighter moments.

Posted by Don Bacon | August 4, 2007 2:20 PM

You're comparing an idealized foreign aid program, that you assume will benefit people, with what we now know has been a hugely disastrous military intervention. But in reality, foreign aid has has often done more harm than good. This aid to education could just allow governments or poor countries to put more money into the hands of corrupt elites or to spend more on arms.

Suppose we compared the decades of foreign aid wasted by corrupt third-world governments with the remarkable success of, for example, US military intervention in Kurdistan from 1991-1999. This is at least as reasonable as the comparison Matt is making, and military intervention comes out looking pretty humanitarian.

Posted by Ragout | August 4, 2007 2:53 PM

We already do quite a bit with raw hunger. That's not to say we couldn't do better, but if there is a place countries are sending foreign aid to that's gonna be our niche. We send over bags of U.S.A.I.D grain that were purchased as subsidies so our farmers don't look like theirs, and they pour it on the ground and use the bag to patch a hole in their house.

Then they get on the road built by the PRC and head to the city and get on a Japanese bus and head to a clinic staffed by Danes or something.

Posted by Ed Marshall | August 4, 2007 2:54 PM

Can we just please stop this nonesense about "spending" and call it "borrowing" for once?

Every additional dollar spent is now an additional dollar borrowed, so our elites no longer have to bother with the calculus of tradeoffs and hard choices. Until they are forced to face the music and can't pass the buck to our children they will go on wasting resources on things like the Iraq War.

Ask yourself if the war would ever have been fought if WE had been forced to pay for it via tax hikes or spending cuts.

Posted by kafka | August 4, 2007 3:05 PM

"3 million children die globally each year from diarrhea. The problem could be fixed with salts that cost pennies a dose. Fix that before talking about spending billions on global education."

I see no point in setting these goods against each other. Primary education itself is dirt cheap in much of the world. In the past year I've developed a relationship with a village of desperately poor Kekchi squatters in the Peten region of Guatemala. Because they're squatters and their community is unrecognized by the government, they have to support their own school, but crop failures and other troubles have made that difficult, so I arranged for my church to partner with them to help out. What do they need? They have a five-grade, one-room school taught by a young maestro with a high-school education, who is paid 1200 quetzales a month--or appprox. US$160! We can support this school with what to a gringo is small change. And education opens all sorts of doors; one other thing I and my friends have discovered in working with these villagers is how important education is to managing an adequate supply of good, safe water. Above all, it helps with the most important need of impoverished people in the world, which is the simple ability to take charge of, and improve, their own lives.

Posted by David | August 4, 2007 4:05 PM

No, there is a real problem here, actually, a conceptual problem that no one ever tries to wrap their head around. There are a large number of humanitarian issues that beset the world, and that industrialized nations pay lip-service to the notion of managing. It's true that we can't address all of these problems all at once, because we don't really have the resources at our disposal to do that (I think. Not really sure, actually). So what would happen in the ideal universe is that countries like the US would break these problems down by their significance, the cost in time and money estimated in ameliorating them, and the odds of success. this would get you a lot of really simple, high threat, low cost issues right at the top, like our man's 3 cent diarrhea cures, malaria treatments, that sort of thing. This isn't crazy-this is pretty simple logic, actually. People could argue over which programs deserve priority based on all sorts of factors. Unfortunately, nothing remotely like this ever happens. Politics is driven by the news cycle, the sympathies of the electorate, and a whole host of variables that are simply not designed to take a holistic approach to humanitarian crises into account. Every now and then, someone points out that we spend infinitely more money on the tools of human carnage than we do on vaccines and textbooks, hinting at the possibility that there might be some more rational way to approach the needs of the world than what we do. But the improvisatory nature of democratic politics is incompatible with such an enterprise, which would take a kind of commitment that people with two weeks of political long term memory could never muster. So the most optimistic among us cling to the hope that the world will improve not by the hand of misguided wealthy nations, but through sheer, agonizingly slow social inertia, and that maybe a thousand years from now a lot of these problems will go away on their own.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 4, 2007 5:34 PM

For all I care, the US should be bleeding money for the next two decades to fix the result of their f@cked up wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Getting the troops out doesn't make the obligations towards these countries disappear and I'm not sure what appalls me more: the idiotic policies of Bush or the penny-pinching isolationism of some Democrats.

Posted by novakant | August 4, 2007 6:55 PM

I think Gordon Lightfoot's holistic approach is very insightful. I'm all for taking a holistic, rational approach. But Lightfoot's pessimism seems like a luxury the world can ill afford. We need to proceed with the best intentions, plan, and follow-through that we can muster and learn from our errors.

I don't think the question we ought to be asking is: do we have enough money to do this? We're talking tens of billions of dollars over decades here, not hundreds of billions or trillions. When there is the political will, the US finds the way. We need to pursue investments such as this, building a stronger future for everyone by bringing the least advantaged children up the ladder of development at the point where education makes the most difference. The most relevant question that I can see is: how can we achieve our aims with the most effectiveness and least amount of waste and risk possible? I think it's important to include values education as a strong component of the funding. We should stress peaceful approaches to problem solving in an effort to minimize risk that the schools could be used as training grounds for violent factions. But then to do that with credibility means the US and other nations need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Posted by joe perez | August 5, 2007 3:27 AM