Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Naturally, the implementation of such institutional reforms is difficult. The key swing states in presidential elections don’t want to end the institution that showers them with presidential attention. Similarly, congressmen have no incentive to give up the system that allows them to pick their voters by drawing district lines, rather than have the voters pick them. Hence writing legislation to implement these policies immediately is a fruitless task. Yet while politicians want to afford themselves every electoral advantage, they want others to focus on good politics. The identity of key swing states changes over time—those legislators who benefit from presidential favor today recognize that in twenty years they might not be so lucky. Consequently, their preference today is that in the future their state focuses on national policy rather than on partisan policy that might be contrary to their partisan desires. When the good of the country does not impact their personal aggrandizement, politicians are all in favor of national welfare and so might well pass legislation today to implement the institutional changes we recommend if those changes do not take effect for twenty years.

Independent Estimates of the Expected Financial Costs of War

History teaches us that the costs of conflict are always higher than the estimates provided by the president. Even worse, from time to time, when members of an administration provide higher cost estimates than those offered by the president, they are punished in a manner we refer to as “shoot the messenger.” Furthermore, as history has also taught us, successful presidents ensure that when they wage war it benefits their supporters while the costs are borne disproportionately by their domestic political opponents. These pathologies need to be fixed by guaranteeing that estimates of the cost of war are made by independent, nonpartisan bodies.

Wars are highly variable in their cost and duration, but how these factors vary has been successfully and repeatedly estimated by nonpartisan groups, including academic bodies and sometimes by government offices, such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It makes sense to use the strictly nonpartisan CBO and perhaps also its executive branch counterpart, the Office of Management and Budget, to be responsible for estimating the financial costs of war. The CBO already does this for virtually every piece of legislation that comes before Congress. For example, the CBO made an effort to estimate the cost of the Iraq War. Of course, it noted at the time that the information it had about the war’s aftermath was highly uncertain. Nevertheless, adopting assumptions made in the media (which could be replaced by detailed military briefings, if our recommendations are followed), the CBO made detailed estimates of the costs of fighting in Iraq and sustaining postwar peace, noting that “CBO has no basis for estimating other costs that might be associated with a conflict with Iraq such as the costs for coalition war fighting, reconstruction or foreign aid that the United States might choose to extend after a conflict ends. . . .”6

Given the estimates the CBO made, coupled with a stated war objective that involved regime replacement, what might the cost have been projected to be prior to the war’s beginning? Using midlevel values from the CBO estimate and prior US experience, deployment would have cost about $11 billion. Defeat of the Iraqi military and overthrow of the regime might have been projected as a six-month endeavor, costing about $45 billion, and occupation with a nation-building intention maybe required ten years. At the time of the war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pointed to success in Japan and Germany as the examples of how we could do nation building. In those two cases, it was about ten years after they surrendered that these countries first held competitive elections without US military supervision. Using the same time frame, Iraq’s occupation would have cost about $300 billion. Finally, the return of American forces after the occupation would have added $6 billion. Thus, a CBO-based midrange prewar estimate of $362 billion would have been readily supportable, although after the fact we know that would have been very low. Still, that is vastly more than the Bush administration estimated the war would cost. Recall that in Chapter 5 we reported that White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey estimated the cost of the Iraq War at $100–$200 billion, a massively conservative estimate. He was fired for his pains. Even the conservative estimate provided above based on the CBO’s thinking might have been sufficiently expensive to give rise to greater opposition to the war on the Main Streets of America. The Congressional Research Service eventually put the price of the Iraq War at $784 billion, double our number here.7 Had that price tag been estimated before the 2002 authorization, the decision to go to war might have been very different.

Obtain Independent Estimates of the Human Costs of War

A problem the CBO or any other panel faces in estimating the costs of war is that it looks at the finances, but it does not look systematically at the other costs in time and lives. In the spirit of our “What If?” sections, let’s suppose that Congress passed a law that required every administration that contemplates a war to share confidentially the core of its military plans with a nonpartisan body similar to the CBO. Based on these data, expected casualties and war duration could be estimated. The CBO already has the technical expertise to assess the financial cost of complex legislation. Political scientists know how to estimate the expected length and lethality of wars. Indeed, in Chapter 3 we used just such a study by Scott Bennett and Allan Stam to estimate the expected length of the Civil War and we concluded it should have been five to six months.8

Estimates of cost, lethality, and duration could have been readily prepared for every US war and also for the event that the United States chose not to escalate to war. Various nonpartisan academic algorithms for estimating the length of a war generally consider the material and human resource base of each side, the degree of asymmetry in the motivation to fight and win the war (itself a crucial factor in, for instance, the Vietnam War), the geographic distance between combatants, and other estimable factors.9 It would not be a particularly difficult task to assemble a suitably skilled panel, with retrospective evidence about past wars used to assess their methods.

One potential objection to this plan is that the United States does not always have time for such an assessment. For instance, consider the urgency with which the nation entered World War II in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The need for an immediate response precluded the time to prepare a cost analysis. A similar objection might be raised about Korea, where quick decisive action was needed if South Korea was to be saved. This objection might stand in the case of Korea as there was little prior expectation of an attack, but the question of US involvement in World War II had long been debated prior to Japan’s attack, as we discussed in Chapter 4. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to expect preestablished, standing panels, such as the CBO, to estimate cost, lethality, and duration. Indeed, such information would have been very informative to the political debate between isolationists and interventionists in 1918, 1940, and in every American war since. And, of course, today, thanks to high-speed computing, there need be no material delay arising from running an established algorithm with a suitable data base at the ready.

A third panel of experts ought to be created whose charge is to use the best extant research to estimate the human toll of any given war based on factors identified in advance of the dispute, validated against the record of past wars, and carefully estimated to include the likely range of error and how that range depends on uncertainties regarding the values on essential variables that make up the human-costs algorithm. Again the panel should be nonpartisan with membership replacement overlapping presidential terms and with qualification for service on this or any of the panels we have discussed based on the individual’s prior track record for reliability on producing accurate estimates and not based on the individual’s partisan ties or preferences.