Book Review / MICHAEL BUSCH
Calculating the Costs of Empire
- Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 2007, 448 pgs.)
- The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes (W.W. Norton, 2008, 192 pgs.)
As the boondoggle in Baghdad grinds into another year of disaster, it seems Americans have lost interest in exploring the vast warehouses of Bush administration deceit. With economic meltdown looming on the horizon and Democratic self-destruction playing out in prime time, the criminally incompetent White House has been largely relegated to the quickly closing book on Bush presidency politics. But before the final page turns, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have taken a final stab at holding the administration to account. Their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, stands as the most clinically trenchant critique of the administration’s mishandling of Iraq to date.
Stiglitz and Bilmes set their sights on the government’s negligent accounting in George Bush’s war on Iraq. The White House did an excellent job before the invasion of frontloading its projected balance sheet with a host of benefits offered by Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. When it came to assessing the expected costs of such an endeavor, however, the Bush team proved less adept. According to some within the administration, democracy in Iraq, peace in the Middle East, the removal of a cruel dictator, and the elimination of his scary weapons, could all be had for the bargain basement price of roughly $50 billion.
After the battle for Iraq transitioned from conventional warfare to guerilla resistance and civil conflict, it became clear that the administration’s early estimates were wildly off the mark. Stiglitz and Bilmes began investigating the war’s actual cost and issued their first study — of which The Three Trillion Dollar War is an updated and expanded version — in 2006. At the time, their review produced an approximated cost totaling roughly $1 trillion. In answer to this unrequested audit, the White House shot back with claims that the pair had failed to provide a fully reflective cost-benefit analysis. Stiglitz and Bilmes agreed, and revised the study accordingly. To their horror, they found that the Bush administration was right: the numbers were off by over $2 trillion.
That their original calculations substantially low-balled Iraq’s considerable costs in no way undermines the pair’s credibility. Indeed, the authors make a formidable team. Stiglitz boasts an especially impressive resume, including stints as chief economist at the World Bank, economic advisor to the Clinton administration, and Nobel Laureate in Economics. More recently, however, he has stationed himself as a popular critic of the neoliberal economic agenda. Bilmes is no less famous within the world of Washington politics. Another veteran of the Clinton cabinet, she has proved a persistent source of headache for the Bush administration. From her post at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Bilmes has repeatedly raised the hackles of Defense Department officials with a steady stream of scathing reports outlining the Pentagon’s disregard for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Together, Stiglitz and Bilmes lay out a simple and straightforward agenda: establish an accurate price tag for the American war on Iraq. Of course, the incalculable costs are easily tallied. In five years of fighting, the United States has lost over 4,000 young men and women of its armed services. Violence in Iraq has sent another 60,000 American troops home maimed and injured. The ghastly conditions there have left over 100,000 vets with serious mental disorders and rendered hundreds of thousands more in need of psychological counseling. And these figures do not begin to account for the untold numbers of Iraqis killed, injured, and displaced by half a decade of brutal chaos.
But following the money, as the authors make clear, is far more difficult. American spending in Iraq has mushroomed to mindboggling heights. Number-crunchers at the Congressional Research Service find that Iraq eats up $4,000 per minute, an appetite that issues a hefty $10.3 billion invoice to the United States at the close of each month. Yet, Stiglitz and Bilmes contend that these numbers obscure the true economic cost. After systematically demonstrating that the accounting practices of the U.S Defense Department are antiquated, sloppy, and egregiously misleading, Stiglitz and Bilmes set about constructing a ledger for spending that more precisely captures the consequences of the conflict.
In order to gain traction in the muddy terrain of Bush administration war accounts, the authors begin by collecting the various appropriations requested by the President from Congress for the war. Next, they add the war’s hidden budget, concealed within silos vaguely labeled “operational expenditures.” After adjusting for inflation, Stiglitz and Bilmes tack on projected spending estimates for the next four years to the total. They then attach projected costs of disability and health care for returning veterans, before considering the price of restoring the American armed forces to their prewar conditions. Finally, they add the budgetary responsibilities of war’s aftermath that fall to other arms of the government beyond the Defense Department. In total, they arrive at their book’s title: three trillion dollars.
But they don’t stop there. Since almost the entirety of war monies spent have been on loan, Stiglitz and Bilmes persuasively argue that any true reckoning of Iraq’s cost should include interest accrued. Adding to the pile of bills already assembled, they take stock of interest payments made on existing loans; unpaid interest currently mounting on those loans; and interest that will stem from future loans necessary to finance the war. Once these amounts have been identified, Stiglitz and Bilmes conclude with thumbnail sketches of Iraq’s macroeconomic impact on both the United States and the world. The final bill, if the authors are correct, will arrive on the next President’s desk in excess of five trillion dollars.
While Stiglitz and Bilmes sometimes lose their footing on the slippery slope of popularizing otherwise dry academic research, The Three Trillion Dollar War is punctuated with enough jaw-dropping reminders of White House corruption to keep readers interested. Of particular note, they expose the previously unreported costs associated with the government’s reliance on private armies in Iraq. As it turns out, not only has the administration doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to cronies running corporate military outfits, but it also picks up their insurance premiums for operations in Iraq. According to Stiglitz and Bilmes:
“It is difficult to estimate how much the government spends on insurance premiums, because no agency regulates the premiums, and no one tracks the overall costs. Insurance premiums are estimated to cost between 10-21 percent of salaries. That would mean that the US government would pay $10,000 to $21,000 in insurance for a private security guard earning $100,000 annually…But even assuming we paid only 15 percent of a weekly wage of $1,000 for 100,000 contractors this adds another $780 million to the government’s annual costs.”
And this acutely conservative estimate covers just the premiums. As Stiglitz and Bilmes point out, “if the contractors are killed or injured in an ‘act of war’ (whether or not the injury occurred during work hours), the US taxpayer is also responsible for paying disability, medical and death benefits.” The companies themselves, of course, pay nothing. Compared with the government’s shameful subsidization of prosperous private military groups, the paltry sums set aside to cover health care costs for disabled vets are cast in painfully high relief. These disgraces are further compounded by the fact that a number of contractors currently employed in Iraq earned their chops as Chilean “disappearers” under Pinochet. Apparently, the government deems war criminals more suitable for insurance protections and post-war health care than members of its own armed forces.
There is little question that private contractors have enjoyed the Bush administration’s addiction to deficit spending. The average American, however, has been less fortunate. Indeed, as Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, had monies spent in Iraq been directed to public investment, the rising tide of recession could have been in part counteracted. “A trillion dollars could have built 8 million additional housing units, could have hired some 15 million additional public school teachers for one year; could have paid for 120 million children to attend a year of Head Start; or insured 530 million children for health care for one year; or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships at public universities. Now multiply those numbers by three.”
Meanwhile, Iraq remains in heartbreaking disarray, a bleak sinkhole swallowing countless lives. Given this distressing situation, it’s surprising to find someone outside the West Wing still clinging to the false promise of American Empire. And yet here he stands: Robert Kaplan, beltway darling and correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, arguing in his new book for a greater application of American military involvement overseas.
When Kaplan surveys the scene of international politics, he sees a wilderness of tribalism, violence, irrationality, and hatred. The remedy to this chaotic stew of potential dangers? Enlightened American imperialism. Since the invasion of Afghanistan by American forces near the close of 2001, Kaplan has traveled — with the American government’s stamp of approval — to a host of countries around the globe where the U.S. military has established an active presence.
Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts takes shape as Kaplan’s second installment in his series of in-depth looks at the American military. The first, Imperial Grunts, was a Frankensteinian concoction of war tourist reportage and traditional travelogue, masquerading as officially sanctioned military history. But it worked. The itinerary Kaplan chronicled in Imperial Grunts includes the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, but also features stops in more peripheral locales where American officers are engaged with the chores of imperial maintenance. From the battle of Fallujah, and counter-narcotics operations in Colombia, to an indigenous troop-training mission in Yemen, the scenes captured in Imperial Grunts provide an arresting portrait of the American response to emerging challenges to its post-Cold War hegemony. The sequel is far less successful.
Kaplan shifts focus away from American ground operations to look instead at those responsible for patrolling the world’s skies and waterways. Kaplan’s claim that security of the vast Pacific will largely determine the rise of China as it develops into a 21st century superpower is surely correct. In order to get a better sense of how such security is guaranteed, Kaplan zips back and forth across the ocean: now on a battleship; now in the claustrophobic confines of a nuclear submarine; now on a massive transport plane. To be sure, his observations of war-gaming potential Chinese threats, or the collapse of Kim Jong-il’s North Korean regime, provide an excellent primer in the uncertain complexities that characterize the balance of world power as it shifts east.
Yet while the American military is battling threats to global security, Kaplan takes care to wage his own war against the “media” and its liberal elite sponsors. The familiar tropes of an effeminate northeastern Left — adverse to freedom and the manly virtues necessary for its defense — are resurrected throughout Hog Pilots only to be flogged to death again by Kaplan’s disdain. For Kaplan, reporters do little but “get in the way,” with their “klieg lights,” and insistence on covering stories that are damaging to the U.S. national interest, and thus are best kept from the public’s awareness.
Bemoaning the media’s resistance to celebrating the “heroes” of the “Global War on Terrorism” [sic], Kaplan smarts at the coverage lavished upon the Abu Ghraib scandal. “While the exposure of wrongdoing by American troops is obviously of paramount importance, less obviously it can become a tyranny of its own when taken to an extreme.”
Despite the fact that the latter part of this assertion makes little sense, its intended meaning is clear enough. This, in turn, suggests that Kaplan misses his own point. It is precisely the American military’s professionalism, self-discipline and valor that make disgraces, such as those at of Abu Ghraib, shockingly newsworthy.
What makes Kaplan’s attacks on the press doubly inappropriate is his claim to independence from the media monolith against which he rails. After all, he has long held a privileged spot on the roster of American media elites. Like other heavyweight pundits, Kaplan enjoys a readership that includes influential actors at the CIA and State Department, not to mention residents of the Oval Office. Kaplan’s stabs at the competition are not only distracting, but they provide an absurd textual overlay to his globe-trekking adventures as well. In one chapter, Kaplan complains that the press has too much access to military. In the next, we read about the thrills of Kaplan’s joyride in a B-2 Stealth Bomber. (“More people had been in space” than had been in the B-2, an excited Kaplan reminds us.)
Hog Pilots suffers from other problems as well. Numerous critics have taken Kaplan to task for his poor readings of history and literature. These accusations are well-founded. Kaplan clearly fancies himself an American Patrick Leigh Fermor, bringing to bear on his travels a wealth of experience and literary sensibility. Throughout his books, Kaplan borrows liberally from a grab bag of literature, history, and political science references to frame his discussions of global events. But while this certainly makes for colorful writing, it also leads to lousy analysis. Kaplan has undoubtedly read widely, but unfortunately not deeply.
This shortcoming is nowhere more evident than in Kaplan’s abuse of political science. Kaplan proudly admits to being a political “realist” in his worldview. Yet even a cursory glance at realist thought demonstrates that he’s nothing of the sort. To wit, where realists see an international system dominated by self-interested, sovereign nation-states, Kaplan sees a world where the power of non-state actors has largely supplanted a crumbling Westphalian system. When hard-core realists argued persuasively that the invasion of Iraq was a fool’s errand destined to undermine the United States’ national interest, Kaplan dutifully banged his war drum, praising George W. Bush’s foresight and resolve.
But Kaplan’s most egregious abuse of realist theory revolves around his preoccupation with “anarchy.”
Traditional realists take pains to emphasize the term’s Greek etymology to describe a rational international order lacking a government of governments. In Kaplan’s mind, however, anarchy connotes a disorderly international realm, where the irrational forces of man’s inner depravity are given full expression. Provided such a grim outlook on the state of world affairs, Kaplan’s faith in the American military’s ability to provide global stability is unsurprising. There’s one problem, though: Kaplan suspects that Americans may not be up to the challenge.
As it turns out, the media and its liberal elite following aren’t the only spineless players driving our “non-warrior democracy.” The American people are at fault as well. The United States, it seems, lacks a “broad-based warrior mentality” that clearly leaves it at a disadvantage in the chaos of a new century. This is to be expected, however. “The loss of a warrior mentality and the rise of universal values is a feature of all stable, Western-style middle-class democracies,” Kaplan assures us. That’s why we need to depend, now more than ever, on the armed services to handle the dirty-work of international politics. Except that Kaplan turns on them as well.
The members of our social and economic elite that avoid military service, and encourage their children to do likewise, are not the only problem. Just as the American public has a limited appetite for grand causes and conflicts, so do the troops themselves, outside of the best units.
Apparently the cancer of liberalism has spread, and is eating away at the fabric of our military institutions. So where does that leave us? Don’t ask Robert Kaplan. As best he understands it “the question is, in what direction is our morale headed, as well as the morale of our current and future adversaries? Argue the question as we may, one thing is clear: we’re fated to find out.”
Finally, Hog Pilots suffers from the sheer ambition and design of Kaplan’s undertaking. By story’s end, Kaplan’s narrative threatens to collapse from exhaustion. The constant zigzagging from one end of the world to another provides little continuity for the reader, and Kaplan himself seems to grow tired of the project. Hog Pilots predictably breaks down into a tedious parade of sloppy writing, unsupported generalizations, crude observations and silly stereotypes. Where to begin, for example, with this charming snippet about the former Soviet Republic of Georgia:
Georgia did not have a European tradition beyond Tbilisi’s architecture and circle of intellectuals. The rest of the country was heavily Oriental. The strength of Georgia’s mafias and the weakness of its governing institutions attested to the predominant influence of Persia’s clan and tribal system over that of Russia’s bureaucratic tradition.
But don’t despair, because the country’s “women had sad, intoxicatingly dark expressions and the noble bearing of Eastern princesses. And they were always on the lookout for Western husbands and boyfriends.” It’s a good thing, too. With military enlistments down, and the nation’s military commitments widening by the year, it’s safe to say that American grunts will face increasingly long deployments overseas. And not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also those lonely spots found at the ends of the earth.
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