Hidden Costs of the Iraq Fiasco: An excerpt from "Blind Into Baghdad"

Blind Into Baghdad is an excellent book by James Fallows. Published in 2006, it is originally comprised of a series of articles Fallows wrote for Atlantic Monthly chronicling the lead-up to and execution of the Iraq War by the Bush Administration. It is required reading for anyone who wants details of what exactly the Bush Administration did (and worse, didn't do) in invading Iraq. Below, I would like to share with you a passage I recently read which points out the horrible consequences of the way the Iraq War hemorrhages American tax dollars.

But hey, at least the Iraq War is making us safer, right?

Because of outlays for Iraq, the United States cannot spend $150 billion for other defensive purposes. Some nine million shipping containers enter American ports each year; only 2 percent of them are physically inspected, because inspecting more would be too expensive. The Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11, is a vast grab bag of federal agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Border Patrol to the former Immigration and Naturalization Service; on-going operations in Iraq cost significantly more each month than all Homeland Security expenses combined. The department has sought to help cities large and small to improve their "first responder" systems, especially with better communications for their fire and emergency medical services. This summer a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that fewer than a quarter of 231 major cities under review had received any of the aid they expected. An internal budget memo from the administration was leaked this past spring. It said that outlays for virtually all domestic programs, including homeland security, would have to be cut in 2005–and the federal budget deficit would still be more than $450 billion.

Worst of all, the government-wide effort to wage war in Iraq crowded out efforts to design a broader strategy against Islamic extremists and terrorists; to this day the administration has articulated no comprehensive long-term plan. It dismissed out of hand any connection between policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and increasing tension with many Islamic states. Regime change in Iraq, it said, would have a sweeping symbolic effect on worldwide sources of terror. That seems to have been true–but in the opposite way from what the president intended. It is hard to find a counterterrorism specialist who thinks that the Iraq War has reduced rather than increased the threat to the United States.

And here is the startling part. There is no evidence that the president and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and trade-offs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.