Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

I did the numbers recently. We've spent something like $25,000,000 per insurgent kill.

Those are *very* rough numbers - wobbly data all the way down the chain, pretty much - but this is a remarkably large number for taking one annoyed man with an AK47 off the streets.

Another way of seeing it is $75,000 for every man, woman and child in Iraq.

I think it is undeniable that, for that kind of expenditure, there was a great deal of room for growing an entirely different class of solutions to the problems of continuing a secure daily life in Iraq.

I've long been a fan of your writing and analysis. Your books have been influential in my own thinking. But this is one time that I think you're flat out wrong. Alasdair Robert's piece seems to comport with just how this "global war on terror" has been sold and carried out in this country. It was never set out to be anything more than a lengthy period of inconvenience to most of us in this country. After all, the President's own prescription was to go out and shop. Shop to keep the economy booming along so that we could all share in its wondrous benefits. Well, perhaps not equally share. Roberts says we need to stop blaming the neocons and their failed analyses and policies and look in the mirror at our own complicity. After all, we bought into the truly simplistic idea that only our military and allied professionals were going to be burdened by this war and its ramifications. We're all complicit in this notion that we don't have to share the burdens. Roberts conclusions seem to be right on the point.

I took much of what J. Stephens did from the article. In 2003 Colin Powell could've shown a picture of Saddam Hussein carrying a particularly sharp boomerang and a strong majority of Americans would have pounded the war drums. 5 years (and one re-election) later and we're all quite satisfied to lay the failures of Iraq at the feet of the Bush administration and tell ourselves our hands are clean.

“If national security types and the military do their respective jobs well, it ain't about the money but rather the allies we attract.”

As we found out, when push comes to shove, some potential national allies find commitments to policy and action unattractive, some understandably and some for very unsavory reasons. I agree that, once committed, if national security types and the military do their respective jobs, then more allies are likely to follow and join the action. What some of us clearly see and others vehemently deny is that very hard-won gains in competence and in successful campaigns of national security types and the military have been in spite of a very unhelpful continual sniper and propaganda war between ideological/economic/political factions here in the U.S. I don’t say that it should or could have easily been otherwise. There are issues to be resolved. I just say that this is the way it was and continues to be. I still think that PNM and BFA are generally the right way to go and that maybe my great grand children will have a better time of it, but of course with different problems, new rule sets, and new opportunities.

Arrgh, requires a subscription! Oh well, wouldn't be the first time I've talked out of my ass on here. . .

I have to agree with the others on here. The reasons being:
a) The arguments given for the war in Iraq just weren't that great. But we were buzzed by the ease of the takedown of the Taliban and scared out of our wits by 9/11. As certain Presidential candidates rhetoric illustrates, many of us still are.
b) Sacrifice can be defined many ways. We didn't need a draft or war rationing to fight in Afganistan or Iraq. We DID and DO need lots of money. Where's the war bonds? Why the insistence on tax cuts? Did the administration really think the long-term economic effects of the war would be worth the debt they're saddling with the current means of financing the war?
c) It took several years and a hurricane for people to turn against the war, in spite of all the media coverage.

You gave an old military saying once: If you want it bad, you get it bad. We as a nation badly wanted our government to go out, pursue the bad guys who hurt us on 9/11, and help us to return to our 'normal' state of obliviousness about the rest of the world. We as a nation didn't want to face War Bond drives, or changes in our taxes, or debates on whether our military is up to the task being set to it.

Bush and Co. gave us what we wanted. For better and for worse.

I agree with this article in that the Iraq war has been nothing more than the ultimate manifestation of our arrogant/apathetic engagement with the rest of the world. We wanted revenge, so did GWB (for different reasons though). We wanted to punch back against an easily labeled bad guy, GWB delivered. I do not feel that we as a nation take the time to understand the causes/effects of our actions. GWB has been the president we deserved, (of questionable judgement, stubborn, uncurious, myopic and arrogant). We see his failures and subconciously know that they are our own as well, but we want to tar and feather him and his cohorts and brand them as an aberrition, not as the true fruits of our current paradigm. I feel we make the mistake all others before us have made, substituting the momentum found at the end of a run for sustainable progress. I feel that is why there is a need for honesty on our part towards ourselves and others. Our issues are not terminal, but our continued denial could make them so.

Let me read this back to you guys and see if you've said what you really want to say. What I'm reading off the majority of commenter's on this thread is that:

Because about half of the voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections were stirred by Karl Rove's platoon of half truths to react to their fears or their angers relating to the liberal members of the government; because they were firemen or store clerks or engineers or any other mindset that didn't immerse themselves in the dissection political rhetoric and back room deals and therefore applied enough trust to the the process so that Rove was able to take them in, therefore they are rubes and deserved to be rolled? Therefore the eight years of rule by Haliburton and it's cronies are what the American people chose and deserved?

I have never agreed that the liar has less or equal responsibility than the people he lied to. To make the world work, people offer their trust, and if that trust is betrayed then someone chose consciously to betray it.

I also perceive in the laments about Sleeping Giant America a desire to see America Rampant, crushing her enemies into dust. However dis-sastified I am with George W Bush he did not gather up the shocked and frightened American People of 9/11 and lead them forth on a WWII scale crusade. A Pearl Harbor moment landed in his lap and he did not use it to build a giant war machine economy or flash-fry the cities of his enemies. What we received instead was a measured (perhaps hollow) military response in the context of frightening fiscal irresponsibility.

I do not lament that I am not a part of a "Greatest Generation", because I do not live in a world endangered by a Fascist Totalitarian take-over. This was not the time to have WWII reborn, and bearing that cost would quickly beggar us with no value in return. In his article, which I have read, Mr Roberts (or the editor) mentions that he will soon release a book with the subtitle "...Crisis of Authority...". What do I, or any of my countrymen/women get out of having more government authority to submit to? Wasn't I supposed to be pursuing Life, Liberty and Happiness?

The government is supposed to be of, by and for the people. High officials lying to the people and engaging in massive profit taking do not make the people themselves guilty.

both sides have a point. undoubtedly, the American public is to blame for being sold a bill of goods on the conduct of the GWOT.

but, in my opinion, the Bush Administration bears much greater blame for their bungling. we do not need to stop blaming the neocons. theirs it the greater fault.

i disagree that we need a much stronger war footing and i doubt the American public needs to bear a lot more of the burden. i am concerned about funding choices at the federal level (sort of my job). ultimately we're responsible for that, too, as our representatives misspend and pork away, but it's a couple of steps removed.

i agree that the ideological war here at home is no help, for which the MSM cannot be wholly blamed. where would the 'alternatives' be if they didn't have the MSM foil to rail against?

The tax cuts prior to the planned war are what add insult to injury, but the People did not see it coming. The 'taxes are always bad' message was sold with great success by Team Bush, a group of people committed to halving the size of the Federal government. You get one guess as to which half has to go (hint: it isn't the DoD). 'You might be rich someday, too, so don't tax the rich,' was the message.

Of course, the rich shan't be asked to pay. They have 'other priorities,' like profiting from this war through DoD contracts.
Were it not for the 130,000 or so private contractors in Iraq making money for the well-connected, we could not have a 'mere' 150,000 or so U.S. troops on the ground.

A draft was deliberately avoided, as it is one of the lessons of Vietnam even the Hawks took to heart. Thus the rich can keep their military-age offspring shielded from an 'undue' burden and leave the poor to fight and die for them.

If this is the war America 'deserves,' it is only due to the efficacy of propaganda that the mainstream corporate media willingly megaphoned for the Administration. Alternative voices were shouted down as un-American in the run up to war in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud.

The more I see Congress giving Bush blank checks for war year after year, I have to wonder if endless war is little more than a back-door strategy to bankrupt the Treasury, forcing the government to say 'Gee, we'd love to pay for the New Deal and Great Society programs, but we simply haven't the money.' In other words, the very programs the Conservatives have *never* viewed as legitimate yet which they are unwilling to confront in a forthright manner in the Congress.