The Zong

O gentle readers of The Zong! I do so appreciate your comments and loyal subscriptions to my RSS feed. That said, you all should learn to be more like Joe Alterio, who reads everyday and then sends me links to stuff to write about so I don’t have to take time out of my “busy” schedule to look for it myself.

This time around, Joe directed me to a depressing but strikingly illustrative article published yesterday in the New York Times by David Leonhardt. Even though his last name looks like a type-o, I like that he’s trying to remind people that the money we’ve spent on the Iraq War isn’t just coming out of the Bush Twins’ allowance. His estimated 1.2 trillion-dollar price tag for our Mesopotamian adventure, a conservative estimate based upon the work of several reputable economists, could very well have been spent on something other than killing people in a country that never attacked us. He lays some of it out pretty nicely.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

Well, that’s just great. I realize that we never would have used the money to actually do these things, but they’re more of a reference point for the larger idea here. What will this $1.2 trillion actually end up buying us? It wasn’t all that long ago that we were warned of an imminent threat in Iraq. Most of Congress and a majority of the American people were convinced that going into Iraq was a vital step towards making us safe from terrorists. (Al Gore wasn’t) It could, back then, be argued that money was no object in the face of weapons of mass destruction and a government harboring Al Qaeda within its borders. Setting aside the fact that not a single thing we were told actually turned out to be true, the Bush Administration actually did put a price tag on the war: $50 billion dollars. Here’s a great quote about where that number came from:

Mr. Daniels declined to explain how budget officials had reached the $50 billion to $60 billion range for war costs, or why it was less in current dollars than the 43-day gulf war in 1991. He also declined to specify how much had been budgeted for munitions and troops.

Bush fired the guy who put the number closer to $200 billion, Larry Lindsey.

If Leonhardt’s economists are even in the ballpark, then the $70 trillion or so in direct costs ought to raise some eyebrows, don’t you think? I mean, one thing I know about Congress is that they love having hearings about stuff. Why the hell don’t they have a hearing about where they got their numbers from? I realize that Republicans controlled Congress back then, but did anyone even think to ask how they came to those numbers before they signed off on it?

While we’ve been bitching for years about all the other lies this administration has peddled to us, this unfathomable discrepancy in costs should be something even conservatives can get excited about.

- M.G.