Wonkette

The Democrats released a study this week attempting to quantify both the actual and “hidden” costs of the Iraq War. Their estimate: $1.3 trillion so far. Columnist James Pethokoukis wants to know if that makes us $1 trillion poorer or if our government might have been able to find plenty of other ways to spend that money (3 guesses what he thinks). Three b-school guys from Chicago think that we could have spent a boatload of money trying to ineffectively contain Saddam Hussein anyway, and a really smart guys thinks that we maybe shouldn’t be doing cost-benefit analysis of war because we might well have more of them. We try to make a little sense of it, after the jump.

So, basically, the point the Dems are trying to make is that the war in Iraq has been costly (easy) and pointless. Well, they also throw in the Afghanistan conflict which I think is probably less pointless, but I understand that they wanted to make the whole thing look more expensive and shit, so I’ll just ignore that. The difficulty with calling it pointless is the required assumption that we were better off with Saddam in power, which I think is open to some debate. (I also think that the Bush Administration, in trying to hard to “sell” the war did themselves more harm than good with their intel flubs and exaggerations in this department, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the U.S. was better off under the status quo either)

Debate is what Steven Davis, Kevin Murphy, Robert Topel are looking to spark with their paper comparing the costs of the Iraq conflict (in 2003 dollars) with the potential costs for continuing the policy of engagement instead. They lay out some pretty convincing numbers to show that continuing the policies of containment would have been a costly undertaking in and of itself, but they don’t at all address the moral or other issues that everyone is really up in arms about. This is the thing that I think the Dems are ignoring at their own peril in trying to prove how costly the war is. People don’t like the war because people are dying, it’s not being won and because they feel like they were lied to by the Administration in an effort to earn their support. If it was going well and things were hunky-dory, the costs wouldn’t be an issue (which makes this, then, their weakest argument).

Posner basically rips everyone to shreds a little because he thinks doing a cost-benefit analysis of the war is kind of silly. He points out that no one makes decisions this in reality and the only time it might have been a useful analysis to undertake would have been in the wake of the invasion when things weren’t necessarily going that well and the underestimated insurgency was getting started.

Pethokoukis (inspired by Posner), though, takes the cost-benefit analysis to its logical, if South Park inspired end: if we went to war for oil, why aren’t we going after Canada?

$1.6 trillion Iraq, Afghan war toll: Democrats [CNN]
Is the Iraq War Costlier Than Doing Nothing? [Capital Commerce]
War in Iraq versus Containment [AEI]
The Cost of the War in Iraq–Posner’s Comment [The Becker-Posner Blog]