$85 Billion will wreck the world. $35 Billion is walking around money.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I am largely agnostic on the wisdom of the upcoming Afghanistan policy but I am not at all agnostic on the nature of our politics of war and peace.

The Senate healthcare bill is, IIRC, around $85 billion/year. (Something like $850 billion over ten years? Probably not evenly divided, but this is a ballpark observation.)

I am reliably informed by people like Joe Lieberman that the Senate health care bill would ruin our economy because of it's vast size and crushing additions to the deficit, even though the bill is deficit neutral.

But sending approximately 35,000 additional forces to Afghanistan would cost at least $35 billion/ year for as long as it lasts. And every penny of that will be borrowed and tacked onto the deficit.

I don't care about the deficit right now, personally. The point is that the deficit is considered an automatic bar to some actions, but irrelevant to others.

Deficit neutrality for healthcare was a pre-condition. Attempts to make an Afghan escalation deficit neutral (war tax) are, however, dismissed as loony-left irresponsibility.

I attribute a lot of this craziness to applying ideas about WAR to optional police-actions and coercive diplomacy.

Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. We are at WAR. Our stated war objective is the unconditional surrender of the Empire of Japan. Period.

Spend whatever needs to be spent. Do whatever needs to be done.

But almost no aspect of the War on Terror was ever a war in the way we think of WARS. We did have a fixed geo-strategic objective of deposing the Taliban as government of Afghanistan, but that was accomplished almost overnight. Beyond that our objective was/is punishing evil-doers and keeping America safe. (Building a nation in Afghanistan may keep America safe.)

The Chicago police force and DA's office have the same mission. Punishing evil-doers and keeping Chicago safe. (And there is a nation building componant... we educate kids, try to improve neighborhoods, etc. to reduce crime long-term.)

And police budgets are not open-ended. (And god knows domestic nation-building-type efforts are not open-ended!!!)

Policing is a varriable... we buy the security we can afford without costing us too much other stuff.

What if al Queada gets nukes and blows up New York? That would be a bad thing. You assign probabilities, weight values, figure out what you can really do about it and generally treat the threat like any other threat.

The Empire of Japan was centralized and had the capacity to really fuck us up... not merely the abstract potential in certain scenarios. (They couldn't conquer us but they could shut down our economic participation in about half the globe.) And we could define victory. We have not spent any time worrying about being bombed by Japan since 1945.

There is a good reason to spend all-out on real WARS and that thinking has affected out approach to anything that can be cast as a war.

But the war on terror is more comparable to two efforts that routinely face budgetary concerns: pandemic control and asteroid defense.

We can imagine really bad pandemics so we do an okay job of funding our communicable disease defense system, but we don't give CDC whatever they ask for. (They would ask for plenty, and with good reason.)

We cannot imagine being hit by a big asteroid even though it is absolutely inevitable and would make concerns like al Queada, global warming and pandemic flu seem like the good news. But such an event is inevitable within a w-i-d-e time-frame so we do not have an asteroid defense capability in place, even though it is within our technological grasp.

I am not arguing for (or against) massive spending on asteroid defense.

I am noting that we apply cost-benefit analysis to restraining and ameliorating chronic threats to public safety, unless it is cast as a war where our boys are shooting at their boys, and visa-versa.

Our new policy in Afghanistan may be a fine idea, but it isn't obviously unpatriotic to mention the money.


Again, I do not want to be misunderstood here... this effort in Afghanistan may or may not be worth the money in the abstract and I am not the least bit concerned with the deficit at this moment in economic time. But this effort should be viewed the same way we view other efforts to counteract chronic threats, not the way we think of WWII.