On October 14, 2010, I wrote a post titled “The Quagmire of Disproportionate Response” to illustrate the key objective of terrorism and how the attack of 9/11 has accomplished exactly what Osama bin Laden intended. The following article (quoted with only minor editing) provides an analysis of the principle and its disastrous effect on America’s future both at home and abroad.
Osama bin Laden cost America more than any villain, ever—which is exactly the way he wanted it.
By Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley, National Journal, May 5, 2011, 2:53 p.m.
The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.
As we mark Osama bin Laden’s death, what’s striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we’ve gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden’s terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.
All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America’s costliest past enemies.
Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.
Perhaps the biggest economic silver lining from our bin Laden spending, if there is one, is the accelerated development of unmanned aircraft. That’s our $3 trillion windfall, so far: Predator drones.
“We have spent a huge amount of money which has not had much effect on the strengthening of our military, and has had a very weak impact on our economy,” says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who coauthored a book on the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Certainly, in the course of the fight against bin Laden, the United States escaped another truly catastrophic attack on our soil. Al Qaida, though not destroyed, has been badly hobbled. “We proved that we value our security enough to incur some pretty substantial economic costs en route to protecting it,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a national-security analyst at the Brookings Institution.
But that willingness may have given bin Laden exactly what he wanted. While the terrorist leader began his war against the United States believing it to be a “paper tiger” that would not fight, by 2004 he had already shifted his strategic aims, explicitly comparing the U.S. fight to the Afghan incursion that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al Qaida would “make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations.”
Considering that we’ve spent one-fifth of a year’s gross domestic product—more than the entire 2008 budget of the United States government—responding to his 2001 attacks, he may have been onto something.
The Scorecard
Other enemies throughout history have extracted higher gross costs, in blood and in treasure, from the United States.
The Civil War and World War II produced higher casualties and consumed larger shares of our economic output. As an economic burden, the Civil War was America’s worst cataclysm relative to the size of the economy. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the Union and Confederate armies combined to spend $80 million, in today’s dollars, fighting each other. That number might seem low, but economic historians who study the war say the total financial cost was exponentially higher: more like $280 billion in today’s dollars when you factor in disruptions to trade and capital flows, along with the killing of 3 to 4 percent of the population.
The [Civil] war “cost about double the gross national product of the United States in 1860,” says John Majewski, who chairs the history department at the University of California (Santa Barbara). “From that perspective, the war on terror isn’t going to compare.”
On the other hand, these earlier conflicts—for all their human cost—also furnished major benefits to the U.S. economy. After entering the Civil War as a loose collection of regional economies, America emerged with the foundation for truly national commerce; the first standardized railroad system sprouted from coast to coast, carrying goods across the union; and textile mills began migrating from the Northeast to the South in search of cheaper labor, including former slaves who had joined the workforce. The fighting itself sped up the mechanization of American agriculture: As farmers flocked to the battlefield, the workers left behind adopted new technologies to keep harvests rolling in with less labor. [End of quoted article]
Take a moment to read again the quotes in bold print above. They are from the one man who understood what no one responsible for directing America’s response to a state of fear was able to grasp, and we allowed him to lure us into the quagmire that traps us today.
There are those who contend that since defense is such a small part of our total budget, we can’t blame it for our current economic woes. From the perspective of the bean-counters, that’s true enough. But when considered from a broader perspective, it’s equvalent to a grifter’s hustle. Get the mark looking at one hand and pick his pocket with the other.
Consider the synergistic effect of the following:
- A litany of fraud and waste in the Middle East caused by America’s misguided attempts to nation-build and bribe surface loyalty.
- The commitment of multimillion-dollar weapons systems against individual human targets in a futile war of attrition.
- A mindset that equates safety with ever-advancing technological superiority and preparedness to deal with any hypotnetical threat, no matter how remote.
- The perpetual revolving door from the military to the defense industry to political lobbyist to political advisory roles.
- The influence-purchasing power of contributions from industry to political campaigns. That’s free speech that can’t be infringed upon, right? As if ten dollars among hundreds of thousands from a defense contractor is equivalent to the ten dollars from Aunt Bertie.
- Government collusion with the banking, insurance, and finance industries to remove safeguards because these guys can police themselves. As if selling securities to clients while betting on those same products to fail is acceptable.
- And when the house of cards collapsed, the culprits were considered too big to fail. How convenient. We have to bail them out so they can recover, never be held acountable for what they did, and be allowed to return to business as usual while the rest of America suffers the consequences of their unbridled greed.
- Business as usual continues elsewhere, of course. Using the state of fear to keep Americans convinced that daddy knows best, the wheeling and dealing over the 2012 defense budget includes political trickery in which the 545 all-powerful few scramble for the piece of the pie that benefits not 300-million Americans as a whole, but their individual constituents. For just one example, Google “F-35 JSF alternate engine” and do some reading.
In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s death, let’s keep our collective attention on the challenges that remain as daunting as ever. We are in deep, serious trouble, and I predict that when all the partisan bickering and finger-pointing is done, the rest of us will most likely be standing over the ruins of a once-great nation as the facilitators of our demise settle into the lives of luxury they have so painstakingly built for themselves.
If you think that’s a misleading statement, check out the net worth of the wealthiest 25 members of Congress. Then if you still don’t believe it, check out the bottom 25. Or you can click here for one of my posts with that information: “American Cancer.”
The root cause of this debacle is a reversal of roles.
They’re supposed to be serving us.
