Neil Reynolds: Costing ‘success’ in Afghanistan and Iraq

Neil Reynolds is an Ottawa writer whose columns on national economic issues appear Wednesday and Friday. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen.

You might think that the cost of America’s foreign wars has driven the country into bankruptcy. You’d be wrong. It didn’t in the Second World War (when U.S. military spending peaked in 1944 at 37.8 per cent of GDP). It didn’t in the Vietnam War (when military spending peaked in 1968 at 9.4 per cent of GDP). It didn’t in the Cold War (when military spending peaked in 1988 at 6.1 per cent of GDP). And it hasn’t in Iraq and Afghanistan (when military spending peaked last year at 4.7 per cent of GDP).

It’s not so much that the U.S. has spent too much on war. It’s that it has spent too much on peace – most of it with borrowed money. War expenses aside, the country has increased its debt in the past two years by more than $4-trillion (from $10-trillion to $14-trillion).

But the issue isn’t the financial cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars. It’s the human cost – which, however appalling, can be properly assessed only with the passage of time. On the ground, though, American (and Canadian) soldiers themselves never ceased to believe, for the most part, that they were engaged in just wars. In large numbers, they volunteered for multiple tours of duty.

Further, these wars were successfully waged. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is finished. Osama bin Laden is dead. (The Times of London says he spent his final days grubbing for money to pay the rent on his safe house in Pakistan.) The Taliban’s role has been diminished in much of the country. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein remains dead, and a putative democracy operates, however tentatively, in his absence.

Were the U.S. and its allies victorious in Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course not. Were they successful? Absolutely...