Paul Wolfowitz’s statement that the United States’s government was ”pretty much clueless on counterÂinsurgency” in the first year of the Iraq war is both creepy and revealing. At that time, it will be remembered, Wolfowitz was the US assistant secretary for defence and, with his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, was a gung-ho neocon.
Five years on — and well over a million Iraqis dead — is the truth, at last, seeping through?
Even in the aftermath of 9/11, it seems inconceivable that the slide towards the decision to invade could have occurred without a greater degree of what nowadays is so adoringly called accountability. But it did. Riding rough shod over the recommendations of many in his own party, of his father — a former US president — and in the face of demonstrations in every major city in the world, George W Bush took his country (and a motley band of allies) into a war which has also taken more than 4 000 American lives — more than 50 last month.
Looking back, the duplicity of US diplomacy — organised hypocrisy, as it has often been called — was a rerun of much that has gone before. But grasping the extent of the sheer deceit seemed more difficult because there was great universal sympathy for what happened in 9/11.
At the time, it was difficult to see that the US’s diplomacy was redolent with the idea of revenge even though, at the time, its sabre-rattling promised to deliver a spectacle of Old Testament proportions.
This conceit was rooted in memories of the US’s military glory, which had helped to liberate Europe and to occupy Japan in earlier generations. Only recently, of course, that force had taken the form of the United Nations-sanctioned Persian Gulf War that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. That war effectively brought the rush of combat into the living room literally with high-pixel quality. The image which lingered from 1991 was the video game — confirming that old truism that the metaphors of war invariably hide its horror behind the language of play.
In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, I was living in New York City surrounded by opponents of the war, many of whom were veteran activitists. It was an exciting and depressing time: their energy levels were high and the depth of their understanding of the issues crystal clear, but their language was caught in the 1960s. At a sombre anti-war demonstration on a sunny day in Central Park, I heard defiant speech after defiant speech harking back to Vietnam. Each memory of how people’s power triumphed over an unwanted war was celebrated with resounding applause. And yet their tongue, their tone and even their tenor seemed out of place in an age in which everything, including the very idea of terror itself, was said to be globalising.
Five years on, I now recognise that the weakness of the anti-war protest was this: in protest politics, language matters more than longing. This is why, sustained by the belief that their mission was both ordained by history and sanctioned by the language of globalisation, the invasion went ahead.
The key to unlocking this standoff between the warrior American and his Pacific alter ego may well have been provided by the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes in their recently released book. They argue that all war takes human life, certainly, but their point is directed elsewhere: war costs money.
Ironically, their language — though not their measured tone — comes straight out of that culture that created the ”market” revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. This explains how it is that the point of entry into their analysis is budgeting — what an article or activity costs both now and into the future. The individual item, of course, was the invasion of Iran: its ongoing costs, the five years of recurring costs on the US and its people. So, what Stiglitz and Bilmes have done is provide an estimation of the costs of the war — in the form of an economic dossier with a budget, cash flow and estimated future costs of a war that won’t go away.
It is a deceptively simple technique because it uses the dicing and slicing language increasingly used to influence budgets, household or other. Take the idea of opportunity costs: the monthly cost of the Iraq war is more than three times what the US gives annually to Africa. Or take the idea of future cost: the US has given its veterans a ”promissory note” — access to medical services for two years and, beyond this, disability payments for life.
Other costs that make up their staggering total amount — the three trillion dollars in the title –include those hidden in other budgets, corrections for inflation and the ”time value of money”, interest and the costs of restoring the US military to its pre-war readiness. So it is that the book’s multiple charts and graphs tell of dissipation and impending ruin — a form of ”military Keynesism” as another American scholar, Chalmers Johnson, recently described it.
This bill — in a manner of speaking — presents the first real report card on the Iraq war. This claim must be qualified: the US’s energetic publishing industry has produced book after recent book on the same shameful events in these five years past — the lack of boots on the ground during the invasion, the sickening pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, the failure of successive Iraqi governments. The insights they offer — drawn from politics, sociology and philosophy — are familiar ones, even if the Iraqi case presents a unique set of circumstances. But by using the tricks of budgetary analysis, Stiglitz and Bilmes have gone where no other writers have ventured: to the dinner-table conversation where in matter-of-fact ways the most intimate decisions are made.
Although we may not like it, the dominant analytical language of our time is located at the budgetary end of the globalisation debate — this is the language within which the world’s most influential people, that new generation of traders, make mayhem and make merry.
The genius of this book is that it asks, in the language they know best, an age-old question: At what price, war?
Peter Vale is Nelson Mandela professor of politics, Rhodes University, and visiting professor, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia