What Does Iraq Cost?

We often think of cost simply in terms of dollars spent, but the real cost of a choice -- what economists call its "opportunity cost" -- consists of the forgone alternatives, of the things we could have had instead...This idea sounds simple, but if applied consistently, it requires us to rethink and, yes, raise the costs of the Iraq war.

That is Tyler Cowen on the hidden costs of the Iraq war.

Another overlooked cost of the war and occupation is the associated "blowback."  As Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds note:

The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which -- as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts -- could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan.

Also important here, is Ludwig von Mises's work on the "dynamics of intervention."  Mises's main insight was that one intervention creates a new set of incentives for both political and private actors.  These new incentives may create a set of circumstances that prevent the achievement of the initial goal and may require additional interventions.

In After War, I write:

Although the theory of the dynamics of intervention has typically been applied to economic systems, the same logic can be applied to foreign policy, and specifically to reconstruction efforts...In the context of reconstruction, foreign governments can never have full and complete information regarding the impact of interventions that aim to craft and implement self-sustaining liberal institutions. Policies that appear to generate the desired outcome may in fact have negative undesired consequences in future periods, and these unintended consequences may in turn generate the need for further government interventions that in turn create a new set of unintended consequences...

Comments

[Brian Pitt]

Dr. Coyne,

Did you mail a copy of this book to the Bush Administration? They are going to need it. Btw, place the "conservative" talk radio hosts (e.g., Medved, Limbaugh, Ingram, inter alia) on your mailing list too.