Surge & dodge: the president's fiscal mess

It's time we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis we are called on to impose on other government endeavors. We are supposed to repeal or revise domestic programs that don't work. Shouldn't a troubled war policy be treated the same way?

Driving the current debate is the assumption that we can't afford to withdraw our troops from Iraq because of the chaos that will ensue. The idea seems to be--an argument skillfully used in the run-up to the surge policy last spring--that good things will happen if we just keep the war going. But this upside-down debate puts the burden of proof in the wrong place.

Despite the apparent, if limited, progress of the troop surge, we should be asking whether keeping our forces in Iraq over an extended period is worth the cost in lives, injuries, money, lost opportunities, and the strain on our military. How will a prolonged stay in Iraq enhance our security? Is Iraq distracting us from foreign-policy questions that will matter far more to our national interest in the long run?

President George W. Bush regularly brags about the accomplishments of the surge. It's true that our troops have performed superbly. Let's be happy that, albeit at great cost, the overall levels of violence in Iraq have dropped and that Al Qaeda in Iraq is weaker today than it was some months ago. But the question to which the administration still has no answer is how this military success will produce a decent outcome down the road.

From Thomas E. Ricks, the Washington Post's military correspondent, comes a disturbing answer. Last month Ricks reported that our own commanders in the field "now portray the intransigence of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than Al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents, or Iranian-backed militias." Ricks quotes Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno on what it would mean if Iraq's leaders fail to use this moment of reduced violence to arrive at new power-sharing arrangements. "If that doesn't happen," Odierno said, "we're going to have to review our strategy."

Odierno's candid remarks should unleash a clamor for the administration to explain where its policy is taking us--and whether the continuing sacrifice in Iraq is achieving more than just temporary tactical victories. We can trust our military commanders on tactics. Experience teaches us to be skeptical of the administration on strategy.

Bush's approach to Iraq is the classic case of a politician arguing that a problem will be solved if only we keep throwing large sums of money at it. That's why a report on the staggering costs of our Iraq intervention, issued last month by the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), is useful. The report noted that Bush has requested a total of $607 billion for the war, but that its actual cost to our economy is $1.3 trillion.

Republican critics of the JEC report ("War at Any Price?") argued that some of its numbers are tendentious. Yes, this study has its moments of tendentiousness. But that doesn't undercut the importance of the questions it asks. Consider only this number: Interest costs on Iraq-related debt will be more than $23 billion for the 2008 fiscal year. That sum is almost exactly the difference between what Bush and Congress want to spend on the entire budget.

Why are the costs of the Iraq war not considered part of our larger budget debate? On November 13, the president vetoed Congress's $606 billion labor, health, and education bill because of a $10 billion difference on spending for domestic concerns. But at the same time the president was asking for a supplemental appropriation of $196 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--an increase of $46 billion over what he had sought only the month before. So it comes down to this: Bush can bust the budget for Iraq, but God forbid we spend a little more on education.

In the way the president has managing the Iraq and budget debates, he has tried to evade the essential questions. By focusing on the surge, Bush avoided responsibility for explaining where we might be in Iraq at the end of his term. And by picking symbolic budget fights, he never has to explain how his own policies--his ludicrous initial assumptions about the costs of the war, his refusal to ask for the taxes to fund it--have created the fiscal mess he now decries.

You'd think that facing the verdict of history, not simply an election, the president would be more serious about these things.

[c] 2007, Washington Post Writers Group

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