By George Besch
The US prides itself on this adherence to economic rationalism and market capitalism, but I have come to wonder why our government hasn't shown us its cost-benefit analyses on alternative policies for keeping its citizenry materially secure and safe from “terrorism”. The previous administration describes September 11th, 2001 as a “wake up call”, and views the war in Afghanistan and subsequent invasion of Iraq as a response to that. But would these events even have occurred if we’d applied our supposed economic rationalism before they took place?
I’ve spent time on five continents while carrying out feasibility studies for clients ranging from national governments to small farmers. I got to meet many of the people who would be affected by those studies: heads-of-state and other elected officials, bureaucrats, CEOs, employees, union workers, and the tillers of the land who had no ownership or rights under their system of governance.
While varied, their opinions about the United States of America often made distinction between “the people” and “the US government”. It was not uncommon to hear, “we like Americans, but not your government”. Traveled readers have undoubtedly experienced the same. “The US government” to those in other countries often means military and/or economic hegemony, applied directly or via aid to their own corrupt and too often brutal governments and corporations.
When I hear the excuse “we have no other alternative” used as justification for invasions and occupations to supposedly end “terrorism”, I reply that we do have an alternative. It’s time we asked if our government ever considered comparing the cost of waging wars and relying on its military, to paying a fair price for resources and a just wage for the labor in developing countries. That would not only be fair and just, it would begin to address some significant reasons we are under attack from terrorism.
Although an economic cost-benefit analysis is not the only determining factor in a feasibility study, it is the one which usually prevails. Even when the initial factor may appear as one of aesthetic, not economic, value. For example, potential water usage demands elsewhere led to feasibility studies for the National Park Service which included economic values formulae for natural wonders in Yellowstone and Yosemite Park. How many visitations – with their paid entry fees, purchases of ice cream cones, hotdogs and souvenirs – would not occur if Old Faithful was no longer faithful or if Yosemite Falls didn’t fall?
It was the Pentagon and The World Trade Towers attacked, not a football stadium during the Superbowl, or St. Patrick’s Cathedral at a Christmas Midnight Mass. Despite the rhetoric used after 9/11, the attack was about our violently militaristic foreign policy and hegemony, not about our way of life, our democracy, or our religion.
Of course the economic costs of maintaining hegemony in the developing world compared to simply paying fair prices for resources and labor can never account for the human lives lost in war -- military and civilian on all "sides" – or the human misery suffered by those not paid fairly. Nor is the euphemistic “collateral damage” limited to the countries we invade, occupy and/or covertly subvert. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower observed,
Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed. This world at arms is not spending
money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children……
Eisenhower wrote that in 1954. Today what we spend to invade, and occupy – whether by force or coerced “invitation”—is not spent on our schools, our health care systems, our environment. Hardcore economic rationalists and our courts pretend they can come up with a dollar figure for a human life based on a person's earning power and life expectancy -- I don’t. And I have faith that the majority of Americans value lives beyond any means of economic accounting, even if our governments and corporations do not.
We could account the costs of the military presences we have in 139 countries, as well as the overt military assistance and aid doled out to our "friends". There are also substantial real dollar costs hidden in other budgets, covert operations, and administered via corporations subsidized by our taxes. If this was done, we would arrive at a total that if compared to what we would need to pay in fair prices for resources and just wages abroad would show that our current course of action is staggeringly more expensive. Adding the number lives saved and human misery prevented through avoiding conflict, as well as the animal species and ecosystems not wiped-out by the devastation of war to the fair and just course of action, and our military hegemony is proven to be vastly inappropriate.
As Naomi Klein wrote about in Shock Doctrine, countries and indigenous peoples from Iran to Chile to Indonesia that have objected to and fought the hegemony of the US government have been crushed by the CIA and our military in the interests of multinational corporations. Now there are groups using injustice-- both real and convoluted-- as the bases for attacking America. So we now have to factor in the costs of providing the illusion of Homeland Security via a department of that name, and the enormous increased budgets of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, to name a few of the alphabet soup of agencies involved.
Even if the cost-benefit showed that it is a little cheaper to do it the military way, are there any of us – because I believe we can be both “patriotic” and honest in our relationships with the rest of the world – who wouldn’t be willing to pay a nickel more for some of our material benefits in exchange for knowing we are acting justly? If all those people I met were right in deeming it is the US government, not Americans, deserving of their disdain, then the people of America would choose the fair and just way.