Let’s analyze something related: The price tag estimate for the Iraq war, which is directly related to the rise of ISIS, is a few trillion dollars. Let’s say $3 trillion in a war over a country of 30 million people, to use round numbers. We could have given every Iraqi man, woman and child $1 million $100,000 and told them to buy a house in a safer place and called it good. Meanwhile, estimates for the GDP of Iraq varied by quite a bit when I googled, but if we go with $6,000/person, the cost of the war was in the ballpark of the net present value of the Iraqi economy at a good rate of return.
Now, obviously I’m not saying it would have been realistic to relocate 0.5% of the world’s population in 2003. What I am trying to do is put some perspective on the vast resources expended for…what, exactly? If it was to provide for the well-being of the Iraqis it certainly didn’t show. If it was to control their resources, well, we didn’t really get control of more than a fraction, and we could have invested wisely and gotten the financial equivalent of completely control of the resources of the Iraqi economy. If it was to enrich contractors we could have done even that more cheaply. Honestly, I’m left to conclude that it was about punching people because we wanted to. We shouted out “Who killed the Iraqis?” but after all, it was you and me. And now people are paying the blood price for that in the rise of ISIS.
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