Talk about a "man bites dog" story!

NYT reports that economists now argue that--duh!--war seems to cost our economy more than peace!

CANYOUBELIEVEIT?

I realize they are pinheads on both sides of the political spectrum that still believe such nonsense, but these people believe in a lot of nonsense. Must we write stories about them so regularly?

Here is the stunning article in question: When Talk of Guns and Butter Includes Lives Lost .

The stunning conceit of this new analysis? They're actually counting lost people now!

Wow! Who'd have thunk it?

The saddest part of this research? It's myopic focus on what this war gets America in particular and what this war costs America in particular. It is strictly binary in approach, as in, us-v-them.

There is no systems analysis here. There is no everything else beyond our borders. There is just "our costs" versus the prevention of the hypothetical attack on the U.S.

Do I pay taxes to have a police department JUST to prevent the criminal attack on my house and my family? Is that the limit of my understanding of a collective good here?

This is old thought that applies war-v-peace thinking from another era.

What I never get is this: everyone talks about a global community being good, but whenever the subject comes to our sacrifice versus our enjoyment of that community's growing benefits (globalization being the catch-all description of said benefits), we always seem to turn into these ungrateful, piggish, self-focused people.

We are losing lives in this war, and right now I'd more than love to have two of those at-risk lives back home from Iraq. But Americans need to remember the world we're trying to shape. There have been millions upon millions of deaths from violent conflict in this world (overwhelmingly in the Gap) since the end of the Cold War. Those calculations never seem to enter our thinking because the causal connections are too hard to make, it seems.

But remember this: Iraq is about connecting the Middle East to the world. When that happens, it's not just our soliders who don't have to die there anymore (though they will still die elsewhere in the Gap til it's gone), there are a lot of local lives not lost. There are also a lot of local lives enriched, which will benefit us and help other nations around the world advance as well.

I know that couching the war in these terms offends many. But we need to look into our past and realize that the military-market nexus is what we used to build this country: we used the military to secure these lands, and that security gave us the potential for the wealth we now enjoy. With the GWOT, we've just re-engaged that historical role on a global basis, and our cost-benefit calculations need to understand that. Because when they do, the logic of the A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states in the Gap will seem compelling to the bulk of the American political spectrum.

So yeah, it matters.