True to form -- on its path to a war in whose name evidence has been doctored and public rationales have been trotted out like successive Lexus ad campaigns -- the administration has waited until the last possible second to attach a dollar amount to this supposedly unavoidable conflict. Or even later than the last possible second: In all likelihood, hostilities will commence before the Bush administration officially sends to Congress its request for war appropriations, expected to be in the $80 billion range.
Where is that money coming from? As a congressional appropriations staffer explained to me, it comes from nowhere. It will just be added to the national deficit, which today stands at $158 billion. The war estimate quoted above is for a short conflict in which all goes well. So in other words, a war in which any complications ensue -- that takes two months, say, instead of one -- could come close to doubling the deficit. And this at a time -- during the very week, actually -- when Republicans are trying to pass more tax cuts on Capitol Hill.
But wait: How dare I talk about something so crass as money when American soldiers' lives are on the line, right? Well, first of all, this war is scarcely being undertaken as a last resort; as such, its cost is a fair question, especially to an administration whose domestic policies turned a surplus into a deficit. And second, we all know that human lives do have a monetary value. In fact, according to this same administration, we now learn that some American lives are worth more than others.
The Environmental Protection Agency is currently seeking a change that would convert that statement into federal policy. To undertake cost-benefit analyses of federal rule changes, wrote Jim Barnett in the March 17 Oregonian, federal agencies place a monetary value on life. At the EPA, it's $6.1 million per American, a figure set in place by the first President Bush and adjusted for inflation. But Bush the Younger finds the old man's view sentimental and old hat, because, you see, some people are old, others are disabled, and still others are sick and about to die anyway. So the EPA, rejecting 21 academic studies that had helped Poppy Bush's bureaucrats arrive at the $6.1 million figure, now wants to cap the value of an elderly life at $1.4 million. It could go as low as $96,000 if it's determined that the person in question has only six months to live.
On its face this may sound like it makes common sense, but the point of the change is not to reflect common sense. The point, critics say, is to lower the dollar amount of the "benefits" part of any federal cost-benefit analysis so that federal intervention -- on environmental matters, on public-health questions and so on -- looks like a less attractive option. All this is to say nothing of the playing-God aspects of the proposal, which spurred Walter Grazer of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to tell Barnett, "In general, if you're valuing one life over another, we've got a lot of problems here."
Oh, so what? When you've already crossed the pope himself, what difference could one more disgruntled Catholic make? Which brings us back to the problems of war.
It seems likely -- and we should all hope, for humanity's sake and our country's -- that we'll win this war, that Saddam Hussein will be retired from active duty, that hard evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in his Iraq will turn up (and hopefully be destroyed before they find their way to the black market), and that the Iraqi people will probably, to one degree or another, be better off under whatever comes next. Bush will benefit from these developments, a fact that brings me no joy. But we must admit that these are all very good things, and liberal opponents of the war need to acknowledge them -- along with the fact that, let's face it, the United Nations was not enforcing its resolutions against Iraq, and only the pressure applied by this administration made it begin to do so.
But the following is true as well, and it is not a very good thing at all. Most Americans aren't thinking this far ahead, and the administration's rah-rah corner is not very interested in the subject, but: History will not end the day the white standard is run up the flag poles of Hussein's palaces. People and societies have memories, and they will remember the staggering number of distortions and pieces of misinformation that helped set this war in motion. They'll remember the administration saying that it would seek the imprimatur of a second UN resolution, and they'll remember the "no lunch, please, we've only got an hour" summit at which that pledge was tossed out the window. They'll remember Colin Powell's "hard evidence" presented at his Security Council briefing in February, and they'll remember just how much of that evidence didn't hold up to tough scrutiny. In France and Mexico and Turkey, they will remember the arm-twisting and bullying and childish caterwauling -- and even if you don't care about those countries, you can bet that Tony Blair will remember just how far he stuck his neck out for an administration that was willing to hang him out to dry, too, and he won't be likely to do it again.
The day this war starts, the world enters a new era of global Darwinism in which a structure of covenants and norms -- admittedly far from perfect, but at least the result of an ongoing dialogue of nations -- that has developed over the last half-century will be pushed aside. It's no contradiction at all to hope for the best for our troops but remain dead set against the rules of world order being rewritten overnight by the jungle's biggest lion.
Michael Tomasky's columns appear every Wednesday at TAP Online.
