The absence of debate over war

Glenn Greenwald explains that permanent war has become the normal state of affairs in the U.S. and there's little debate about it, especially now that both major parties are backing it.

The absence of debate over war, by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt ponders how little attention our various wars received during the primary campaigns that were just conducted: "You would hardly know, from following this year's election campaign or the extensive coverage of last week's primaries, that America is at war. . . . those wars, and the wisdom of committing to or withdrawing from them, have hardly been mentioned in the hard-fought campaigns of the spring." Hiatt is right in that observation, and it's worth examining the reasons for this. [Continue reading]

It should not need to be said that there is rarely anything moral about war. And it's hard to see how it would pass a benefit-cost test either since it involves large scale death and destruction (i.e., it destroys scarce resources). Even if the plunder that U.S. soldiers and contractors could bring back from dirt poor Afghanistan could make up for the cost of sending them there, this is merely a transfer from Afghans to Americans. If we let transfers cancel out, there is no way that positive net benefits for humanity could come out of building a bomb, flying it across the globe, then exploding it on top of a building or a group of people at great risk to the bomber and even greater risk to the bombing targets. It's pure waste. Even the joy and satisfaction of "winning" a war is matched by the pain and suffering to those who lost it.

Economists can explain eloquently that international trade would be mutually beneficial for the people of all countries taken as a whole even though there could be some losers within each. War produces the opposite: it is costly for all sides even though there could be some gainers within each country. I think it is a sad reflection on the state of intellectual discourse in our world that while most economics textbooks contain a chapter on the gains from international trade, rare is the textbook that devotes even one paragraph to the waste and immorality of war.