Lest we forget, anti-freedom, anti-capitalism jihadists were attempting to drive a dagger through our economy. That was the point of hitting the World Trade Center, wasn't it? But they failed miserably to stop the rising tide of free-market capitalism throughout the world. Global GDP has averaged nearly 5 percent annually in the last five years. The capitalization of the world's stock market has increased 159 percent -- or $35 trillion. New emerging-market economies have seen their stock markets collectively rise by 223 percent.
Incidentally, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that if troops in Iraq were reduced to 75,000 by 2013, war costs will amount to just over $1 trillion for the entire period -- roughly one-half of 1 percent of $177 trillion in newly created GDP. Still a tiny amount.
And how can anybody truly approximate the cost of permitting Saddam Hussein to remain in power? In 2006, several economists at the University of Chicago estimated that in certain scenarios the containment of Saddam might have produced security costs that are similar to the actual expenses of the Iraq war.
But what of the benefits of removing the totalitarian Iraqi dictator? How are we calculating those? It was Saddam who launched a 10-year war against Iran, invaded Kuwait, and gassed and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. And it could well have been Saddam who blew up the entire Middle East had he been left in power.
Where is the liberal price-out of the potential consequences of not going to war? And should the Iraqi surge continue to safeguard an American ally and promote the kind of 7 percent economic growth that is now occurring in Iraq, how does one estimate the economic benefits to that nation, the region, the United States and the rest of the world?
Liberals like Stiglitz have blinders on when it comes to the strategic course of U.S. civilian and military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. They're only willing to evaluate the negatives, rather than think through the positives.
This is called single-entry bookkeeping. It makes for bad economics and even worse national security.