Butter or Guns

Whenever a nation sets out to war against another, it is forced to reallocate its resources, as you can either use your time, material and ingenuity to produce a plough or a sword. (The cost in human blood is another expense.)

Americans - as all of us westerners! - have grown so wealthy and lethargic that we don't really feel the immediate financial impact of the current war in Iraq. Partly because nobody pays close attention to government (as we should) and partly because the war is not financed by increased taxes but by loans from China and Japan (who buy the US treasury notes!).

It is interesting to look at the cost of the Iraq war, a war that was supposed to finance itself with re-invigorated oil exports from Iraq's abundant deposits (the 3rd largest in the world).

Ironically though, Iraqi oil is off the global market since the US invasion.

Ignoring the impact on the oil price which the war undoubtedly helped drive up and which is estimated to have cost US citizens 150 billion USD, the war against Saddam Hussein costs a whooping 200 billion USD annually. At the time of writing, this has added up to 700 billion USD in direct spending. Again, let's ignore the additional future costs of veteran's disability pensions, loss of productivity, etc. and only look at the 200 billion per year of direct spending.

The human mind is not capable of imagining such astronomic figures, therefore I would like to bring this amount into perspective by looking at how much real 'butter' would cost by comparison: (I take my figures from an article by David Leonhardt in the IHT of Jan 18, 2007 and Lester Brown's book "Plan B)

Universal Healthcare: 100 billion annually
(all people covered in the US)

Universal preschool: 35 billion
(early childhood education for every child in the USA: half days for 3 year olds and full day for 4 year olds)

Immunizations: 0,6 billion
(for the world's children against measels, whooping cough, tetanus, polio and diphteria)

Reforesting the earth: 6 billion

Protecting biological diversity: 31 billion

School lunch programs for the 44 poorest countries: 6 billion
(Apparently the most effective population control is educating women. To get poor families also to send girls to school, it has been proven that school lunches is the most effective incentive. I am not excluding boys from this program, but when forced to make a choice, poor families send boys to school, not girls.)

I could go on an on.


200 billion dollars is a huge sum. Throw a tenth of that amount at solar research or at subsidies of renewable energy generation and you'd make a real dent in green house gas emissions and global warming, not to mention increased independence from OPEC.