David Henderson writes in his article: "How George Bush Changed My Life" (click on the title of this post to get the full article; emphasis added by I.G.T.U.):
Until 9/11. Like almost everyone else in America and, indeed, most people in the world, I was outraged by the 19 criminals who murdered 3,000 innocent victims. But when George Bush said, on that very same day, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward … and freedom will be defended," I smelled a rat. In saying that freedom was attacked, Bush was saying something about the motives of the attackers, even though he couldn't have known that soon what their motives were. So it seemed to me that Bush was trying to set the groundwork for a war rather than trying to go after the higher-ups behind the perpetrators. I turned out to be right. In response to 9/11, George Bush made war on Afghanistan and, depending on which audience he and Dick Cheney were speaking to, a response to 9/11 was part of their motive in attacking Iraq.
That's when I started to inform myself regularly on foreign policy. My first piece on war after 9/11 was on a topic I was quite familiar with without knowing much about foreign policy: the economics of war. I had thought it was obvious that war hurt the economy, but on Sept. 14, 2001, New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman committed what economists call "the broken window fallacy." He wrote, "Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack – like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression – could even do some economic good." His argument was that the destruction of buildings in New York would lead to the construction of more buildings to replace them. Krugman, apparently, was not aware that over 150 years earlier, French economic journalist Frederic Bastiat had shown the problem with that reasoning. When a window is broken, noted Bastiat, it's true that there is a need to replace the window. That's what is seen. What is not seen but should be foreseen, wrote Bastiat, is that the resources used to make that window could have been used to produce something else, something that now won't be produced. The bottom line, concluded Bastiat, is that destruction is not profitable for society.
I had to reply. So on Nov. 28, 2001, I pointed out his mistake, among other things, in "The Economics of War," published in the San Francisco Chronicle.
I decided that I wanted to speak out, in print and orally, on these subjects. But to do so, I would need to inform myself the same way I did when I wrote on domestic policy issues: read articles by the people who disagreed with me, take careful note of their arguments and evidence, and ask questions, by e-mail or phone, of experts in the field. Bit by bit, I have become a foreign policy analyst. One of my first chances to speak on this was in June 2002, when, in a talk to admirals taking a special class at the Naval Postgraduate School, I made the case against war on Iraq. I argued that although I did not know whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, if he did, we could deter him from using them. Moreover, I said, the worst thing the U.S. government could do was attack him because then he might use them. There was amazingly little pushback. Virtually all of those who expressed any thoughts on the issue agreed with me. So I felt confident enough to write an article, "A Case for Not Invading Iraq ."
In October 2002, Congress rolled over for Bush on Iraq, voting 296-133 in the House of Representatives and 77-23 in the Senate to let Bush make war on Iraq. Then I was sure we were in deep trouble. So I started paying even closer attention to war and foreign policy.
I realized that although I had been teaching military officers at the Naval Postgraduate School for almost 20 years, I had thought amazingly little about how to apply the same economic tools to analyzing war and foreign policy that economists have successfully applied to domestic economic policy. When I started reading the academic literature on the economics of war and foreign policy, I found amazingly little written about such obvious questions as the incentives of politicians to make war and the unintended consequences of war, to name two. I found that the same pillars of economic wisdom that helped my students and me understand domestic economic policy could help us understand foreign policy. It's just that few economists had studied foreign policy using those tools. So there was a lot of low-hanging fruit. I wrote an academic article on that issue, titled, "The Economics of War and Foreign Policy: What's Missing?" In it, one of the conclusions I derived is that a government will do more destruction to people in a foreign country than to its own people because its own people have little information about what the government does to other people and because those foreigners don't vote in the home country's election. We should expect, therefore, that foreign policy will be more destructive than domestic policy.
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