Focus 580; The Real Price of War: How You Pay for the War on Terrorism

In this part of focus we'll be talking about the costs of war and specifically here we're talking about is the war in Iraq the war on terror. Those kinds of efforts they're more involved in right now. And our guest for the program is Joshua Goldstein. He is at the mall an adjunct professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and has written a number of subjects including war international relations international political economy. He has a new book out which is titled The real price of war. The subtitle How you pay for the war on terror. This book is published by The New York University Press. And if you'd like to read it is certainly out in bookstores and it is available. And he makes the estimate in this book that the war on terror as it is currently being funded costs the average American $500 a month in taxes budget cuts increased national debt in the book he asks readers to imagine a government parking meter in their living room she says every quarter you deposit buys America 20 minutes of national security. In the book you make the point that he thinks that it is very

important that we fight the war on terror and that we win and to do that he says it's going to require spending money. And in the book he makes he summarizes its main points this way in the introduction he says the real price of war makes three central arguments first that the war is more expensive than you thought especially if you include hidden indirect and future costs. Second he writes We have little choice but to pay the price and probably a rising price in the coming years and third he writes President Bush and the Congress have not been honest with the public about the real price of this war which competes with tax cuts and other political priorities. So we still need a debate upon how we split the bill for wars. He goes on to note liberal readers will need to consider the possibility the war deserves even more money and attention than President Bush has given it. Conservative readers will need to consider the possibility that we need to raise taxes to pay for the war. Again the book is titled The

real price of war. Joshua Goldstein is talking with us this morning by telephone and as we do as we talk questions comments are welcome. Anybody can pick up a telephone call make a comment ask a question we do ask people to just try to be brief and we ask that so that we can keep the program moving and get as many callers as possible. But of course anybody who's listening is welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. Professor Goldstein. Hello. Hello. Well thanks very much for giving us your time we certainly appreciate it. And I'm sure that from the people hearing this little introduction that I've made and the fact that in the book you you present this estimate average American $500 a month in taxes budget cuts increased national debt goes to the war on terror. I'm sure that a lot of people hearing that number well ask the question and we can discuss it in some depth. How do you would arrive at a figure like that. Right well that figure is actually more than just the war on terror and Iraq and I'll tell you why

there's a debate going on about the costs of the war in Iraq. The number one hundred twenty billion dollars and counting has been used. And first of all we don't know what a hundred twenty billion dollars is. Because you know we're not used to thinking in those large numbers so we want to translate that to what it is that for the average household and the formula is really pretty simple. If you take a $10 bill that's a billion dollars for the average household about 100 hundred million households. So you're one hundred twenty billion dollars would be one hundred twenty of those $10 bills or twelve hundred bucks for the average household that's how you can do the formula. Now the problem is that that number just for Iraq. Which incidentally works at about 60 dollars per month for the average household that doesn't include the salaries of the soldiers serving there. It doesn't include their equipment and supplies it doesn't include the research and development that lets them fight there. All those are in the regular Pentagon budget and they are costs we have to pay to fight a war anywhere but we're not

talking about them yet. So when you when you add up the Pentagon budget the supplementary spending for Iraq and the other spending that we're doing in the war on terror. That's where you get to that overall figure of about $500 per household per month that's what we spend on war not about a third of it is the increase since 9/11. So if you will about one hundred fifty a month it is just the war on terror just the increase in the last couple of years but without the rest of the two thirds of it we couldn't be doing any of the things we're doing in the war on terror so that's why I'm trying to put the focus on the big number of overall spending on war right. Well even though if we consider the. You say we have to look at this on a number of levels you can look at spending specifically for what has come to be called the war on terror. So that's our cost for the Iraq war for being in Afghanistan. You put in Homeland cost of homeland security there and then if you look in a sort of a larger frame you look at all of those things that it

go into maintaining the U.S. military and American defense capability that we would be doing just to make sure that it was there some of it we would be doing anyway and others of it we wouldn't for instance veteran's benefits are not included in that hundred twenty billion or 12 hundred per household. But obviously we're going to pay more in veterans benefits when we're fighting a war in Iraq and people are coming home wounded. So right now most of what we pay in veterans benefits is for the last war but in the future will have to pay for this war. You have to put that on the table as a cost. Then there again if you enlarge the frame though there are other costs that are related but perhaps indirect not the kind of things that we immediately think of. It's not what we're spending on the war in Iraq. It's not homeland security it's not maintaining the military it's not veterans benefits. It's it is it is related but more but hidden. Right. There are the $500 a month the 20 cents a quarter in your parking meter for 20 minutes. That's only what the federal government spends. But when

we're at war there are a lot of pride. Obviously paid costs and costs paid by state and local governments to give you some examples. Champagne Illinois has to do new things to protect against possible terrorist threats. They need more police officers they need new decontamination equipment and the fire department etc.. Those are not paid by the federal government that's paid by the local taxpayers. Hospitals need new kinds of equipment in case of a biological attack and those are not paid by the federal government that's in your health care premiums. The Golden Gate Bridge needs to be protected it's a possible terrorist target that's paid by transit district sales tax surcharge and so we're paying for the. And then businesses private businesses are paying a lot of costs for the increase of doing business in wartime especially the hard hit sectors such as the airline and transportation sectors. And then when the world goes badly the price of oil goes up and we all pay for that so there's a lot of ways that we pay in addition to just what the government pays and those are all in

on top of the $500 a month bill that you're paying for the. Federal government. So then if we ask this question as the title book suggests what is the real price of war. It's more than this. This the average American is paying more than $5 a month for five hundred dollars a month. Have you got a number to put on. I don't have a number to put on it a lot of it depends how the war goes and it depends very much on how long the work goes on for the longer war goes on the more these business disruptions and the indirect costs pile up. And of course we don't know if the war will go badly and will have more terrorist attacks. Those are very expensive. But and then. And wars that go on more than a few years inevitably result in inflation and inflation is a kind of hidden war tax that affects all of us as we pay more for everything. And you know a long term war. People talk about staying at war for a generation this will lead to an escalation of all those costs and probably be

paid primarily through inflation. Just. Looking at your background your your academic training is in political science and the thing you have written about these things that I have talked about things like war and conflict and international relations and world order and and so forth including ppl in political economy. But it seems that this is maybe a slight departure for you that you're drifting over into the work of your colleagues who who study economics. What would lead you to even want to do this analysis. Well it's not an economics book it's really a nother example of what I've studied for decades which is the impact of war on society. And in this case. The key if you step back from the green eyeshade you know counting up the numbers aspect of this which is not the most important thing. It's important to know that this is a lot more expensive than people are talking about. You step back from that there's a basic dilemma here I call it the self-evident truth of the war which is the

country's at war. It's very expensive and somebody has to pay for it. You can't really argue with those propositions when you think about how somebody's going to pay for it realize that the whole war effort is at odds with the philosophy of cutting taxes. We've never done it before in wartime. If all those raised taxes and more time we go to the wealthy Americans to pay for wars because that's where the. Money is that's where most of the tax revenue comes from. And for instance in World War 2 the top bracket income tax was 94 percent. I'm not advocating that now but it shows that you know that's where we get the money in wartime. But this war is different. We're cutting taxes especially for the wealthy. And then we're going off to war without adequate money to fight the war. That's the philosophical problem. You have people who came into government committed to cutting taxes. Then we came into a war and we need to change that policy but we haven't been able to do it. And again just to make sure the people know where you're coming from you're. You also make the strong arguments in

the book as I said that the war on terror is important. It is and it needs to be fought. It needs to be won. And it's expensive. So we need to spend what it takes to do it. It's just as as we've said that you think that people should understand just what the cost is and that both the president and the Congress have have not been straight about just how much it is. It is going to cost and it does cost and just where we're going to get the money from that's the debate we need to have where will this money come from if we're at war. And I do believe we need to pay for it and we need to prevail. It's going to be expensive whether Kerry is president or Bush is per. That it's going to be very expensive. So where will the money come from. And if you just have a blanket attitude that you'll never raise any tax on anything in fact you want to keep lowering taxes. Then where's the money going to come from or how will we prevail in the war. Well let me again introduce our guest and we have a couple of callers we'll get right to. We're talking with

Joshua Goldstein. He's political scientist. He is adjunct professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies which is at Brown University and he's written a lot about war gone Pflicht international relations. His most recent book lays out some of the arguments that he has mentioned here already in the beginning part of the program the title of the book is the real price of war how you pay for the war on terror and the book is published by The New York University Press. Questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We have couple people here ready to go. Caller in Indiana to start line for. Hello. Unfortunately this is going to go on as nebulous kind of questions but where is the money going to come from. I can meet Lee think of see if Bush takes over of that. Well fur be cut pretty drastically and things like that. And. They keep wanting to cut corporate taxes capital tax and a tax on the wealthy. I

presume they're going to hope that they all tease the Saudis and the rest of the world by a lot of our farms and I'm just sort of like you know throwing this out you know. You know I think of a number of ways it would go. But from your studies of war and what's happened with economics how do how do you sketch it. As far as that goes. Good question and you're right on target. There's really only three places you can get money in war time unless you get the other countries to pay for it as we did in the Gulf War. But we're not doing this time around. You can tax you can cut the budget somewhere else or you can just print up money you know literally run the printing press this is how they used to do it but now it's a matter of just injecting extra money into the economy and then you can also borrow but when you borrow you have to go around later and either tax print or cut somewhere else to pay for that plus the interest. So those are the only ways we have to do it and usually in war time we've done all of those things. This war as if they were cutting taxes. We're not

cutting much elsewhere in the budget and it would be hard to do it in these quantities and so most of it we're just borrowing and putting it off. Now when we borrow that money as you say the foreign investors are the ones mostly buying that. And as they get less interested in investing in us because we're running up irresponsible deficits then we have to pay them higher interest on that. And the costs go up and ultimately as they say inflation. Just if we just print up the money to pay for the war as we've done in the past then the money has less value and it buys less so that we're all paying more for inflation. This happened after World War 1 and 0 and World War 2 the dollar lost about half its value and then a third of its value in those wars. But for this reason and the difference between paying for it by an income tax and paying for it by inflation is the income tax it's mostly wealthy people. Inflation hits poor people the hardest. So there's a big philosophical issue

about how we're going to pay for this. Mostly rich people are mostly poor people. And that's a debate I want to have. I think that there are some people who have made the criticism of way governments operate at least for the past several decades that when it comes time to confronting the guns or butter question we say both we. Both and that there are times when we're flush the economy's doing well that we can get away with that. But we're not. What happens is we end up running a big deficit. Do you think that this this administration the place where we are now or really any different can when confronting that choice then than past administrations have been. Yes it is different because in the past we've never been able to claim we would have both. We've always turned to all the sources that we could find in wartime and we've been able to do it and especially the tax issue. Raising taxes in wartime we've been able to do that because Americans are willing to sacrifice in war time when the country is under threat. And we've had political leadership in war time people like Roosevelt

who could. Calling the country to everybody's sacrifice because we're in a time of need and because we need to win the war and as quickly as we can. This administration doesn't call on us to sacrifice the calls on us to go shopping. It doesn't say we're going to win quickly but rather it's just going to drag on and on. And then it's all just paid for by magic money which is the money that we just borrow and have no plan to pay back. No plan to really bring down the deficit. So that's different that hasn't happened before. Well it happened one time somewhat similarly in the War of 1812. Congress declared war. They didn't pay for it and they went home and we had a disastrous series of military defeats until the government could finally get some money together by which time Washington D.C. had burned to the ground. So we don't want to do that again. It's better to have a plan and have the money and fight the war with the resources we need. Let's talk with some other people who are listening. The next caller in line is in champagne and on line one.

Hello Well I'm just wondering what are you calling the war on terror as someone in international relations. What does it really consist of. Does it consist of keeping people out of the country who are moderate leaders in Europe like Cat Stevens and who's also known as use of Islam or tyrant. Tariq Ramadan. Or I guess you know I'm just wondering. We have had people talking about the New American Century and I don't think that it's going to turn out the way the neo cons had planned and that the world is training whether it's culturally which maybe people like Yusuf Islam or Tariq Ramadan might represent in some way or they might be the mirror images of those people who think that we need to do something about our secular society and liberalism and turn to religion it's just that they want to turn to another. And maybe that's why they're being blocked from coming into this country to discuss religious and cultural ideas at places like Notre Dame. But anyway the world is

changing culturally economically strategically. Is it just a simple war it doesn't seem like it anything like any previous war that we've fought. And it's very nebulous and could you Kimmie clarify some of those issues. Sure. It is a different kind of four than we thought before you can argue about whether war is even the best word for it. To my mind there are a lot of people killing each other in various places in the world. And that looks like a war to me. My book is not about how we fight the war. So my argument is whether you think it was a good idea to go into Iraq or a bad idea to go into Iraq. Personally it was a bad idea I think but whichever way you you come down on that question it's going to be very expensive and you can't rewind history and say let's not have the war in Iraq where there were you might say bogged down there it's very expensive and it will be whoever is president.

Afghanistan we never finished the job there. One of my arguments is that we didn't spend enough money to do a good job in any of these place. We're trying to fight the war on the cheap for what the administration said they were trying to accomplish and then Homeland Security is unfinished and needs more resources. Container cargo system and those kinds of things are not getting the resources that they need so there is a series of these things and I've more or less accepted the administration's framing of this as these are related efforts. They're concerned with protecting us from al Qaeda and terrorist attacks. Whether some of them were mistakes and trying to do that we can talk about but the efforts that they're making are in a variety of places in a variety of kinds of efforts. But they're trying to do them on the cheap because they don't want to give up the tax cuts. So I can give you a whole series of examples from homeland security to Afghanistan Iraq and so forth and how

they have done these things on the cheap and how with adequate resources they might have had better luck with what they were trying to do right there. That vaccine is just the tip of the iceberg the actual terror and violence in the world. But the whole way that this is playing among the people the world population and the way that it's polarizing the world. I mean I don't know how we can draw back and somehow not have this polarization but it seems like it's an absolutely it's like a snowball out of control. You know it's a it's a mess now and an expensive mess. I talk about three fronts if you want to call him that three ways that we're fighting the war. If you call it a war I do. One is military actions. Another is homeland security all those things about airport security and borders and critical infrastructure the food system et cetera. And then the third is foreign aid and diplomacy that's what we're trying to win friends. And in front of the people around the world. And that's important

in this war because the terrorists are in a bunch of countries. We need the support of and help of the people in those countries and the governments of those countries. And obviously this is a terrible time for in terms of our friends in the world supporting us. The public opinion polls are just depressing about people's views of America. And I make the point that for the kinds of money that we're spending in Iraq for example we could take on big public health initiatives stopping the AIDS epidemic and things like that that would really show some leadership to the countries of the world address some of the problems of inequality poverty in the world and it would be cheaper than some of the military actions that we take. But whether you think the emphasis of the war should be military actions or should be foreign aid and diplomacy or should be homeland security or all three. You're still in for a lot of spending to dig your way out of the hole that we're in

now. Well let me first I want to thank the caller and say we're at our midpoint here and I have some other people I want to get to but let me ask the direct question because well but earlier you said well look at what we've done in the past when we've been in similar situations. There are a number of things that you can do. You can raise taxes you can increase the money supply or you can divert spending from somewhere else and put it into defense. And you said in the past we've often done all of these things and then. The big problem here is that we really haven't done any of them. And so and we've talked about just how much it does cost the average American to support the American defense establishment and to carry out this thing that we call the war on terror. You're proposing that what we really need to do is actually to spend more. And is it possible to do some of that by reallocating where we spend or really at the end of the day are we talking about we're going to have to spend more and that means that we're going to have to we're going to have to get that from taxes we're going to have to raise taxes.

I don't see any way to do it without raising taxes without at least rolling back some of the tax cuts of the last few years. Put it that way. They're just the money isn't there any other way. And my proposal it's not really a proposal so much as a thought experiment that I say given that the war has been underfunded in these various areas we could talk more about what could we do with an extra suppose we went from $500 a month to $600 a month per household. How much money. Would that give us and what would it let us do better than we're doing now and it turns out it would dramatically improve our ability to carry out homeland security. For example on these container cargo containers coming into the country 20000 a day coming in and it would cost less than 1 billion dollars to put sensors in them to secure them so that we know what's coming in in those containers. The system that has been thought about and

could be done but we just don't have the money for it right now. I give you another example from Iraq. We went to buy up shoulder fired missiles in Iraq because they pose a grave danger to commercial aviation in the hands of terrorists. And we said we'll give a reward of $500 per missile if you turn these things in. There are thousands of them that Saddam Hussein had had. And it turns out that for on the black market you can get $5000 a missile for these things. There were just under underpaying and we didn't get very many of those turned in are in Afghanistan we went to form a national army and we paid them a dollar a day the soldiers. And that's the UN's definition of extreme poverty in poor countries. So and most of them quit because they weren't paid enough to support their family. So if you're going to have expansionist rhetoric you know if it's rhetoric or money the world would be well funded but if you're going to have this expansionist rhetoric you go around the world and try to do big things to grapple with the terrorist threat. Then you've got to fund them adequately to make them work.

And if we had the spirit of let's pay $600 instead of five get the job done and get back to peace time. To my mind that's much wiser than always being late. And you know what a day late and a dollar short and then ending up with the war dragging on year after year and decade after decade causing immense damage to the economy as you go. Let me promise the color's a whole new a get right to the let me ask one one for the question that goes to the to the debate over taxes that's been going on now here between President Bush and Senator Kerry. President Bush when he was around. Election first time and he laid out his agenda. It seemed that the the top thing the most important thing as far as he was concerned was cutting taxes and he got it. He got his tax cut and he has continued to say that he thinks that that was the right thing to do that that's the way to stimulate the economy. He would like to see the tax cuts made permanent so he continues to defend that position. Senator Kerry says no that's

the wrong way to go because the tax breaks have gone to the wealthiest Americans and he says what he would do if elected is that he would raise taxes on the wealthiest people continuing to look out after the interests of the of the middle class. He's also said some things about possibly that he can make some changes in the taxes that fall on corporations and that. Generate additional money and he has a number of things that he says that he would spend that money on now. The president says well he they they have competing numbers where they say how much money additional money would be generated by increasing the tax on wealthy Americans but it's hard to even if Mr. Kerry is right. It's hard to see that the additional money that would generate is really going to cover everything that he's talked about doing right. That would be my criticism of Senator Kerry that he's at least as flexible about that we need to raise more money and not just keep borrowing magic money. But he's not really talking about putting that into the war effort so much as health care

and other areas. The president by contrast is so rigid about never raising taxes that he was unable to change. I just you know changing his position is not his strong point but he came into office got the tax cut fine and then came September 11th the country was united behind him. We were all willing to make sacrifices and that was his chance to say I promise to to cut taxes. We're going to have to turn some of that back now because we're at war. But he couldn't do it. So that's where I see a lack of leadership to call on people that we all are in this together. We're going to need to sacrifice. We're going to need the country united. And instead the country has become bitterly divided again. We're distracted from the war effort. And frankly I think it will take another big terrorist attack which everybody thinks will happen sooner or later to get us back to realizing we're at war and we need to grapple with these issues. It's no I can't it's very difficult to imagine a candidate any candidate running for

anything. Getting up in front of potential voters and saying I'm going to raise taxes is not even easy going on the radio and talking. But I guess that's you know are we going to go back to 94 percent marginal rate like World War 2. The political discourse in the country doesn't even let you talk about those things. Luckily if you're a professor and you're writing a book you can raise these issues. And I think we need to raise and we need to talk about them. But probably it will be after the election that anybody would take that seriously for the reason that you say you'd be dead in the election if you go in promising to raise taxes. Well I have several callers will get right to them. Let me just take enough time to introduce again the guests for this hour of focus 580 Joshua Goldstein. He is a political scientist he's written a lot about war conflict International Relations and he is adjunct professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown universe. Day and previously held tenure at the University of California and also at American University in Washington DC is author of a number of books and the most recent is the real price of war

how you pay for the war on terror and it's published by New York University Press. Back to the phones here are Banna next. And that is line number two. Hello. Yeah hi. You said that we haven't been told about all the expenses for research and in the military for the war. And but then I don't on the other hand we we've had this war in Iraq and now with the military contractors are going to turn around and use that as an excuse to get more funding. And this is the exception to the rule that I stated which is that war is bad for business and bad for the economy. Well it's not bad for all business. In truth if you bought Halliburton stock two years ago you've doubled your money. And obviously military contractors do better in wartime they make more money but you don't want to generalize that to say that corporations do better

than corporate America does better in wartime that's not true for every military contractor like Halliburton. There are a lot of big companies like Boeing that are really what Boeing does some military contracting but on the civilian side they're really hurting the airlines going into bankruptcy. The Everybody depends on the price of oil which is all the manufacturing companies are hurting from it. So there are winners and losers but they're more losers than there are winners in corporate America. Yeah I'd like to see just two things quickly before I hang up. First of all China and Japan have both been buying literally trillions of dollars of United States debt. The total federal debt is 7 trillion and about three or four trillion of that is owed to to those two countries. And I don't understand why tax and spend is better than borrow and spend. The United States is becoming a global laughingstock

due to our being indebted to the rest of the world and the like like you said the the money the money supply has been growing by 10 percent per year which is basically creating paper money or computer money out of it out of thin air and decreases the the value of the money in people's savings accounts. Then just one more thing. A lot of what a lot of times you hear Well these numbers are so big that nobody understood nobody can can deal with them. If you take if you want to convert trillions of dollars into dollars per household take the number of trillions and multiply it by ten thousand. So a 10 trillion dollar federal debt is $70000 per family per household like you said and actually that's a conservative number big. You're assuming an average household

size of three people whereas if you consider a family of four with one or two surviving grandparents that's actually more like about 50000 family or 50 million families. With that has one or two wage earners. So the actual federal debt is more like 100 to one hundred fifty thousand dollars per family. And to that you have to add on people's mortgages credit card consumer debt which could could get up toward a quarter of a million dollars or so. So it just it just seems like we are spending way way too much money on wars and and the whole rhetoric about tax and spend is just not nearly as bad as the borrowing that we've been doing anyway. Thanks thanks. Yeah yeah your numbers are right. It's about $70000 per average household in that formula that I mentioned earlier is the same that you just said a thousand

times bigger which is that a billion dollars is a $10 bill for the average household. A trillion dollars would be ten thousand dollars for the average household. The federal debt has gone up by $20000 or so her average household on President Bush's watch that that's your share of it. And the interest that the average household is paying on the national debt is now up to almost $300 a month. That's just the interest and that's going up fast. And clearly if China and Japan stop being so interested in buying our treasury securities then we have to pay more interest. And that number's going to go up quite steeply as to what someone else is also. It was in Urbana listener line number three. Hello. I would submit this. So that pouring about how we paid for this war is perhaps useless until we decide what the war is and who we're fighting. But the term war on terrorism is meaningless.

Terrorism is simply a tactic used by actually a number of. Least in the past disparate groups. And we better decide which ones we're actually fighting. For instance the Chechens are Muslims but they were not fundamentalists and at least until quite recently had nothing to do with al Qaeda they're nationalists. The same thing could be said for the civil war in Pakistan which perhaps it is and I had nothing to do with a fundamentalist Islam but certainly had a lot to do with terrorism. One could probably say the same about the Palestinians who are certainly not fundamentalists. And whom up probably for that reason until quite recently al Qaeda showed very little interest in. Right. So and of course when we're fighting a war in Iraq which wasn't a religious nation anyway this was a secular nation

and one that al-Qaida was particularly determined to bring down. We're going to waste a lot of money over the next few years unless we understand who we're fighting and what they are what we're going to spend that money in the next few years anyway because we are not out yet. But whether Kerry is elected or Bush is elected we're there in Iraq I think you know the one thing we agree on and I agree with them is you can't just pull out precipitously without causing a worse problem and destabilizing the region that is really worse than the nurse or not fully I suspect we're destabilizing it if we stay. And I thin is are we destabilizing it more if we stay or if we get out. Well we are destabilizing it. Staying or getting out maybe but that my point is there's no cheap easy solution to this and you can't just say well we don't need to worry about the problem. We do need to worry about the problem and that problem of terrorist groups of global reach that's

not the Hamas people but. You know getting their hands on nuclear weapons which they're trying hard to do and may have done and have some capability that's a very real problem and we need to focus on the fact that we botched an operation in Iraq ended up making things worse etc.. That's all in the past now we have to know that we have to pay our way out of that problem. My point is if we continue doing things like Iraq we make things worse and we're very ineffective in ending the the problem we've got to understand what the objectives and how tight are. And I suspect that they have very little to do with us in the long term that this is really an internal struggle in is the funding. Mentalist against probability 90 percent of the rest of Islam and I hate to say this but I believe that our blundering in Iraq has greatly furthered bin Laden.

That's right. So now if you put yourself in the White House and decide what to do about it in the next four years you want to make a fresh start. You want to do things differently but you're surely going to need a lot of money to do it right now. Absolutely. And when we say long term people seem to think for five 10 years I point out that the Egyptians have been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood for 70 years. Yeah. People talk about a new 30 years war if you go study the 30 Years War 16 18 to 16 48 in Europe it was a disaster certainly economically killed off a third of the population in Central Europe. Epidemic diseases poverty just ruination of those societies. This is not something you want to have as another 30 years war. I want to jump in here because the lines of fall again. I want to get in some other folks we are in to our last. Past 15 minutes. So we'll go next to a champagne color and wine one hello.

Yes thank you very thing you've had to say today has just reinforced something I've missed and arguing for some time that not only is Bush and company bankrupting the United States but they're accelerating the decline of the American empire and you know you could argue whether or not that may be good for the rest of the world I think it almost certainly will mean much harder times here at home. And I if you read the writings of people like Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz they believe the U.S. military power can be used to maintain our economic dominance in the world and keep things you know better here. I am very skeptical about that and I certainly think it's immoral. But you know I mean they're they they're really setting us up I think for an incredible economic decline in the next

few years to decades. Yeah I think it's an overstatement to say that it will bankrupt us unless there's a big you know a terrorist nuclear attack on several cities or something like that. But the road we're on now it will weaken us it will drain our economy it'll make us all poorer but we are a big rich country. And you know the war spending is still just five six percent of our gross domestic product. And it's a cost that we could absorb if we were sensible about how to pay for it. If we had the country united about what we're doing and if it were for a short period of some years not going on decade after decade is something we can do financially it's not the cost. I don't need to be prohibitive. But we're not going about it the right way. Well but Bush is talking about further. You know cuts in in taxes and which will mean more

borrowing and what if the rest of the world decides that the dollar isn't worth much anymore because then you're going to get something similar to what happened in the Vietnam war financially which is that we we had low inflation in the early 60s just like now 1 percent a year half a percent want to have percent a year and then. Then comes the Vietnam War and then where we see very high inflation and it turned into stagflation where the economy wasn't really growing there was high inflation. People's standard of living was going down and as it started to now. Now the war is not responsible for all these problems but it does make all of them worse. Right down to the local school district that's not getting its money because the local police department needs the money but because of threats and homeland security and it isn't being paid by the federal government because of the Federal tax cut that kind of trickles down to cuts that hit us in our local. And some of that would happen without the war but it's making all those problems worse.

Well I just I'm very wary of you know where we're going and I think that you know your work's very important and I hope that you can get this you know understood by a wider part of the population because I think a lot of people seem to have their head stuck in the sand in this country right now. Thank you. There's a website for the book at real price of war dot com so people can read the first chapter there are a few. Thank you. Let's go to Bloomington Indiana line for for the next low high name four ways that we are fighting terrorism and ask you how we could how we could. Some of these ways of fighting terrorism for less money. Now first the first way we're fighting terrorism we're on the offensive you go on the offensive and you keep the terrorists on the run because it's hard for terrorists to attack when they're running for their life. Right. How could we do that for less. I don't think we should do it for less. I think that we tried to do it for less in Afghanistan we had the terrorists on the run. We had our forces

near them and we held back and let the Afghan warlords do it instead which turned out to be a disastrous mistake that al-Qaeda was able to regroup and come back worse than ever because of that. That's an example of penny wise and pound foolish. And so there's a pretty good military argument for allowing people to maneuver in rough mountains which are. Which are our our our soldiers don't know anything about those mountains never been in them. And those native people have been there they know them and them and you know that's a pretty good military strategy to let those people maneuver in those mountains that they know about. Well it didn't work. Well I know but it's still not good military strategy. And then in Iraq we went on the offensive and whatever you think about whether it was a good idea or not we needed more troops I think that's clear now Paul Bremer has said it. We needed more troops there to keep order on the ground to stop the looting and to stop the insurgency from taking hold and now we're stuck there with a bigger job than we should have had

had we gone in in the first place with the adequate resources. Let me go to the second way of fighting terrorism and the second way of fighting terrorism is to put potential terrorist terrorists in Guantanamo where they can't commit terrorism how can we do that for less. No answer on that I think that what we're doing there. We have enough of a budget for. OK. The third way of fighting terrorism. We convert states which are friendly to the terrorists states which are friendly to us and in other words as we're doing in Iraq we we make a friendly base out of a base that was friendly to the terrorists. Yeah if it worked it would be a good idea. We did it in Afghanistan and certainly I supported that. Overthrowing the Taliban there which had been directly harboring Al Qaida our enemy. Iraq is a little bit different case but the problem in Afghanistan. To go back to the money issue we overthrew the government and then we did not provide Countrywide security

because we didn't because we wanted to go into Iraq and get our troops out of Afghanistan because we didn't want to pay for it. Don Rumsfeld had a news conference in early 2002 where he was asked what would it take to provide Countrywide security and he said to take money but we don't have it. And they said where you know where are you going to get it from and he said gosh when it comes to money I'll take it wherever I can get it. That's not how you fight a war. You give the secretary of defense the money that he needs to secure the countryside in Afghanistan if that's what we need to do to keep it from turning into a to. Or haven again but we didn't do that and some say we were distracted. What we wanted to go into Iraq but it didn't happen in the fourth and final way that I think we're fighting terrorism might be a way that we could save a lot of money if if we can disrupt the funding in communications of the terrorist that is to say if we can take the funding away from them we don't have to spend so much to fight them doing what we need to spend something to go in and take the money

away from them and get out of their networks. And if you if you read what people are writing who were in the government who were the counterterrorism people Richard Clarke and people like that they will tell you that there's not enough money there's not enough resources. The administration is not giving them what they need to succeed and they end up like I mean I say in the book they're like light bulbs we just grew them in burn them out and then screw another one in. There's a tremendous turnover of counterterrorism officials and it's a sign that they're not getting what they need to get the job done and to make it work. It's all an indication that this is not well thought through and not adequately funded and that the country is not united behind it because of the way we're going out about it. Well I I certainly wouldn't say that we haven't made any mistakes. But I would say this that this is the first time I guess in world history that we've ever fought a war against terrorism. And since 9/11 we have not had a substantial terrorist attack on our own

soil. We must be doing something right. Oh yeah. Or there's as we know a long time lag between attacks will often wait five or six years and then come back and hit a target again so you don't want to be lulled by the fact that we haven't been hit again. Everybody who studies al Qaeda everybody who's in the government fighting this fight will tell you that the there's a real danger that things are not going as well as you would think from the fact that we haven't been attacked again. Could happen again any time and it's very likely to happen again some time. Well Tony one more caller here in Chicago. One two. I think a lot of the previous callers have all pointed to the fact that this definition of war and terror doesn't have any shape to it. And I think it's very hard to pull in public support and commitment if it's shapeless the least to previous callers have spoke to that. But this my problem is that I think you're seriously

underestimating how long will be battling a war on terror. And if you look at Ireland that's going come close to the century mark pretty soon. And in Spain there do a fight with the TGA has been more than 30 years. And in both those cases that only came into a reasonable conflict with the use of diplomacy. And we have a policy of not talking not negotiating. And I think that means. That we're talking about an endless war on terror because I haven't seen any case where terrorism has been resolved without a political solution. But I do agree with you that the timeline we're on now it looks like it's going to be an endless war because we're going backward as much as we are forward. But that doesn't mean it has to be an endless war and I don't think Ireland would really be the right analogy for this war. But I do make the question What is the analogy for this war because it has no shape. Well let's let's let it take the analogy for a second of World War 2 so that was a completely different kind of

four. But it was obviously a much greater threat to us. This is a war that killed tens of millions of people and the entire world was wrapped up in it. We were facing Nazi Germany with all of Europe under occupation virtually. And yet from the time that Pearl Harbor was attacked until the victory final victory surrender of Japan in that war was at a time period equivalent to the time from 9/11 to the middle of next year now we get to the middle of next year we're not going to be signing the ultimate surrender of Japan kind of end of the war we're just just getting started so we're going about it much slower. And I think it's the. Residents job to mobilize and unify the country behind a vision of the war that people understand failed to do it so far. But given political leadership that would define the war in a way we understand. Tell us what we need to do to win it and not not in 30

years but maybe five. And what resources are needed and where we're going to have to pay for it. I believe the American people would rally behind that and that we could get the job done there's nothing inherently impossible about finding out how to rooting them out and putting them out of business it can be done. We will stop there because we hear at the end of the time I want to save anybody who's interested again and reading some more of the thoughts of our guest you can look for the book we mentioned it's titled The real price of war. It's published by New York University Press and as Professor Goldstein has mentioned also there's a website for the book where you can read the first chapter and some other things about it which is real price of war dot com. Otherwise you can head down to the bookstore and look for the book and again our guest Joshua Goldstein is an associate of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and has authored a number of books dealing with war conflict and international relations. Professor Goldstein thanks very much for talking my pleasure.