by Matt Barr

Government sucks at war, too

Alex Tabarrok has a brilliant pair of posts at Marginal Revolution about the Iraq war as a demonstration of government ineffectiveness. (This morning, Tyler Cowen has a rejoinder.)

All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.

He explains further that government has no incentive to treat foreigners with fairness and restraint. (He does not argue that treating enemies with fairness and restraint is an alternative to war; read the posts.) In other words, democracy as a check on government does not work for people who live elsewhere and can't vote the bums out. It (government) also acts on imperfect information without immediate consequence. Put the two together and you have the recipe for spectacular failure.

He is not arguing that the market could have done it better: "No, believe it or not, my goal is not to efficiently kick the shit out of foreigners. If something can't be done well that's an argument for not doing it -- or at least not doing it often."

Co-blogger Cowen warns that Tabarrok's libertarian rhetoric "would not produce a very libertarian world."

Had Alex his way, the first Gulf War never would have happened. Saddam and his sons would rule Iraq, owning both Kuwaiti oil revenue and nuclear weapons, and probably itching for a rematch with Iran. Sound like fun?

I add that only to get it out of the way -- I think you can consider a democracy's proper expectations for war without being pigeonholed as a supporter or opponent of the Iraq liberation. In fact, let me try.

There is no good reason to expect that government will be better at war, on any reasonable, independent scale of efficiency, than it is at anything else. Mind the qualifiers. Our government is far better at war than, say, administering a massive pension program, or more or less running public schools. There are a few reasons for this.

One is that we're filthy rich, and have the best military technology and equipment. Another is that military affairs traditionally are insulated, more than most things, from public view. We all know someone getting a Social Security check. We haven't all had a tour of the latest fighter prototype. We also traditionally (and properly) tend not to get all bound up in military stuff -- we defer to the experts.

Properly? Yes: In theory, anyway, foreign policy in general and war in particular will be less effective if 52 percent of us support it and 48 percent oppose, and that matters. "Politics stops at the water's edge" is so quaint a saying, which used to be true. We can still aspire. Responsible citizens shouldn't say "I'll let Congress figure out how much to tax me, I'm no tax expert," but responsible citizens should support the military and foreign policy to a degree that wouldn't be appropriate for domestic matters. Particularly, I would argue, if an election has intervened and the guys responsible for the foreign policy and war at issue won again.

Anyway, government is great at war, compared to most things. As Tabarrok mentions, this is often enough to ensure success: "Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently." And has inferior weapons and technology, and compulsory service, and so on.

But given government's performance in the area of... everything else, is there any reason to suspect it's more efficient and effective at waging war, considered on its own objective war-waging scale of efficiency and effectiveness, than it is, for instance, running a drug war? Right-libertarians might perk up at this point and say war is one of the things the government is supposed to be doing. Sure, but to believe this means it's good at it is kind of wishful thinking, don't you think? It's supposed to be ensuring border security, too. How's that going?

War has another feature unique among the things government gets its grubby paws on: normally, they declare a winner. We love World War II, because we won. But look at it objectively. Millions killed, two cities reduced to radioactive ash, and Soviet domination of eastern Europe for half a century. If we set out to reform the tax code and had that many bad things happen because of it, I think we'd be perfectly justified indicting all of Congress for whatever felony we could come up with, even if our tax burden was fairer.

No, it's not fair to compare domestic initiatives with war, insofar as nobody opposing your domestic initiatives is willing to use deadly force. (I think the Democrats in Congress are only another couple election cycles away, though.) But it is useful to remember that this is a centralized, detatched, remote federal government running our wars, and there's no reason to suspect it will be any better at it than it is at anything else.

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