Planning for Your Future: How to Invest in Foreign Wars

When Congress authorized the President to invade Iraq, I remember thinking, "has anyone specified a means to an end and considered the cost?" What struck me most is how willing the "fiscal conservatives" of the Republican party were so willing to write a blank check. It is further frustrating now to hear of politicians calling for an exit strategy when that should have been discussed to some extent prior to invading.

Think back to the President's original justification for the invasion: terrorism. He never really said that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were linked, but he used both names in the same sentences so as to give people the impression that they were. Now there are millions of people walking around still believing that Hussein was somehow helping bin Laden crash those planes.

When the al Qaeda link was debunked, "weapons of mass destruction" became the reason for the invasion. We don't know what kind of weapons they are, but they sure sound bad. No WMDs were found and a claim by the President that Hussein had sought plutonium from Niger was debunked. Finally, in his 2004 state of the union address, it was all about democracy and fighting the people who hate freedom.

It took 40 years for a stable democracy to take hold in South Korea after the Korean War. We're still maintaining a presence in the former Yugoslavian states ten years after the US-led NATO invasion. The prospects for stable, democratic governments in some of those states are few. Unlike the situation in Iraq, however, we've got the help of NATO to help defray the burden.

Where is it going to end in Iraq? How many lives? How many dollars? Is there a point where it gets to be too much? These are questions that should have been addressed before the invasion took place. Anyone who considers himself a fiscal conservative should have been debating these things before he supported the invasion. A war is not the sort of thing you rush into without considering the cost and the consequences.