Wars persist through sunk cost fallacies and concern for personal legacies, long after nothing beneficial can result from continuing them.
No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back. ~ Turkish Proverb
The US War in Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001, and is now becoming an 18 year long quagmire in just a couple weeks. The Iraqi conflict is presently in a third phase after 16 years, with the United States engaging in numerous attempts to be a power broker between different Muslim sects and radical organizations. The Vietnam War carried on for around a decade after the Gulf of Tonkin incident led to Americanization of the conflict. In all these lengthy military engagements, two things are evident: politicians and military leaders alike revert to the sunk costs fallacy to justify further engagement, and no one wants to be the guy who “lost the war”.
Blood and Treasure Wasted
Government programs are often incredibly expensive, and wars are among the most expensive of such programs. In 2014, the Congressional Research Service estimated the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at $815 billion and $686 billion, respectively. Such sums are so large compared to an ordinary person’s experience, they are hard to grasp. It is eminently understandable for someone to balk at the idea of having wasted over a trillion dollars.
This motivation is only compounded by the mentality that the lives of soldiers are an additional cost of the prosecution of war. This is no mere modern belief in the costs of “blood and treasure”, as the phrase goes, dating back to usages in Britain’s House of Lords in the 1640s. And rightly so, for a government that does not view the loss of young men in war as an expense it has paid is even more apt to throw away lives in senseless conflict.
Yet the large expenses of blood and treasure involved in wars can often be used to justify the continuation of the war itself. Ending the war without a clear victory can easily be interpreted as a waste of the lives lost and money spent throughout the conflict. No one wants to see their comrades die in vain. Few can stomach wasting large sums of money. To admit that the war was lost, or even just failed to accomplish the promised goal, becomes nearly unthinkable. And so the conflict continues, throwing good money after bad…. and wasting more lives in the process.
What Kind of Legacy?
Politicians are prone to yet another reason to continue wars that should have ended long ago — concern for their legacy. For the same reason that Presidents create libraries and monuments, they seek to avoid being seen as the “loser” of a war, or to be blamed for the outcome of the war’s aftermath upon ending the conflict. This presents a significant psychological barrier to the end of a war, and one that increases the longer the war has been going on.
Lengthy wars without clear resolution present a case where, even when ending the conflict can be spun as different than losing the war, the unstable aftermath of the conflict presents an uncontrollable situation where the goals of the conflict might become entirely undone. This is nowhere clearer than with the multiple phases of the American-Iraqi conflict since 2001.
After years of war, the United States government under President Obama sought to withdraw coalition forces in 2011, in accordance with an agreement between President Bush and the Iraqi government signed in 2008. These troops were withdrawn with Obama declaring that Iraq had become “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” after US support for nearly a decade.
Within a couple years, the actual instabilities created by the US intervention had developed from insurgency to a full-blown civil war with the rise of ISIS. To deal with this, Obama sent American forces back into Iraq to restore the apparently not so “self-reliant” Iraqi government to power over the country. The alternative, for Obama at least, would have been to become known as the President who lost Iraq to insurgents. The result is that billions of dollars more have been spent on conflict in Iraq, and there have been dozens more American lives lost.
The critical element is that peace, while cheap in terms of money and lives, is politically risky. The use of armies to extend force, even when it fails, presents a case where the politician has “done something” to accomplish the goals of his administration. Peace, by contrast, involves relying on the spontaneous order of trade and mutual interest to produce a beneficial outcome. There are no guarantees, and no levers of troop counts or strategies to try to force the outcomes to turn out politically fortunate.
Lost Men Groping For Peace
These factors easily combine to cause war to continue, even when passions are no longer inflamed, threats no longer persist, and all that remains is a slowly increasing body count on both sides of a conflict that has long since ceased to make sense except to the most jingoistic individuals. The rights violations and destruction of lives inherent to war become normalized and accepted, going virtually without comment in news media and the daily lives of the citizenry.
This is a tragedy that can be avoided. The mental trap of sunk costs should be stridently guarded against, especially when considering costs that include people’s lives. Political legacies of peace and conflict avoidance should be elevated over the starting and continuing of wars. This is the path to avoid a great deal of unnecessary bloodshed and strife in the world.
Matthew Tanous is a professional software developer with a personal concern for liberty and peace. His blog is www.disinthrallment.com.