No roads for me but a new hospital for thee?

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s on-again, off-again suggestion that federal disaster relief for Hurrican Irene victims be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget is a courageous precedent to set against further deficit spending.   And yet I wonder how many of the Republicans who have backed that idea, including Cantor himself, require similar offsets for “counterinsurgency” infrastructure projects abroad–which David Petraeus, undoubtedly to great huzzahs in the Republican establishment, recently warned against cutting.    The belief that by building roads and hospitals in Afghanistan, America has the power to change that society in significant and positive ways, and to foster long-term good will towards the U.S., strikes me as no less fanciful than any Great Society faith in the ability of government social service programs to eradicate dysfunctional underclass behavior.   Restoring electricity and rebuilding bridges in New Jersey and Vermont, by contrast, is eminently doable and a service that American citizens can legitimately expect their government to provide–even if the costs of doing so should be offset during this time of spiralling deficits.

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4 Responses to No roads for me but a new hospital for thee?

  1. Clark says:
    September 7, 2011 at 12:49 am

    I remain convinced that one of the greatest mistakes of Bush was pretending you could wage war without paying for it. Had we had to pay for it we would have demanding more accountability earlier and I bet Bush and company would have been a lot more careful about how they waged war. Ditto Obama and Libya.

  2. Polichinello says:
    September 7, 2011 at 6:32 pm

    I think the Iraq War was a bad idea from the get go, but Bush’s big mistake in prosecuting the war wasn’t prodigality, far from it. He was too parsimonious in the begininning. He rejected Shenseki’s suggestion to deploy 200 to 300k troops, and the weak force, between 100k to 150k, couldn’t adequately suppress both Sunni and Shiite insurgencies.

    And, in fairness to Obama, the Libya costs have been financially minimal. $984 Million, last I heard, which in Washington terms is chickenfeed.

  3. Clark says:
    September 8, 2011 at 2:06 am

    I think the reason Shenseki’s plan was rejected was there was no way to call up 300k troops logistically.

    Bush made tons of mistakes (not asking what the plan for a guerrilla war was an other big one). But I think we could survive the Iraq war (which I confess I was for at the time given the info available at the time). The pattern of spending though has set the country back far, far worse than Iraq did.

  4. Polichinello says:
    September 8, 2011 at 1:13 pm

    I think the reason Shenseki’s plan was rejected was there was no way to call up 300k troops logistically.

    That should have been a red flag right there.

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