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Fighting for Freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan: Whose?

By Byron A Ellis – September 02, 2009

Why are young Americans who have not fully enjoyed life dying on the battlefields? Ten or twenty years from now whichever side prevails, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, the United States will, more likely than not, engage in commercial trading with former enemies, as it does with Vietnam today. So, why not immediately move to the trading relationship and bypass sacrificing lives?

I am convinced if those that send young men and women to wars had to physically be on the frontline, as a soldier, most would opt for peace.

What benefit was achieved from invading Iraq? The argument by proponents of the invasion was that the US would be safer from weapons of mass destruction. However, there was no evidence that such weapons existed.

Proponents of the Afghanistan invasion make a similar argument. They claim that the US is fighting against the attackers of the Twin Towers. But, weren’t the 911 terrorists mostly from Saudi Arabia? 

By invading Iraq and Afghanistan whose freedom are we fighting for? And, if the answer is ours, what are we being freed from?

And, is the cost for seeking for peace without war less or greater than the cost of fighting for “peace” with war. Of course, fighting for peace is an oxymoron.

Economists often use the Edgeworth Box, a geometric picture of a two-person, two-commodity, pure exchange economy, for determining efficient allocations between two parties based on levels of satisfaction (indifference curves) of the parties. The efficient allocation lies on what economists call the contract curve. Points on the contract curve are point of tangencies where neither party can be made better off without reducing the level satisfaction of the other party.

Thus, if conflicting parties understood the cost of conflict, it is likely that they would immediately move to points along the contract curve without incurring waste. Violence in any form is wasteful. Therefore, policies that are wasteful, such as the current Iraq and Afghanistan strategies, should be seriously reconsidered.

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