The Global War on Abstraction

It is has become increasingly clear since the new year that the United States is, indeed, mired in Iraq, so much so that even President Bush’s own base of national-defense hawks are beginning to voice discontent and, in some cases, parting company with the administration. Despite the recent slaying of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and despite the seemingly endless communal violence, there has been little movement in Iraq, as neither the Americans nor the insurgents have been successful in advancing the ball in any particular direction. Most of the major recent happenings in Iraq have been political in nature, centered upon the slow, ugly process of nation-building. Most Americans sense that they have reached the end of what can be done militarily in Iraq—for now—and will likely begin redeploying troops to Afghanistan soon in order to quash the revitalized Taliban, thus bringing closure, of a sort, to the World of 9/11.

Of course, President Bush’s Global War on Terrorism will not end so abruptly. Such ‘wars’ on abstract entities never do, viz. the wars on poverty, drugs, etc. Instead, they linger on like the fire held in Prometheus’ stalk of fennel, but whatever warmth such fire provides tends to disappear long before the flames are extinguished.

Every new War on Abstraction creates with it a new bureaucratic structure to administer the war. In the case of poverty, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 and the Housing and Urban Development Act in 1965. Together, these laws created a new cabinet-level department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as funneled over $1 billion to new programs during 1964-65. Today, HUD employs over 10,000 people and has an annual budget of nearly $30 billion.

The War on Drugs has followed the same pattern. Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, subsequently creating the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Today, the DEA employs over 11,000 people and has an annual budget of around $2 billion. This, of course, does not include the massive amounts of money spent in counternarcotics more broadly. For example, the 2001 Military Construction Appropriations Act (better known as Plan Colombia) allocated $1.3 billion to aid South American governments in implementing counternarcotic programs. And that’s just one bill! And of course, the creation of the DEA did not obviate the need for that ancient piece of bureaucracy, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), whose predecessor agency was the Bureau of Prohibition (Eliot Ness’s old stomping grounds).

Unfortunately, the War on Terrorism will likely proceed in a similar fashion. Already, the war has created a new cabinet-level department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS employs an astounding 135,000 people and has a budget of over $36 billion dollars. As is the case with most extensions of federal bureaucracy, DHS’s tasks range from those newly created to those it has assumed from other agencies, such as when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was incorporated in 2003 (also typical, in liquidating INS, three new agencies were formed to replace it).

In each of the three cases above, there was a noble intent involved, whether it be ameliorating poverty, staunching the flow of illegal drugs into the US, or safeguarding the US from another terrorist attack, but in all three cases, the declaration of “war” and the attendant mobilization of money and human resources exceeded what was necessary to effect change. Over time, as the perceived threat to society diminishes, there is sometimes a reduction in the amount of money spent to prosecute the “war,” but as a general rule, once these bureaucracies become entrenched, it is next to impossible to dislodge them, and they accrue unto themselves great power and wealth.

Depending upon one’s political philosophy, one might take exception to the claim that these wars and the agencies that fight them “exceeded what was necessary to effect change.” Proving (or disproving) the claim would be very difficult, and in one sense, that is the problem with our declaring war on abstractions. Applying the martial metaphor to what is in fact merely a series of policy choices, while great for public relations, implies that the “wars” can be won, that the “enemy” will capitulate, and that we’ll have a smashing parade down Fifth Avenue with streamers and confetti celebrating victory. But poverty, drug use, and terrorism are always and everywhere, and while they require a governmental response, they often don’t require the creation of a large bureaucracy to carry it out, and indeed, doing so often forecloses on the possibility of finding solutions outside of government, which are always preferable in the first instance.

Why is such a monopoly on problem solving a bad thing? Most often, such a monopoly locks into place one set of policy approaches, those deemed correct by the administrating bureaucracy, over and against whether those policies work or not, and this leads ultimately to largesse, as agencies throw ever more money at a problem in order to justify their initial approach. If decision making were not so concentrated in our Wars on Abstraction, as is usually the case with other policy problem areas, it is very likely that multiple approaches, both private and public, would be formulated to address an issue, and we wouldn’t be tied so tightly to policies that train inner-city workers for jobs that don’t exist, or that muck up the criminal justice system with millions of minor drug offenses, or that make responding to natural disasters, such as hurricanes, nominally a question of homeland security.

When problem solving is diffused throughout the body politic, it in effect creates a “market” for solutions, thereby driving down the “price” and improving quality. Now this is an idealistic notion, to be sure, for the machinery of society must still be directed toward solving the problem, which requires leadership, but that leadership could just as well come in the form of legislation that provides incentives to people to take up the task, or sometimes merely the president using the bully pulpit. For example, the public-private job creation programs that have been installed over the past few decades—and that were notably overlooked in the 1960s—have flourished due to government’s holding out a variety of sticks and carrots to private business to come up with solutions that address inner-city joblessness. The largely successful drug deterrence and treatment programs, likewise, were not the main focus—and to a degree, still not—of early efforts in the War on Drugs.

In the War on Terrorism, we are still in that stage where attempts to solve the problem are directed by a highly concentrated (monopolistic, in you will) bureaucracy, although there are signs that this may be changing. Because bureaucracies are so heavily invested in their solution to a problem, there is a natural tendency to push on even in the face of obvious and predictable failure, as we have seen in Iraq. Indeed, the very decision to invade was guided by an extreme concentration of bureaucratic power, one that refused to consider alternative points of view, and from the perspective that hindsight provides, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the failure to find adoring Iraqis waving hankies at our “liberators,” and the failure to find a solution to Iraq’s deep-seated sectarian rivalries can all be traced to this monopoly on problem solving.

Still, our difficulties in Iraq should not obscure other fronts of the War on Terrorism where we have experienced some success. I should add, these successes argue for a more diffuse decision-making process, not less. For example, our ability to tightly regulate capital flows in the post-9/11 world has been largely successful, and that success is a product of, above all, cooperation and open-mindedness. One small circle of bureaucrats in Washington could have never achieved so cheaply and efficiently the desired goal: to monitor capital flows internationally in order to prevent terrorists from using the international banking and financial system to fund their worldwide operations. By enlisting the international banking community, as well as foreign governments, we were able to formulate strategies and put them in place with far greater skill and utility than if, say, the Treasury Department had attempted to do it all by themselves.

I should caution here that this is not an argument against unilateralism as such, and frankly, that’s a discussion for a different day, as it will only confuse the issue I had hoped to raise, namely, the detrimental effects of our Wars on Abstraction, which tend to largesse, inefficiency, and unforeseen, undesirable consequences. If the previous Wars are any indication, our policy making regarding this current war will eventually move in a more fruitful direction as the malfunctioning piece of bureaucracy is forced to open itself up to new approaches and as a greater diversity of opinion and ideas is sought, but one must tire of failure before arriving at that point.

There are some significant differences between the War on Terrorism and the other two Wars I considered above. Most significant, the metaphor itself isn’t merely fanciful. While the War on Poverty might have required the occasional eradication of racketeers and gangsters, while the War on Drugs might require a firefight here and there with paramilitary organizations and smugglers who profit from the drug trade, the War on Terrorism to a great degree involves real soldiers, real tanks, and real bombers. In short, it has all the trappings of a real war, but in considering such a notion, we must still remember that our “declaration” of war was made against an abstraction, not an actual nation-state. Will we fight this war until there is no more terrorism? Or is it only militant Islam that we are fighting? Or, still yet, militant Islamists who happen to imperil key, strategic geopolitical areas? Will we begin leafing through the terrorist directory and launch strikes against all the groups we have labeled “terrorist”?

All of this should signal to us that the War on Terrorism needs definition, and now that the sweat has dried from our first few battles, we should endeavor to struggle toward an understanding of whom it is we are fighting and to what end. Otherwise, as with our previous bouts against abstraction, we’ll stumble along, fitting disparate events within our comfortable bureaucratic patterns, and at a greater cost than is necessary.