Enough with the Lefty Liberal War Cost Meme

If I had a dollar for every time that I heard some anti-war liberal complain about Mitch Daniels’ estimate for the cost of the Iraq War, I could probably pay for a good chunk of the cost of the war. At the very least, I could buy an entire island someplace tropical and retire.

This week, Brian Howey has taken a break from his usual worship of the Obamassiah to run some drivel by one of his columnists slamming Mitch Daniels for his estimate of the cost of the Iraq War.

(Read more below the fold)

How could he have gotten it so wrong? How could Mitch Daniels have failed to properly advise his President and his country on the true costs of war? Yes, volumes have been written on how nearly “All the President’s Men” gave him bad advice in the lead-up to war and trimmed and tailored their views to suit the President’s inclination to wage a war of choice. But how could the man with ultimate responsibility for our federal budget - Mitch Daniels - have gotten war cost estimates so wrong when he was White House budget director? Shouldn’t that horrendous lapse of judgment raise continuing questions about his judgment now when it comes to objectively valuing state assets or resisting impulses to further privatize state resources like the Indiana lottery?

To be blunt, Mitch Daniels was the budget guy. He was in charge of accounting and numbers.

He was not in charge of planning the war, planning for the post-war, or predicting military situational outcomes. Those jobs are for generals and for the Department of Defense (which, it must be noted, were very wrong in their expectations).

Daniels, it must be noted, based his estimates on the cost of the war upon the expectations and analysis provided to him by the Department of Defense and by various experts involved in war planning.

He made an estimate based upon their expectations, and their expectations were wrong (as we can clearly see now; hindsight is 20-20).

But how at fault is he? More at fault than the Congress that appropriated $54 billion for the war in April of 2003?

More at fault than the folks at the Pentagon and the other experts that planned for a light force and a quick invasion, and did not have any planning at all for an occupation or extended ground presence afterward?

The invasion itself and the immediate aftermath seems to have largely been in line with Daniels’ costs for the initial invasion and the immediate aftermath in the few months that followed. If he erred in estimating the cost, it was because he–in making that estimate–trusted those more knowledgeable than he about military affairs.

After all, you wouldn’t want the way you fought a war to be determined by the budget guy, would you? Better that the way the war was fought was determined by the Pentagon and Daniels shaped his estimates from them, rather than he gave them a dollar figure and forced them to work around it.

If you want to go to the auto shop to get a rattle noise fixed on your car, the person that makes your appointment might tell you that the work would cost two hundred dollars. But suppose the mechanic then examines the car, and finds out that you’ve got something wrong with the transmission or engine too? Suddenly the cost for fixing a rattle could increase many times over.

An imperfect analogy with the war to be sure, but bear with me.

Who is at fault for the phony cost estimate for eliminating the rattle? The person that gave you the initial cost estimate over the phone? The mechanic? You, who let the car get in that condition to begin with? Or are you just glad that you got rid of the rattle, found the engine or transmission problem, and got it fixed before your car died on you on the side of the freeway in the driving rain?

Such things are not so clear-cut. The person that made the appointment for you over the phone based their analysis on the situation as described to them by the owner of the car (you). They are hardly at fault for something more being wrong with your car, or the cost for it being greater than they thought based upon a description that was given to them.

Simple reasoning like this shows the utter nonsensical nature of the complaint against the Daniels war cost meme so often put forward by the Governor’s more knee-jerk partisan opponents.

Mitch Daniels, as budget director, relied upon the best information given to him by the experts at the Pentagon. His estimate was wrong, but they were wrong too.

I’d dare say that three and a half years as governor say more about whether to reelect or vote out Mitch Daniels than a cost estimate for the Iraq war; heck, his estimate for major combat operations was correct (it was in the lack of an assumption that combat would continue long after the invasion that the problem arose, and that assumption was made by people more expert about things military than Mitch Daniels).

(This post is also available at the Hoosierpundit)