Melvin B. Miller
Editor & Publisher

Is it worth it?

African Americans have always focused their public policy concerns primarily on civil rights issues. Other matters would get attention only if they affected the income of the poor. Blacks could ignore other issues because there was a certain comfort in being a citizen of the world’s leading economic and military power. Also, there was always a self-conscious belief that African Americans lacked the political clout to influence national policy.

President Bush’s misguided war in Iraq should convince everyone that it is now unwise to restrict the black perspective to provincial concerns. In this era of globalization, issues that once seemed remote have suddenly become local. It is increasingly more difficult to find general issues that do not have a major impact on the welfare of African Americans.

A good example of this shift is the war in Iraq. There are ethical and strategic issues which can be debated forever. Should the United States have launched a pre-emptive strike? Is the mere belief in the existence of weapons of mass destruction significant justification for attack? Is the desire for regime change a sufficient rationale for war?

Despite one’s point of view on those issues, everyone will agree that once the decision to attack has been made, the war must be managed skillfully. Bush has been an absolute failure in this regard. His inability to involve the support of major allies has meant that the United States must bear the cost of the war alone. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld predicted that the war would cost under $50 billion. Economists now estimate that Operation Iraqi Freedom will cost $2 trillion. That is two thousand billion dollars, 40 times Rumsfeld’s estimate.

In Operation Desert Storm, the first war with Iraq in 1991, the United States had the support of the United Nations and almost all industrialized countries of the world. The allies paid about $53 billion of the $61.1 billion cost as calculated by Congress. The U.S. must pay the total cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom alone.

To make matters even worse, President Bush has flouted the basic economic conundrum confronted by every chief of state — whether to spend the nation’s resources on “guns or butter.” Bush has chosen both. He has pushed for major tax cuts at a time of war. As a result, the war is being financed by debt to be repaid by future generations.

A disgruntled group of ten CEOs, with the endorsement of a large number of business leaders, took a full-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times of May 21 to call for Rumsfeld to be canned. First on their list of criticisms is that Rumsfeld is guilty of financial mismanagement and unaccountability. The Office of Management and Budget concluded that “87 percent of defense programs fail to use strong management practices.” Pentagon waste was a problem that Rumsfeld has promised to correct.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense during “Desert Storm.” In a 1992 interview, he offered the following reason for not continuing on to Baghdad:

And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.

Nothing has changed since then to make Iraq, with its religious and ethnic differences, any easier to govern.

Now conservatives want to cut entitlement programs, which are so needed by low-income families, in order to pay for their war. Clearly, it is time for African Americans to become more thoroughly involved in the policy decisions of the nation. The day has passed when blacks should acquiesce to be shunted off to civil rights matters alone.