that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothinganother article in this morning's times about the iraq debate in the senate alluded to the same argument:
Republicans said the deaths of more than 2,500 troops would be in vain if the United States backed down from an open-ended commitment to the war.it's a bad type of argument, albeit a familiar one for members of congress. it's the very same argument they use to justify the most bloated wasteful pentagon expenditures.
this is how it works: someone at lockheed or boeing or some other military contractor has an idea for an innovative new weapon system. congress appropriates money for research and development, a relatively small amount at first. the research looks promising, so congress appropriates more money to build a prototype. but ideas never work out entirely as planned. there's often a problem, and so, the contractor asks for more money to revise the design and build another prototype.
sometimes the problems get worked out and sometimes it doesn't. a lot of idea that look good on paper don't work quite as well in practice. the contractor doesn't want to give up on the basic weapon system idea, so they ask for a little more money to "work out the bugs", assuring the pentagon that the kinks can be worked out. and then they do it again, assuring the pentagon that they are close to a solution. and again and again and again. this can go on for years, with congress throwing more and more money at the program without any tangible results (except, of course, some jobs in a lucky congressional district).
there are a bunch of weapons programs that have been going on like this for more than a decade, with congress dumping billions of dollars into a weapon system that no one can get to work. these programs are notoriously hard to kill and always trotted out as exhibit A when people talk about pentagon waste.
part of the reason they are hard to kill is because the program becomes a federal jobs program. but another part has to do with human psychology. after a substantial heap of money has been thrown at the project, you start to hear the argument "well, we've already spent $3 billion dollars researching this weapon, if we stop now that will all go to waste."
it sounds like a compelling argument. but really it's not. the reason we've spent so much money on the project is because it isn't working. if it were successful, it wouldn't have cost this much. the money spent is already wasted. there's no getting it back no matter what we do. the fact that so much money has already gone down the tubes should be a reason to stop, not to continue with a project that has proven itself flawed. the bottom line is that, at the end of the day, we're left with is a big budget sinkhole and no usable weapon.
so the "if we stop now, it will all go to waste" argument is one of the arguments the republicans are trotting out to defend staying the course in the iraq war. except that instead of wasting money, we're talking about wasting lives. the argument may sound convincing at first glance, but really its a symptom of a plan that was flawed from the beginning. the high cost incurred so far is all the more reason that we should consider a change in direction. it doesn't support "staying the course" at all.
ADDENDUM: MatthewB pointed out this slate article about the sunk-costs fallacy. the article makes a similar point to what i was trying to get at here.
