Apologies in advance for the epic-length post.
There’s been a fair bit of wailing and garment-rending about war on the op-ed pages. In addition to the cloying and tiresome Mark Helprin piece to which David links below, E.J. Dionne, Glenn Greenwald, and Fred Hiatt have all touched on the subject in recent days. One common theme is the idea that Americans are insulated from the costs and benefits of war, and that this is a problem.
To their credit, some of the writers offer proposals for redressing matters: Helprin suggests American citizens should force congressional declarations of war characterized by “extraordinary, penetrating debate” in order to ensure that decisions to go to war have been “ratified unambiguously by the American people through their constitutional and republican institutions.” (Do we also owe the troops good decisions?) Further, citizens must recognize that it is “unacceptable” to “starve the means to fight” in order to defray the costs of war. “If the general population must do with less, so be it, for the problem is only imagined.”
What planet does Helprin live on? The ways in which citizens and legislators behave when it comes to war are shaped by the incentives each group faces. Helprin — and the other writers — should try to think about those incentives if they actually care about solving these problems.