Matthew Yglesias complained that he was running out of “strategic patience” when it comes to the military contingent that the U.S. currently has stationed in Iraq. This sort of complaint always bothers me to the point of irritability (cf. my sarcastic comment in that thread), but it’s difficult to articulate why. I think Postmodern Conservative comes close to boiling it down to its essence: “Iraq Is Money”.
Matthew Yglesias, and people like him, including possibly you, are complaining almost exclusively about money, when they complain about Iraq.
But so why does this bother me so much?
Reason 1: Quite often, the people doing the complaining - about money - have no tangible reason to complain. I feel fairly secure in asserting that Matthew Yglesias, lefty blogger/commentator with a book coming out soon, is doing just fine, financially. The money that the U.S. government has spent on the occupation of Iraq has not affected him in any tangible way whatsoever. Yet he is “impatient” over it. There is a disconnect here. Indeed, for most of the people out there fond of complaining about the Iraq military contingent, their actual finances in their actual lives are not suffering in any measurable way whatsoever as a result of it. It’s basically an entirely hypothetical concern.
Reason 2: There is a mismatch between what the “anti-war” faction likes to say (and tell each other) they are complaining about (war = bad, the suffering of our soldiers, etc.) and what, it often seems, they are actually complaining about (money). Sure, it need not be an either/or proposition, but the problem is that no matter how bad or well the occupation/counterinsurgency is actually going, they will always fall back to the “but we’re spending lots of money” complaint. This gives the impression that even if the occupation were going near-perfectly, they’d still complain about the money. But in that case what’s the point of discussing how well Iraq is going at all? It’s still going to cost money and ‘money’ remains on the “anti-war” faction’s laundry-list of grievances. In a very real sense, it’s their baseline complaint. But the reason this grates is because they always posture as having nobler concerns - peace, love and understanding, and all that good stuff. But corner one of these people and try to pin down exactly why the Iraq occupation bothers them so much and chances are you’ll end up having to follow their logic down a twisty path that starts with how much money we’re paying, proceeds to how this puts us into debt, meanders vaguely to the idea that interest rates will have to go up, and culminates in an observation such as this will affect their mortgage because it’s an ARM, thus he might end up having higher mortgage payments in 2011 or something. (Yes, I have actually had this conversation with someone.) In other words: take a guy who’s posturing as having selfless peace-loving concerns, squeeze him a little bit, and what oozes out, frustratingly often, is a stinky dollop of self-centered spoiled-brat self-regard. Seriously, we are supposed to urgently abandon the Iraqi government (which requests our military presence) because some upper-middle-class lefty software programmer (or, prominent lefty blogger) is worried about….hypothetically having a higher mortgage payment later?
Yes, Iraq is money. But so many of the people who complain about the money we are spending on Iraq are among the most financially coddled, secure and comfortable people in the history of the world. I believe it is appropriate to discount their concerns accordingly. In any event, the idea that I am supposed to listen to their complaints with a straight face really tests my patience.
) so do click on over to Fire Megan McArdle and read what they have to say, and if you’re Megan McArdle’s boss, maybe they will even convince you, with their blog, to do just that. 