October 08, 2003, 5:19 p.m.
Worth Every Penny
The cost of liberation.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This editorial appears in the Oct. 27, 2003, issue of National Review.

Foreign aid is not popular in America, and for excellent reasons. Too often it amounts to “poor people in rich countries sending money to rich people in poor countries,” to quote the late, great development economist Peter Bauer. So it is not surprising that President Bush’s request for $87 billion for Iraq — $67 billion for the military and $20 billion for reconstruction aid — has run into trouble on Capitol Hill. The polls are not favorable, so neither are the pols. Many conservative Republicans are balking at the price tag, and complaining that some of the spending in Bush’s bill would be wasteful. In an op-ed for National Review Online, Stephen Moore and Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida argued that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction, especially if other countries forgave it the debts that Saddam Hussein incurred.

Moore and Feeney are right to say that the debts should be forgiven. The new regime in Iraq should not be saddled with the debts of its predecessor; and if the cancellation of the debt discourages future lending to odious dictators, so much the better. If Congress can find ways to improve the bill by cutting unnecessary spending — which is not its usual practice when it comes to spending bills — then it should by all means do so. But as conservative representative John Shadegg has pointed out, we don’t need 535 reconstruction czars.

Besides, saving money should not be the priority of congressional conservatives in taking up this legislation. Ensuring the success of our foreign policy should be. We have no more important foreign-policy objective today than establishing a peaceful, stable, and free Iraq. The reconstruction aid is defense spending every bit as much as the money for our armed forces is.

It is hard to see how our foreign policy would be advanced by having Iraq repay us for the cost of reconstruction — and even for the cost of the war, as Moore and Feeney suggest — out of its future oil revenues. If this suggestion were followed, our enemies and detractors around the world would say that we had invaded Iraq to get its oil money. That would be untrue, of course. But why hand our opponents the opportunity?

We have no doubt that some money will be wasted in Iraq. But if the bill contributes to our mission there — and nobody has denied that it would — it will be worth some waste. Failure in Iraq would be much more costly, in every sense.

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