Iraq is Money

In short, I lack strategic patience. -- Matt Yglesias

But the bottom line is still the giant hole into which all those budget allocations are going. Ask yourself: if occupying Iraq were free, would any sort of anti-war movement be able to sustain itself based on some of the lowest casualty rates in all of human history? On the vague specter of a quasi-imperial arrangement? No. The only really powerful reasons to leave Iraq -- the ones that move a people -- are getting beat and going broke. Right now the first reason, in a very close shave, seems to have been averted for good. But the second reason stalks the halls of good government. Obviously we float somewhere between the fantasyland of costless occupation and the present reality of budget-busting cost outlays. Importantly, where exactly we float depends on other variables and is relative to them -- both 'objective' things like the domestic economy and 'relative' things like the public perception of the state of the domestic economy. And I see neither of those things going up in the short term. So the cost issue has to be resolved, or else it will resolve itself. But we should be careful to understand that the loss of 'strategic patience' among Your Average American (or even your not-so-average blogger) is pretty much guaranteed actually to be a loss of financial patience.