Here are two newspaper accounts about the conclusion of the Iraq war:

The New York Times:   “Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.”

The Washington Post:  “Nearly nine years after American troops stormed across the Iraq border in a blaze of shock and awe, U.S. officials quietly ended the bloody and bitterly divisive conflict here Thursday, but the debate over whether it was worth the cost in money and lives is yet unanswered.”

There is a problem with those accounts.  The United States has been at war in Iraq for twenty years, not nine!  George Orwell warned us not to confuse war with peace, but we are clearly falling into that trap.  More here.

The Iraq War: 20 Years, Not 9 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Few GOP presidential candidates have proposed specific budget cuts.
• “Peace is in the interest of Taiwan, China, and the U.S. … But the U.S. should view continuing arms sales to Taipei as perhaps the best means to maintain stability and peace across the Taiwan Strait.”
• Market liberalization has transformed newly independent states that formerly comprised Yugoslavia.
• President Obama is simply the new standard-bearer for the bipartisan contempt for constitutional limits on power.
• Cato chairman Robert A. Levy makes the libertarian case for marriage equality:

Thursday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A study on anti-Semitism in Germany offers the disturbing finding that “communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later,” during the Nazi era. But cities

with more of an outward orientation—in particular, cities that were a part of the Hanseatic League of Northern Europe, which brought outside influence via commerce and trade—showed almost no correlation between medieval and modern pogroms. The same was true for cities with high rates of population growth—with sufficient in-migration, the newcomers may have changed the attitudes of the local culture.

Free trade helps lead to peace, prosperity, and the erosion of prejudice.

Sweet Commerce is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you follow the news, you might never guess that we’re living in a remarkably peaceful era. But we are. The long-term trends say that war is on the decline—combat fatalities, too. If we value world peace, we shouldn’t be complaining. We should be figuring out why these things are happening—and asking how we can keep them going.

Peace, of course, doesn’t often make the news. There’s nothing dramatic to report. Peace doesn’t explode. It doesn’t kill people. It makes for lousy TV.

I’m hoping, however, that peace makes a good topic at Cato Unbound. This month’s lead essay is by Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University. If we live in a more secure world, he asks, why is it?

Please join us throughout the month for an empirical discussion of peace and war, the demographics of each, and what it is that makes our era an unusually peaceful one.

Peace by the Numbers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“Peace on earth, good will toward men” is a phrase we associate with the Christmas season. One bit of good news that you will probably not see in the newspaper or on cable TV over the holiday is that the world in recent decades has actually been moving closer to that ideal, and free trade and globalization have played a role.

In its latest “Trade Fact of the Week,” the pro-trade Democratic Leadership Council reminds us that “The world has become more peaceful.”

Citing a recent report from the Human Security Center in British Colombia, the DLC memo notes that wars are less frequent and less bloody than in decades past. The average annual death toll from armed conflicts has been declining since the 1950s, from an average of 155,000 down to 17,000 in 2002-2008. None of the world’s “great powers” have clashed since the 1969 border conflict between Russia and China, and none of the major European powers have exchanged fire for 65 years—-the longest intervals of peace for centuries.

In Chapter 8 of my 2009 Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, I describe this phenomenon as “Free Trade’s ‘Peace Dividend’” (pp. 140-143). There are two main ways that globalization promotes peace: The growing network of global trade and investment has raised the cost of war, so that now if two nations go to war, they not only lose soldiers and tax dollars, they also lose markets and cause lasting damage to their economies. Globalization has also reduced the spoils of war by allowing people to acquire resources through peaceful exchange rather than conquest.

The DLC Trade Fact memo shares the credit with decolonization, the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and peacekeeping missions, while also recognizing the contribution of economic openness:

[L]ower trade barriers, more open economic policies, more efficient logistics industries and better communications technology speed up and deepen integration across borders through trade and investment, strengthening mutual interests and reducing reasons for conflict. The [Human Security Center] report suggests that a 10 percent increase in FDI reduces a nation’s chance of international or civil war by about 3 percent, and that globalization reduces the reasons a country might want to fight:

“[T]he most effective path to prosperity in modern economies is through increasing productivity and international trade, not through seizing land and raw materials. In addition, the existence of an open global trading regime means it is nearly always cheaper to buy resources from overseas than to use force to acquire them.”

Eliminating all remaining trade barriers would be one of the best Christmas presents our politicians could give us.

Free Trade’s “Peace Dividend” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Bloggers have already noted the most glaring problems with Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and Bill Kristol’s Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Peace Doesn’t Keep Itself,” which worries that conservatives are figuring out that trying to run the world is not conservative.

The op-ed pretends that the fact that defense spending isn’t the largest cause of the deficit means it isn’t a cause of the deficit. It obscures the fact that we spend more on defense than we did in the Cold War by counting the defense budget as a portion of the economy without noting the latter has grown faster than the former.

So I can limit myself to less obvious angles. The first is that neoconservatives like Kristol are for increasing the defense budget no matter what. For them the military is basically an expression of national awesomeness (to use an academic term). Enemies and other details, like what we spend already, come up mainly in the justification phase.

In 2000, when U.S. defense spending was nearly $180 billion lower than today—excluding the wars and adjusting for inflation—Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wanted to increase defense spending by $60 to $100 billion a year. After September 11, they called for a “large” and “substantial” increase. Having got that and then some, Kristol, at least, wants even more. The neoconservative appetite for military spending is insatiable because their militarism is.

Second, I want to pick on one point the op-ed makes because it is both wrong and widely believed: “Global prosperity requires commerce and trade, and this requires peace. But the peace does not keep itself.”

There are really two theories there. First, commerce requires general peace in supplier nations and military protection of supply lines. Second, only the United States can provide both. There is some evidence for these claims in a long-running correlation. Since World War II, U.S. military hegemony has coincided with explosive growth in global trade. So it’s easy to see how people assume causation. But as Chris Preble and I argue in the Policy Analysis that we just released, “Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint,” the causal logic here is weak. It overstates the U.S. military’s contribution to global stability and trade and the trouble that instability causes us.

The first theory is right in the sense that nations devastated by war ultimately lose purchasing power, which is bad for their trade partners. But in the meantime, warring countries typically need a lot of imports. They also generate capital for armies by selling goods abroad. For that reason, the Iranians and Iraqis kept pumping oil during their war. Wars do not simply shut down trade.

The argument for policing peacetime shipments is even worse, as I explain in a guest post I did yesterday for the Stimson Center’s revamped defense budget blog. As I note there, we do not really protect shipments now. A tiny minority get naval protection. Thus primacists tend to argue that what matters is not defending trade but the ability to do so, which deters malfeasants from harassing it or building capability to do so. But that argument gives the game away. You don’t need to do it in good times to do it in bad times.

What happens the day after we tell our Navy to stop sailing around in the name of protecting commerce? Who interrupts shipments? Would Iran start charging tolls at the Strait of Hormuz or China in the South China Sea? I say no because they know that we can force access and because there are plenty of ways to retaliate, including blockading those countries.

A more plausible claim is that some states would increase naval spending to police their own shipping. That seems like a good thing. Sometimes people say that such burden-sharing could set off a naval arms race that causes a war, say between India and China. I suppose that is possible, but naval arms races have caused few, if any, wars.

Let’s say our ability to buy some good from some area is cut off, either by instability at the source or en route. The likely outcome is supply adjustment, not supply failure. Generally another supplier takes the orders and prices adjust. That is particularly true as globalization links markets and increases supply options. It is when you have only one potential supplier that you really need to police delivery.

If you believe that military hegemony protects peacetime shipments, you could argue that it distorts price signals by shifting a portion of the good’s cost to federal taxes. Because I don’t believe that we are propping up prices in most cases, I say that what primacists are really selling is an attempted but failed subsidy to consumption of goods, including oil.

Oil is a special case because price shocks caused by supply disruption have in the past caused recessions. However, economists argue that the conditions that allowed for this problem have changed. One change is the reduced burden energy costs now impose on U.S. household income. Others disagree, but if they are right, that is why we have public and private reserves.

You can read more of what we think of about the idea that only we can keep the peace among states in the Policy Analysis or in the stuff Cato scholars have been pumping out for years. I will just say here that primacists ignore all the history contradicting the idea that only hegemons create a stable balance of power and the many rivals that formed stable balances of power without an hegemon taking a side.

International stability and world trade would be OK without our nation trying to use our military to provide them. If you don’t believe me, you might read one of these three papers by Eugene Gholz and Daryl Press. I took a lot of this from them.

Actually We Aren’t Running the World is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The professionally ignorant (and I’m thinking here of Lou Dobbs, among others) never “get it” about trade. They think it’s some complex swindle, in which we deny ourselves “jobs,” or that it should be about being “fair” or “balanced.” They don’t see how free trade creates prosperity and peace. I was inspired by the outstanding trade economist Doug Irwin of Dartmouth to explain what goes on when people trade. The challenge was to explain international trade in under 3 minutes. So here’s the result in 2:57: The Great Prosperity Machine.

Share it with your favorite protectionist, or with professors and teachers. (There’s more information at AtlasNetwork.org/BastiatLegacy.)

Watch and share:

How to Explain Free Trade in Less Than Three Minutes is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tomorrow, the Cato Institute will be holding a half-day conference titled, “Escalate or Withdraw? Conservatives and the War in Afghanistan.”

One of the many speakers at tomorrow’s conference will be Rep. John Duncan (R-TN). On the House floor this week, he explained why “there is nothing conservative about the war in Afghanistan.”

Watch:

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a conservative, and neither are many of my Cato colleagues. This event is intended to highlight that leaving Afghanistan is far beyond Left vs. Right, and that anti-war sentiment is not “owned by peaceniks and pacifists.”

You can come to the event, or watch it live online.

Conservatives and Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Well, so much for the peace presidency…

• Patrick Michaels on Copenhagen: “Expect a lot of heat, not much light, and a punt right into our next election.”

• Why the Supreme Court should strike down the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board: “Imagine a government agency with the authority to create and enforce laws, prosecute and adjudicate violations, and impose criminal penalties. Then throw in the power to levy taxes to pay for all the above. And for good measure, make the agency independent of political oversight.”

• Discussing Hayek over at Cato Unbound: Four problems with spontaneous order.

• Podcast: “Obama’s Patriot Act Duplicity.”

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• A Financial Super-Regulator: The dangers of giving the Fed too much power.

• The financial regulators’ pipe dream: “Most new regulation will do nothing to limit crises because markets will innovate around it. Worse, some regulation being considered by Congress will guarantee bigger and more frequent crises.”

• The shape of things to come? More war will come before peace in the Middle East, says journalist and foreign affairs analyst Leon Hadar.

• The illegal cigarette trade in Ireland reaches “epidemic proportions“  after the government imposes draconian regulations on tobacco products.

• Podcast: “Too Big to Fail Is Just Too Big“

Thursday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• How cap-and-trade is like ritual self-flagellation.

• The Senate Finance Committee’s version of health care reform is definitely a step up from all of the other versions of the bill. But that’s still a pretty low bar.

• Change? The president cuts another deal for special interest lobbyists at the expense of American families.

• Why free trade is a boon to the environment.

• Podcast: Measuring Obama’s record on pursuing peace.

Weekend Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog