As we approach the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, it's time to look at the legacy.
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is scathing in his critique. He says it damaged the United States in ways that Osama Bin Laden never imagined. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are just the beginning. The wars, Stiglitz says, were funded entirely by credit, increasing the level of US debt.
Stiglitz writes: "Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America's future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%. … Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the US. But then the US Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted."
In other words, the wars, combined with the action of the Federal Reserve, created the financial crisis.
David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy points out that there were 10 more significant events than 9/11 over the last decade. These are the American response to 9/11, the Arab Spring, the rise of Asia, the stagnation of the US and other developed economies, the invention of social media, the proliferation of mobile phones and hand held computer devices, the crash of 2008, the Eurozone crisis, the failure to address global warming, and the rise of China, India, Brazil and Russia. So let's get it in some perspective.
So as David Wessel at The Wall Street Journal asks, was it really all worth it?
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