Mike Phipps reviews Wreckonomics: Why it’s time to end the war on everything, by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, published by OUP.

The war on terror. The fight against migration. The war on drugs. None of them are succeeding, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t winners. Machinery for the war on terror, up to 2021, cost $2.3 trillion in the Afghan-Pakistan theatre alone. Globally the cost between 2001 and 2021 may be as high as $18 trillion – alongside 900,000 deaths.

There are other beneficiaries too. As Naomi Klein explained in The Shock Doctrine, wars, coups and disasters are ideal moments of disorientation to force through rapid privatisation and other free market reforms.

The idea that war is a racket, benefiting the few at the expense of the many, is not new. But there are lucrative profits to made in other ‘wars’ – for example, on illegal migration – not just for the people smugglers, but also academics, reporters, NGOs, border police, maritime patrols and other state actors, the latter often open to bribery.

Spending on US border security has increased tenfold in thirty years. And just beyond the frontiers of Europe, dubious regimes badge themselves as ‘tough om border security’ in return for EU aid and recognition. It was recently estimated that the EU “provided states outside its jurisdiction more than €13 billion between 2014 and 2020 to curb migration to Europe while pretending to foster regional development.”

Exemplifying what this means in practice, Felicity Okoth wrote recently: “In Libya, EU externalisation projects have led to an influx of arms and funds to state and non-state actors (private security firms) willing to enact the European containment agenda. The funds have granted these actors political legitimisation that has been used to undermine migrant rights (interception from sea, forcible return, torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour).” These crimes are more fully explored in Sally Hayden’s 2022 book My Fourth Time, We Drowned, which Labour Hub reviewed here.

And underlining how a punitive policy may produce the opposite effect to that intended, Okoth adds: “Increased securitisation and militarisation, especially along the popular migration corridors in Africa, have also increased the overall cost of migration. Migrants must pay smugglers more money to go through new clandestine routes that emerge from these efforts. The more restrictions Europe puts in place, the more money smugglers make.”

Profiteering

The ’war on crime’ also reveals some unhealthy profit-making. A man arrested for stealing a single can of beer in Ferguson, Missouri, was fined $200 – but was also compelled to rent an alcohol-monitoring bracelet for $400 a month, payable to a private company. His only source of income was selling his blood plasma, but skipping meals to pay his debt meant his protein levels fell, making him ineligible for giving plasma.  His debt grew and he was jailed.

In 2013, Ferguson’s population of 21,000 had been issued with an astonishing 32,975 arrest warrants for non-violent offences. Court fines and fess brought in that year $2.4 million revenue for the town. This provides some of the context for the huge protests against the police killing of an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson a year later.

The authors identify a pattern to all these policies: the reduction of a complex set of problems to a fixation on a single ‘threat’; the rigging of the debate to get the right outcome; the export of the cost of the ‘solution’ – for example, most US wars are fought in other people’s countries; the proliferation of unintended consequences; and later, the distortion of the facts to project a positive result.

Distorting the results

A possible example of the latter was Home Secretary James Cleverly’s tweet on December 27th, aimed at talking up the government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign: “There were no small boat arrivals over Christmas for the first time since they started in 2018. Last night, our Border Force officers and their French partners worked together to stop a boat launching on the beaches. They’ve played a crucial role in cutting crossings by 35%.”

To which refugee and asylum activist Lou Calvey responded with a more likely explanation as to why crossings might have reduced at this time: “Step outside. Feel the strength of the wind. Imagine climbing on board a small boat & crossing one of the busiest shipping lanes in the World. In the freezing, dark Sea.”

Or the US, attempting to reframe its 2021 Afghanistan debacle as a success: the Taliban had apparently reformed. Vice-President Kamala Harris said, after the Taliban takeover, that the mission had “achieved what we had gone there to do”.

Unintended consequences

War in particular is full of unintended consequences. In Afghanistan, the US presence gave new prestige to local warlords, who allied with the Western coalition and whose viciousness drove many civilians into the arms of the Taliban. This kind of ‘gaming’ of conflicts where Western forces are present is widespread, the authors contend.

Again in Afghanistan, the deployment of British troops in Helmand province was justified primarily in terms of curtailing the narcotics trade. In attempting to destroy the little economy that existed, it pushed the opium price up, incentivising farmers to grow the crop, while at the same time generating anti-NATO sentiment. In areas under Taliban control, the opium economy continued as before, giving people an incentive to support the Taliban and oppose the government.

In fact, even in Western-controlled areas, the ‘war on drugs’ provided highly lucrative opportunities. According to Andersson and Keen, “posts as police chiefs in poppy-growing areas were being sold to the highest bidder at a cost of as much as $100,000 for a six-month appointment. Since the monthly salary was $60, one quickly gets an idea of the profits involved.”

Similarly in Iraq, the rise of Islamic State, particularly its military capability, is unthinkable without the sheer volume of war materiel that the US-led invasion force brought into Iraq. When the Iraqi army fled Mosul without firing a shot, it left behind a massive trove of US-supplied weaponry. This included 2,300 armoured vehicles – a majority of all the armoured vehicles the US had delivered to Iraq. This was seized by IS, making the subsequent war against it all the more protracted.

Or as John Kerry told President Bush in 2004: “Iraq was not even close to the centre of the war on terror until the President invaded it.” The authors estimate that the number of fighters in Islamist-inspired terrorist organisations more than tripled between 2000 and 2013 – and then declined as the ‘war on terror’ diminished in intensity.

Exporting the costs

The ‘war on drugs’ is a good example of externalising the costs of a policy. Rather than address the demand for mind-altering substances, the crackdown on supply targets producer and transit regions, usually in the Global South. In Mexico, the anti-drugs budget trebled between 1987 and 1989 and trebled again in the 1990s, creating immense scope for corruption. “The authorities have found themselves sitting on a prize asset: the service of nonenforcement, which can be purchased by drug smugglers.”

In the Philippines, this reached deadly proportions: the police were paid substantial sums for killing drug addicts, according to human rights organisations. But this was not substantially different from Western forces paying big bounties to warlords and paramilitary groups for the capture of supposed ‘terrorist suspects’, to be later sent to Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere.

There’s a lot to agree with in this book, although the chapter on policy responses to Covid 19 – which ranged from laissez faire to hyper-repressive – does not fully fit the model and leaves the authors in some disagreement with each other.

None of the issues considered here can be resolved without addressing the underlying causes – that’s especially clear with immigration. This year it is estimated that half of the world’s population will go to the polls in elections of varying degrees of fairness. If politicians propose quick fixes in the latest war on whatever, and people vote for them, the world is likely to be a much grimmer place this time next year.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.