That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [130]
Today the rich don’t need the benefits of collective action, said Stiglitz, because they can create their own “subsociety” with its own collective goods. “They have their country clubs, which are their own parks. They have their own private schools. They don’t have to go to public schools and they would not want to have their kids educated there. They have their own transportation system with private jets and chauffeured cars, so they don’t really care about the deterioration in public transport. They don’t care if there are long lines at the airport, because they are not in them.”
Chasing the Losers
If during the Cold War we had let the key features of our formula for greatness—which are the major determinants of economic growth and therefore of power and influence in the world we are living in—deteriorate the way we did during the Terrible Twos, it would have been considered the equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Politicians would have accused one another of creating or tolerating an “education gap” or an “infrastructure gap,” like the “missile gap” of the 1950s. The charges and countercharges would have dominated national elections. In the Terrible Twos, something far worse happened.
We didn’t notice. Declining numbers in the important categories of national life became normal.
Then we made things even worse. Having underestimated the challenge posed to America by 11/9—November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell—we compounded the error by overestimating the challenge of 9/11. We spent the rest of the decade focusing our national attention and resources on the losers from globalization—al-Qaeda, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—when our major long-term challenge comes from the winners, most of them in Asia. We devoted ourselves to nation-building in Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush when we should have been concentrating on nation-building at home.
Since the authors of this book both supported the war in Iraq, to date the more controversial and expensive of the two projects, we need to say what we got wrong and what we still believe. Both of us believed then and believe now that finding a way to bring democracy into the heart of the Arab world was a strategic and moral imperative. We knew it would be difficult and costly, and said so at the time, but even so, we underestimated just how difficult and how costly. We have nothing but regret for the excessive price that America and Iraq have had to pay in lives and treasure.
The losers from globalization—specifically al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—did pose significant security problems. We had to strike back against the al-Qaeda perpetrators of 9/11, not simply to deter another attack but also to disrupt what they might have been planning next. But Saddam Hussein was not part of 9/11. The Bush administration asserted that his regime had to be toppled because it had weapons of mass destruction. Neither of us shared that view. Michael believed that the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was thought to possess—chemical weapons—did not pose a severe enough threat to justify an attack. What did justify removing him from power was the prospect that at some point in the future he would acquire the far more dangerous nuclear weapons.
Tom’s view was that the long-term threat to the United States from the Middle East came less from weapons of mass destruction than from people of