Sunk Costs

 Of the various Senate Republicans who have expressed skepticism in the past about the president's war-making powers, a curious number of them nevertheless voted against the resolution this week that would have constrained Trump's ability to continue his illegal bombing of Iran. 

The New York Times yesterday highlighted the case of Todd Young, the Senator from Indiana, who in the past had "warned of the dangers of a legislative branch that had ceded its war-making powers to the executive branch." Nevertheless, he helped vote down the war powers resolution. What gives? 

Young explained that, even if it would have been better to start this war with full consultation and approval from Congress—nevertheless, now that we are in it, we have to "finish the job" (as he put it). 

"[T]he practical reality that if [...] withdraw all military support immediately—that could be the most dangerous thing possible to our national security," the Times quotes Young; "Now we have to, so to speak, finish the job and at least stabilize the situation."

In short, it's the classic sunk costs fallacy: Yeah, maybe this war was a great big bloody murderous illegal and unconstitutional mistake. But now that we're in it, we have no choice but to continue. You break it you bought it. We've gone this far, why not go all the way? 

... I am in blood 

Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er:—as Macbeth put it. 

Gore Vidal, that great critic of the American Empire, once quoted that passage, in a classic essay about the 1954 Guatemala coup that the CIA and the U.S. government backed (See Vidal's "In the Lair of the Octopus"). 

(Anyone witnessing Trump's repetition today of the worst chapters of U.S. imperialism, orchestrated coups, and colonialism in Latin America and the Middle East, and who knows Vidal's essays, must surely be thinking to themselves: Vidal, thou shouldst be living at this hour, America hath need of thee!)

Vidal was describing in the essay his conversation with an old State Department hand who had helped oversee the U.S.-backed coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically-elected president in 1973. In justifying his role in these events, the former ambassador protested that it was impossible to "start from a point of innocence." 

That seems to be what Young is saying here too. 

Sure, he seems to imply, maybe the president shouldn't have started an unprovoked war of aggression that has already metastasized to 12 countries and led to the deaths of at least a thousand people, including over a hundred schoolchildren. 

But it's too late to do anything about that now. Our hand is stained. We can't recapture our innocence. Might as well keep going and "finish the job" we started.  

"To which I suppose the only answer"—as Vidal retorted—"is to say—Go! Plunge ever deeper, commit more crimes to erase those already committed, and repeat with Macbeth, 'I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er.'"