Skin in the Game

Picking just one quote for this post was not easy!

The post hoc rationalizations accompanying the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq got me thinking about ways to discourage conflict except in the most serious instances. Given the necessary (for classified source reasons) information gulf between our leaders and the general public, any such disincentive must occur at that level. I propose the following: a chance of death. Once the conflict is over, those in our government that voted for war should have to go through a lottery in which they may be picked for execution. The likelihood should be linked to the costs of the war (both human and financial) and perhaps any disparity on that score from what the public was told to anticipate. Obviously, such metrics would need to be very careful considered, and the exact details are beyond the scope of this post, which assumes for the sake of discussion that such a formula is possible. This measure would have a chilling effect on entering into war lightly and discourage optimistic portrayals of the sacrifice being considered. It seems entirely reasonable to expect those asking others to potentially lay down down their lives to risk their own.