Jihadist elements in Syria might benefit, but nothing will benefit them more than a prolonged war of the kind that already exists.
Mr Lindsey offered an even more cheerful forecast: he estimated that even a prolonged war would not cost more than $100 billion-200 billion, or about 1-2% of America's GDP.What's the worry, then?Hang on a minute, says Mr Nordhaus, who argues in the latest New York Review of Books that none of the recent analyses of war goes far enough.
In the event, the central powers though at an enormous economic and demographic disadvantage fought a prolonged war much more effectively than the Entente, until the failure of Ludendorff's offensive in the spring of 1918, when the morale of German troops finally broke.
In America a young president was forced to fire General Stanley McChrystal whose epic faux pas seemed to make a prolonged war feel more uncertain.
QUESTION FROM JANET: Wasn't what fueled 1968 protests largely the Vietnam War? Are today's protests today going to be deeper and more prolonged because unlike stopping, finally, the war, solving the economic crisis: joblessness, huge income inequality, etc. may be harder to solve?
That agreement set up a series of steps toward reconciliation in Congo, which has been caught in a prolonged war of shifting alliances for more than five years.
They face a prolonged war whose casualties will dwarf the estimated 70,000 lives lost to date; more houses destroyed, more refugees; the ruination of their once prosperous economic life; and the shredding of a social fabric that held Syria together for centuries.
Though the number of active service members in its military has achieved near parity with the number in Malaysia, there are more than five times as many Malaysians to be drawn on in the event of a prolonged war.
And that made for a prolonged war, an escalating war and essentially a hopeless war.
That could result in a much deeper, more prolonged downturn.
