Libya cost/benefit

I watched a fair amount of Libya coverage with my father-in-law on Saturday, including BBC, CBC and CNN. I kept wondering why no one was talking about the cost of the war and thinking about it in cost-benefit terms. Wars that are completely voluntarily should be thought about in exactly those terms. Think how much nicer it would be to use the money we will spend on this adventure to pay down the national debt, or to reduce taxes or to provide public goods. Instead, we distract ourselves from the unhappiness of necessary domestic budget cutting with some expensive boom-boom, as though the country were being run by seven-year-olds.