Why not eradicate malaria, instead of bombing the shit out of people?

In my introductory classes, I almost always show them this TED talk that Bjorn Lomborg gave a couple of years ago.  Lomborg, who is probably a banned word in the academic hallway where my office is given that I am surrounded by self-proclaimed Socialists and Marxists, makes a neat and simple point:

If we had say, 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world, where should we spend it?

Apparently America's answer is that we would rather spend it on bombing a country.  I mean, think about the cost of the recent wars and what they actually deliver in terms of returns.  Joseph Stiglitz, who initially estimated the cost of Iraq War at $3 trillion--yes, 3,000 billion dollars--had to revise it upwards:

two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?
The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

And now, we are on to yet another war of choice--in Libya.  It is not cheap.  Mark Thoma summarized it in one single sentence; a sentence heard around the blogosphere:

We have enough money to pay for military action in Libya, but not for job creation?

The Economist's correspondents are engaged in a debate on this very issue of guns and butter.  Exhibit one:

If our foreign policy aims to prevent suffering and death with finite resources, it makes sense to ask whether this war makes sense on those grounds. I grasp the tiresome point that the choice on the table was not a choice between taking out Libya's air defences and buying bed nets. The choice was between taking out Libya's air defences or not. But the question nagging some of us is why this was the choice on the table. Why did this come up as a matter requiring urgent attention and immediate decision? Why is it that the choice to express our humanitarian benevolence through the use of missiles and jets gets on the table—to the top of the agenda, even—again and again, but the choice to express it less truculently so rarely does? If our humanitarian values really set the agenda, how likely is it that the prospect of urgent military intervention would come up so often?
It's important that we take the logic of humanitarian justification seriously, but it's true that talk of bed nets tries to do this in a somewhat confused and confusing way. What we really need is intelligent insight into the death and suffering intervention in Libya can be expected to prevent relative to other feasible options. That no one seems even to try to do this in a serious or systematic way—that it seems almost surprising when someone notes the existence of options "between sitting on our hands and launching something close to all-out war"—suggests that objective humanitarian success isn't actually the guiding light of Operation Odyssey Dawn.

Exhibit two is an argument with this colleague, explaining why we Americans and our government prefers the bombing approach than the malaria tent approach:

it simply isn't true that we aren't faced with calls for peaceful humanitarian interventions as often as we are faced with calls for military ones. We are faced with calls for peaceful humanitarian interventions all the time. People are asking for more money for USAID. People are asking for more money for UN peacekeepers. People are asking for more money for the United States Institute for Peace. They're asking for more money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. If you want America, collectively, to be doing more of this sort of thing and less of the bombing sort of thing, then what you need to do is to argue that those sorts of activities are central missions of the United States government, because the most powerful political forces in America over the past couple of decades have been arguing that they aren't, and that's why we're not doing more of them.

In other words, yet again the argument is that we the people are to be blamed--we haven't emphasized enough to our warmongering politicians that we would prefer our tax dollars to spent otherwise. 

Well, as we go about bombing the shit out of countries, we need to keep this in mind:

If the experience of the last ten years has taught us anything, it should be this: We can bomb our enemies into the Stone Age, but we cannot bomb them into the 21st century