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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
On March 27, 2003, in the thick of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary and an architect of the war plan, testified before a House appropriations subcommittee. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon," Wolfowitz said of Iraq. Wolfowitz calculated that "the oil revenues of that country could bring in between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years." Other Bush administration officials, speaking to the press before and during the initial attack, speculated that because fewer troops would be used during this war than were used in the Gulf War, the bill for the second invasion of Iraq would fall short of the price for the first. That war cost slightly less than $60 billion, of which U.S. allies paid $48 billion.
Needless to say, administration officials were way, way off in their cost predictions. Like many of their other mistakes in Iraq, the chief culprit seems to be what the president recently conceded was a "miscalculation" regarding the conditions of postwar Iraq. The Bush team had presumed that an occupied Iraq would be a peaceful, economically vibrant place, a country that did not require a full-time occupation by hundreds of thousands of American troops.
"We totally blew our prewar assessments," says Daniel Goure, a defense analyst who is the vice president of the Lexington Institute, a conservative group that supports the war in Iraq. Goure had once agreed with the administration's estimates that a small number of troops would be needed to secure Iraq. He admits now that he and everyone else who was predicting peace in Iraq was wrong, and he foresees current troop levels staying steady in Iraq at least until next summer. Goure says he expects a reduction, in the year after that, to about 100,000 American and allied troops, and for the war to be declared a success he'd want to see the troop levels substantially reduced after that -- "perhaps down to zero within three years," he says.
Troop levels are important to any cost estimate because maintaining the force in Iraq is the most expensive piece of the battle -- far more expensive than, say, rebuilding the country. To date, the United States has pledged about $24 billion in reconstruction costs, and less than half of that money has been allocated or spent (it's tough to build schools when you're battling car bombs.) "The vast majority of the costs are associated with getting the troops over there, activating the reserve personnel, that sort of thing -- they're largely fixed costs determined by the size of the deployment," says Steven Kosiak, the director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group that monitors Defense Department spending.
This is bad news for the U.S. bottom line, because it doesn't appear possible to reduce troop levels any time soon. There are "little data points" that point to this, says GWU's Gordon Adams. "We had been as high as 190,000 called-up Reservists and Guard troops, and then for a while it tailed down into the low 150s. Now we're starting to see it go back up, and the minute you call up Guard and Reserves, you're spending more money." Asked whether he believes the costs can go down in Iraq if the security situation suddenly becomes sunnier in the next few months, Adams, who has long opposed the war, feigned incredulity: "Did I hear you right? What did you say -- I'm sorry, I think something must have gone wrong with my phone. Did you say that things would get better in Iraq?"
Adams' sarcasm is not misplaced. Perhaps the most comprehensive picture of the current health of our mission in Iraq is provided by The Iraq Index, a chart of hundreds of statistics that measure every facet of everyday life -- for both the Americans and Iraqis -- in the country. The index, which is updated three times a week by Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, functions as a map of American blunders in Iraq; you can't read through the entire 50-page document without concluding that American troops are engaged in extremely heavy fighting in the country, and will likely be needed in the region for a long time. Here are some of the grim statistics: For much of last year, the estimated number of insurgents throughout Iraq stood at about 5,000. The number is now 20,000. The average number of patrols conducted by coalition forces every day now stands at a near-record high -- more than 1,800, compared with 1,600 last November. Last November, there were about 700 attacks on coalition forces in the country; in August, there were 2,700. In June of 2003, there were six attacks on Iraqi oil facilities; in August of 2004, there were 21.
Fighting all these insurgents is expensive business -- and you might say that it would be worthwhile expensive business if the benefits were clear, and if our resources were limitless. But the benefits of this fight are far from clear, while the money being spent in Iraq is almost certainly being diverted from a more pressing concern -- protecting ourselves in the United States.
To take one example, look at the security of U.S. ports. In November 2002, Bush signed the Maritime Transportation Security Act, meant to provide federal funds to upgrade security at seaports and waterways. The Coast Guard has estimated that $7.5 billion is necessary over 10 years to protect trading ports in accordance with the act -- but since 9/11, P.J. Crowley points out, Bush has allocated less than $500 million for the task. Similarly, the Coast Guard needs $4 billion to upgrade its fleet, and $2 billion is necessary for the Cargo Security Initiative, a program that would dispatch security screeners to ports around the world to inspect cargo heading for the United States. All of these initiatives have been underfunded. "We are challenging the Coast Guard to do more than they've ever done before -- we're giving them a central role in the war on terrorism," Crowley notes. But we're not paying for it.
Crowley's report brims with scenarios like this -- domestic agencies asked to do more but given fewer resources with which to complete their tasks. Instead of increasing funding for police, as you'd expect a government to do after an attack like 9/11, the Bush administration cut by almost $100 million the funding for Bill Clinton's 1996 crime bill, meant to put 100,000 police officers on the streets. Rather than increase funding for fire departments, Bush cut resources by $250 million for the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, which goes to purchase equipment for local departments.
There is precious little money, too, for visionary long-term programs meant to provide real global security -- not only plans to secure nuclear material around the globe and deactivate nuclear warheads, but also to rebuild Afghanistan, which, let's remember, was the real source of the last major attack.
All of these homeland security measures could have been purchased with the money spent on the war; many more projects might be funded with the money likely to be spent in Iraq during the next decade.
