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Analysis
Off the Mark on Cost of War, Reception by Iraqis
By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01
A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.
Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.
Much of the focus on prewar expectations vs. postwar reality has been on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But while that was the central justification for the war in Iraq, the administration also made a wide range of claims about the ease of the invasion and the benefits that would result. Though comparisons between expectations and results are complex, it appears that the administration, based on limited human intelligence and conversations with a small corps of Iraqi exiles, was overly optimistic.
White House officials, who did not respond to requests for information for this report, acknowledge that the financial costs have been greater than expected but say they are pleased with the progress toward democracy, security and prosperity in Iraq.
Bush, who will deliver a speech today outlining the successes of the past year, gave a taste of his themes in an address in Kentucky yesterday to troops just back from Iraq. "A year ago, Iraq was ruled by the whims of one cruel man," Bush said. "Today, Iraq has a new interim law that guarantees basic rights for all: freedom of religion, the right to cast a secret ballot and equality under the law." Iraqis, he said, are "building a country that is strong and free, and America is proud to stand with them."
On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be &1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."
That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another &20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as &75 billion this year alone.
The transcript of that interview has been pulled from the USAID Web site, the agency said, "to reflect current statements and testimony on Iraq reconstruction." The earlier &1.7 billion figure was "the best estimate available at the time, based on very limited information about the conditions inside of Iraq."
Natsios was far from the only one to offer low-ball figures. Similarly, a report by the White House Office of Management and Budget in late March 2003, said: "Iraq will not require sustained aid." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, in February 2003, dismissed reports that Pentagon budget specialists had put the cost of reconstruction at &60 billion to &95 billion during the first year -- in retrospect, relatively accurate forecasts. In testimony to Congress on March 27, 2003, Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." In fact, the administration has already sought more than &150 billion for the Iraq effort.
In its predictions a year ago, the Bush administration similarly underestimated the resistance the United States would face in Iraq. "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 interview.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz derided a general's claim that pacifying Iraq would take several hundred thousand U.S. troops. And Rumsfeld, in February 2003, predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
The capture of Iraq did proceed rapidly, allowing Bush to proclaim on May 1 that "major combat operations" were over and to declare "victory" in the "Battle of Iraq."
But those upbeat assertions were undermined by an Iraqi resistance that proved much more difficult. Washington had not counted on the scope, capabilities and endurance of the resistance after formal hostilities had ended -- or that Iraqis might eventually turn on their liberators. By yesterday, 574 American and 100 other coalition troops had died in Iraq. As many as 6,400 Iraqi soldiers are believed to have died in combat, and the insurgency continues to claim the lives of Iraqi civilians.
The "coalition has been unable to ensure a safe and secure environment within critical areas of Iraq," concluded a Council on Foreign Relations task force led by former defense and energy secretary James R. Schlesinger and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering.
"This lack of security has created widespread fear among Iraqis, inhibited growth of private sector economic activity, distorted the initial development of a robust and open civil society, and places important limitations on the normal routines of life for most Iraqis," said its report, "Iraq: One Year After."
Iraqis, who had high expectations that the United States could make them secure, have been disappointed, analysts say.
"Unfortunately, it's been 11 months since the fall of Baghdad, and the U.S. still hasn't fulfilled those expectations of [providing] basic security or services," said Kenneth Pollack, research director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center and a former National Security Council staff member in the Clinton and current Bush administrations. "At this point, Iraqis are beginning to think that, if those services have not been provided, it may be because we're unable or unwilling to do so."
A poll of Iraqis released this week by ABC News found that 42 percent of Iraqis, and 33 percent of Arab Iraqis, said the war liberated Iraq, but that 41 percent of Iraqis, and 48 percent of Arab Iraqis, said it humiliated the country. The presence of U.S.-led forces in Iraq is opposed by 51 percent of Iraqis.
Administration forecasts that the invasion would improve Iraqis' lives were closer to the mark. On March 17, 2003, Bush promised to help "build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell vowed days later: "We will show the Iraqi people a better life. We'll deal with those segments of the population who have been . . . absolutely brutally deprived for years, and they will start to see a better life very quickly."
Thanks to the massive injection of foreign aid, an important transformation has begun in rebuilding an Iraqi society emaciated by a dozen years of tough economic sanctions and Hussein's preference for personal luxuries over public necessities, analysts say.
Considerable economic activity has resumed in Baghdad and other major cities, while living standards are better than at any time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the country's oil revenue is gradually climbing. "What's impressive -- and maybe more credit goes to Iraqis than to us -- is that economic activity has picked up. Clearly, there's money out there. People are going to jobs and working," said Henri Barkey, former State Department expert on Iraq and now chairman of Lehigh University's International Relations Department.
The ABC News poll confirms this. Fifty-six percent of Iraqis said things are better than before the war, and 71 percent expect that their lives will be even better next year.
The administration's forecast that the toppling of Hussein would start a wave of democracy and a disavowal of terrorism in the region has not yet happened. There has been progress; Libya, for example, has since relinquished its nuclear weapons program. But while the administration had often predicted that Hussein's ouster could resolve the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the standoff between the two has worsened.
A poll released this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that Muslim countries are highly skeptical that the ouster of Hussein will make the Middle East more democratic.
"Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation," the president said in October.
But Iraqi democracy has proved messy in the making. Almost immediately, divisions within the Bush administration led to a temporary breakdown over the postwar plan for Iraq. The Pentagon abruptly jettisoned the State Department's plans for assembling a post-Hussein government and started from scratch -- a move from which analysts believe the United States has not recovered.
"Because we didn't have anything concrete to put in place the day after, it left a vacuum," Barkey said. The early chaos led the administration to change course. A plan to hold an Afghan-like national conference to select an interim Iraqi authority was tossed out in favor of appointing a 25-person Iraqi Governing Council, largely exiles and dissidents allied with Washington.
Two transition plans designed by the United States and its allies in the Coalition Provisional Authority were rejected out of hand by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a Shiite cleric virtually unknown before the war. With about four months left before the U.S. occupation is due to end, there is still no plan for how to pick a new government.
"The challenges for U.S. policy in postwar Iraq, given the geopolitical stakes, the threat of ethnic conflict and armed resistance, and the political complexities of administering a legal occupation, were far more formidable than those that confronted U.S. officials in previous cases," from Haiti to the Balkans to East Timor in the 1990s, the Council on Foreign Relations report said.
Still, there is hope that democracy may yet take hold. "Iraqis are engaged in free and vigorous debate about their collective political future and the adoption of a Transitional Administrative Law represents a major success both for U.S. policy and for the people of Iraq," the report concluded.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this article.