Break it, you buy it. The Fall of 2002 was a critical one for decisions about Iraq. What did Republicans and fiscal conservatives do? You know, the guys who like to pose as reliable stewards of the economy. They must have demanded realistic cost-benefit scenarios, right? Disasters were predicted. They must have tried to derail the train, right?
You’d think they left their brains on vacation. Nothing makes them any more trustworthy now. A return to red flags of the time, to see the warnings they ignored…
Yale economist William Nordhaus wrote The Economic Consequences of a War with Iraq in October 2002. He noted that the Administration was
silent on the costs of war. Neither the study from the Congressional Budget Office nor that from the Democratic Staff of the House budget Committee estimated the cost of a protracted war.
The reports exclude complete estimates of the total costs of occupation, peacekeeping, democratization, nation-building, and post-occupation humanitarian assistance.
Nordhaus estimated the occupation for a decade to cost $75 Billion to $500 Billion, reconstruction and nation-building to cost $25 Billion to $100 Billion, and humanitarian assistance to cost $1 Billion to $10 Billion.
He itmized early warning signs of economic and political miscalculations:
The Bush administration has made no serious public estimate of the costs of the coming war. The populace and the Congress are unable to make informed judgments about the realistic costs and benefits…
The Bush administration has not prepared the public for the cost or the financing of what might prove an expensive adventure…
[U]nilateral actions, particularly those taken without support from the Islamic world, risk inflaming moderates, emboldening radicals, and spawning terrorists in those countries…
[S]trategists may be deluding themselves on the reaction of the Islamic world and the Iraqi people to American intervention….
The war in Iraq threatens to claim the scarce resources and attention of the United States for many years, distracting the country from other troubling spots, like North Korea or the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The administration concentrates on Iraq, while slow growth, fiscal deficits, a crisis of corporate governance, and growing health-care problems threaten the economy at home….
Notwithstanding all the warning signs, the administration marches ahead, heedless of the fiscal realities and undeterred by cautions from friends, allies, and foes.
In December 2002 came estimates the cost of the war could run as high as $200 Billion, reported the Washington Post.
A recent conference by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies considered three scenarios for a war with Iraq. …
A worst-case scenario (5 percent to 10 percent probability) envisaged fighting for three to six months, massive political unrest in the Middle East, terrorist attacks against the United States and large-scale damage to Iraqi oil facilities. … [This] would have “serious adverse effects” on the U.S. economy, according to Laurence H. Meyer, a former Federal Reserve Bank governor now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The worst-case scenario would likely lead to a global recession.
More pointedly, Christopher Farrell criticized the lack of candor of the Bush Administration, commenting on the same report in Business Week for conservative readers.
If the price of war in Iraq starts escalating, however, to $200 billion, $400 billion, $1 trillion, how does the government propose to meet the tab? By borrowing and sending the budget deficit into the stratosphere? By cutting government spending on just about everything else? By rescinding tax cuts and maybe levying a surcharge on the wealthy? By depreciating the currency with that old standby and enemy of the people, inflation?
James Fallows interviewed a good variety of people for his article in the Atlantic Monthly of November 2002. He foretold almost every disaster, both long-term and short-term:
- the immediate humanitarian crisis
- the destruction of infrastructure
- many billions of U.S. dollars for reconstruction and post-conflict security forces
- the hunt for Saddam Hussein
- severe language/communication difficulties
- delay in setting up a plausible new government
- expansion of Iranian influence
- “warlordism” and ethnic-regional feuds
At a Pentagon briefing… Rumsfeld asked rhetorically, “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if Iraq were similar to Afghanistan–if a bad regime was thrown out, people were liberated, food could come in, borders could be opened, repression could stop, prisons could be opened? I mean, it would be fabulous.”
The transforming vision is not, to put it mildly, the consensus among those with long experience in the Middle East. “It is so divorced from any historical context, just so far out of court, that it is laughable,” Chris Sanders told me. “There isn’t a society in Iraq to turn into a democracy. That doesn’t mean you can’t set up institutions and put stooges in them. But it would make about as much sense as the South Vietnamese experiment did.” Others made similar points.
Fallows wasn’t taken in by a gushing Rumsfeld.
Merely itemizing the foreseeable effects of a war with Iraq suggests reverberations that would be felt for decades. If we can judge from past wars, the effects we can’t imagine when the fighting begins will prove to be the ones that matter most.
Today, Republicans and fiscal conservatives may claim to disagree with the President, transparently for political advantage. When it mattered, they weren’t there. They ignored warnings of disaster. They went on vacation rather than work.
They can go on vacation permanently, and take their laziness with them. You want respect? Earn it.
