WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Democrats on Capitol Hill are charging the Bush administration pulled a bait-and-switch on Congress, promising that Iraqi reconstruction would largely pay for itself, all the while warning them that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to U.S. national security with his alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The two facts combined to assure a quick and almost unanimously supported war with Iraq -- and now, neither is turning out to be entirely accurate, say Democrats.
"I think they strongly implied it would cost a lot less and take less time than in fact it will because I think they had a rosy picture of what we were getting into," said David Helfert, the communications director for the Democratic members on the House Appropriations Committee.
Whether Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States is increasingly in doubt, especially after the former U.N. weapons inspector in charge of finding evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons told Congress he needs at least six to nine more months to complete his investigation. David Kay told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had found only evidence of intentions and capabilities but no actual weapons in his three months of work.
"We have not found ... actual weapons. That doesn't mean we've concluded there are no actual weapons. It means ... we've not yet found weapons," Kay told reporters. "Imminence is a political policy decision."
Kay's work is still unfinished, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday at a Pentagon press conference, and the results should not be pre-judged.
However, at least one senator privy to Kay's classified briefing seems to be having misgivings.
"We need to do some serious thinking about where did our intelligence allow us to get so that we ... would decide to go to war. Did we misread it, or did they mislead us, or did they simply get it wrong? Whatever the answer is, it's not a good answer," Sen. Jay Rockefeller said Thursday.
Nevertheless, Rockefeller said he would support the Pentagon's request for $87 billion in fiscal year 2004 to fund the ongoing operation in Iraq. Roughly $20 billion of that amount is earmarked for reconstruction.
In the months leading up to the war, and even while it was being waged, administration officials suggested the costs of Iraqi reconstruction could be largely paid for from Iraq's vast wealth. The country sits on the second-largest known deposits of oil and natural gas in the world.
In February, then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, "Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction."
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the House Appropriations Committee March 27 reconstruction could largely be covered by proceeds from Iraqi oil and foreign donations.
"There's a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. And it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. They will now own those assets instead of a dictator that owns them, and they should spend them for their own welfare," Wolfowitz said. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon."
Two weeks later White House budget director Mitch Daniels told a reporter, "There's just no reason that this can't be an affordable endeavor."
Andrew Natsios, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, put an even finer point on it April 23. He told ABC's Nightline "the American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this." The remainder, Natsios said, would be paid with international contributions and from Iraq's oil wealth.
Those statements were made before the Bush administration had taken the full measure of exactly how bad the Iraqi infrastructure was -- functioning sewage served just 3 percent of the country, only 60 percent of the country had reliable electricity, and less than 40 percent had safe drinking water.
It was also before massive and terribly destructive looting broke out in the days after the war, during which many buildings were stripped of furniture, appliances, and even electrical wires and plumbing and sometimes set on fire. Such sabotage continues. (On one recent two-hour drive north of Baghdad every third power line seemed to have been torn down.) Oil pipelines continue to be attacked, cutting off the export of Iraq's main cash crop. The reconstruction effort was officially underestimated to begin with, and the continuing security problem adds to the bottom line.
Kevin Kellems, a Pentagon spokesman, told United Press International Thursday that such quotes have been taken out of context by critics politically opposed to the war and Bush administration.
"In virtually every case I've seen in the past couple of months on these kinds of questions, the quote being cited by opponents of the policy are either taken radically out of context or are small, misleading excerpts of larger explanatory paragraphs."
For their part, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz with a verbal discipline that has characterized their tenure at the Pentagon carefully eschewed projecting specifically what the cost would be for Iraq reconstruction, saying there were too many variables that could dramatically affect the bottom line.
"I am reluctant to try to predict anything about what the cost of a possible conflict in Iraq would be, or what the possible cost of reconstructing and stabilizing that country afterwards might be," Wolfowitz said Feb. 27 in testimony to the House Budget Committee. "I think it's necessary to preserve some ambiguity of exactly where the numbers are."
One month later, Rumsfeld pronounced the cost "not knowable" in testimony to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.
"We can't know how long the effort in Iraq is going to last -- and we certainly can't tell what it is going to cost. It is not knowable," Rumsfeld said March 27.
"The only estimates I've seen are $50 (billion) to $75 billion by various international institutions, and that is a guess. And think of the range -- 50 to 75!" he laughed Thursday at a Pentagon press conference. "It is obviously a guess."
In fact, the $50 billion figure came from then Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels, a fact Rumsfeld noted in January to reporters.
Daniels made his estimate in the wake of comments by Lawrence Lindsay, then-National Economic Council chairman, to the Wall Street Journal. He told the newspaper in September 2002 the United States may have to spend as much as 1 percent to 2 percent of its gross domestic product on a war with Iraq -- which translates to $100 billion to $200 billion. He said the cost would be affordable given the size of the U.S. economy.
Lindsay resigned his position in December 2002 along with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill.
The World Bank estimates the cost of rebuilding Iraq over the next four to five years will be between $38 billion and $55 billion. Other organizations say it could be between $60 billion and $65 billion.
So far, the bill for the war and reconstruction in Iraq has reached roughly $135 billion. In April, Congress approved a supplemental of $79 billion, of which roughly $60 billion was for military operations in Iraq, which now run at about $3.9 billion per month. The reconstruction total from that request was relatively low at $2.5 billion.
On July 29, OMB Director Joshua Bolten told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "We don't anticipate requesting anything additional for the balance of this year" for Iraq.
Two months later the Bush administration would ask for another $87 billion. But Bolten's statement was, taken literally, that the new request is money for the new fiscal year rather than the balance of FY2003.
Neither Bolten nor Wolfowitz would estimate the cost of the Iraq operation for 2004, saying they had no way of knowing what the variables would be. However, the Coalition Provisional Authority presented its plan for the way ahead in reconstruction to every member of Congress on July 23, according to the American administrator overseeing the CPA, L. Paul Bremer.
A small part of Iraqi reconstruction is being paid for out of seized and frozen funds, according to Bremer. U.S. forces seized $900 million and the U.S. government froze $1.7 billion. All but $63 million of that has been exhausted, most of it on salaries.
Bremer told Pentagon reporters last week the projected Iraqi government budget for 2004 and beyond was about $15 billion a year. Projected oil revenues will be roughly $20 billion a year, giving the Iraqi government -- provided it has no emergencies or unanticipated costs, and disciplined management that will prevent it from going over budget -- $5 billion annually to invest in its own development and reconstruction, beginning in 2005.
By Bremer's calculation, $20 billion is urgently needed for reconstruction in the next 12 to 18 months. He told the Senate Appropriations Committee last week he "hopes" a large portion will be pledged by other countries at the Oct. 23 donors' conference in Madrid, and that Iraqi oil revenues will cover the rest.
"And that's how you will fill in this gap," he said.
The story of funding Iraq is not over yet, a Pentagon official told UPI.
"Those who are confident -- that we are going to be left holding the large part of the tab are guessing -- they don't know we haven't seen the end of the story. And they may end up having to explain an awful lot of quotes and attacks that were thrown about loosely in the heat of the moment," he said Friday.
Rumsfeld still holds to the notion that the reconstruction bill should not be paid by the United States.
"No one I know believes that the United States taxpayers ought to pay any significant fraction of (Iraq's total reconstruction cost). We do know that the funds for whatever the number may prove to be, the bulk of it's going to be paid by the Iraqi people," he said Thursday.
He did not answer whether he considered $20 billion to be a significant fraction of the Iraq reconstruction bill.
Bremer has recommended against asking the appointed Iraqi governing council to garnish its oil revenues to pay back the United States for the costs of reconstruction, as he sees it only as adding to the already $200 billion in debt Iraq faces. About half is real debt, from loans from foreign entities, and the other half is money owed as reparations to victims of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War.
"It is not wise to seek to put any more debt on to the Iraqis, even if it's in the form of collateralizing future oil revenues which also has the disadvantages ... of making it look as if we -- even no matter how you do it -- we are in some way taking a lien against oil revenues and therefore that's why we fought the war," Bremer told the Senate Appropriations Committee Sept. 25.
Michigan Democrat Sen. Carl Levin presented an amendment Friday to have Iraq finance its reconstruction by getting a loan on the world capital market to be secured by its oil wealth and guaranteed by the United States.
Bremer's recommendation against adding to Iraq's debt -- which he frequently likens to the massive war reparations foisted on Germany after World War I that paved the way for Hitler's rise to power -- only outrages Democratic critics more.
"Now we see the same people, where they were (once) talking about the resources to pay for its own reconstruction, they are now saying 'We can't use that money to repay these costs. It's needed for other things. We can't heap that debt on Iraq, we can't add more to it.' Well, guess whose debt that gets added to? The American public's," Helfert told UPI.
