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Quagmire? What
quagmire?
By Daniel
Smith
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
In the months
leading up to the war in Iraq and in its aftermath, Bush
administration officials were forced to continually
change their rationale for launching the attack to
topple Saddam Hussein. Where they have not wavered, and
where they have received consistent support from top
Pentagon military commanders, is in their insistence
that Iraq is not another Vietnam, not a quagmire. The
further the US and the world move from the fall of
Baghdad on April 9, the more it seems that the
administration is correct: Iraq is not a quagmire. It is
really a black hole.
A quagmire is defined in
the American Heritage Dictionary as (1) "Land with a
soft, muddy surface" or (2) "A precarious or difficult
situation". In either definition, circumstances are not
irreversible. A "soft muddy surface" suggests something
more solid somewhere beneath, while "difficult" is not
the same as impossible.
But media reports the
past week in August have made it very clear that the
administration has plunged the US over the lip - what is
called the "event horizon" - of the human and financial
black hole that is post-war Iraq. The significance of
passing the astronomical event horizon is that whatever
crosses it, even light, cannot recover or be recovered.
It is a one-way trip down a "tunnel" at whose end there
is no light, only crushing gravity.
Consider the
human costs of the Iraq adventure to date:
The US death toll from all causes since May 1, the
date that President George W Bush declared the end of
major combat operations in Iraq, now exceeds the death
toll from the three weeks required to seize Baghdad
(March 20-April 9) and the three weeks thereafter. The
286 US fatalities in the 2003 war is fast approaching
the 293 killed in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq.
The British lost four more soldiers in late August,
bringing their post-May 1 losses to 12. This is nearly
one-quarter of the UK's total fatalities since March 20
and doubles total UK fatalities in the 1991 Gulf War.
And the British are operating in an area the coalition
expected to be very receptive to the occupation
authorities.
Not routinely reported are the number of US wounded,
who total 1,127 as of September 2.
The United Nations' foreign staff lost 16, killed
when its Baghdad headquarters was blown up by a
vehicular bomb in August. Other relief and humanitarian
workers have also been targets, and one Danish soldier
has been killed.
Unreported are the Iraqi dead and wounded from
encounters with invading and occupation forces and the
series of car bombings in August and early September.
And then there are the fatalities caused by inadequate
or insufficient public services - electric power, clean
water, sanitation - as well as lack of basic security
brought on by the wholesale dismissal ("cleansing") of
the Iraqi police force, army and border guards in May.
According to the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, Baghdad
has 6,000 policemen, most of whom are in training.
Before March 20, the city had 20,000. And today the
"army" consists of 1,000 recruits.
The financial
aspects of the black hole that is post-war Iraq are
astronomical:
The cost of the war itself is estimated at US$48
billion, with the Pentagon's ongoing operations costing
another $4 billion a month - and no decrease forecast.
Reconstruction costs for just the post-war part of
fiscal year 2003, which ends September 30, have been
estimated at $7.3 billion. The administration refuses to
estimate costs for 2004, let alone future years.
Independent estimates depend on what is included; for
example, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has a
range of between $106-$615 billion over 10 years, while
estimates by Taxpayers for Common Sense run between
$114-$465 billion.
The administration had already signaled it would ask
Congress for new, substantial Iraq supplemental
appropriations in October. Now it says that it will need
a "few billion more" just to get through September.
L Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA), acknowledged that rebuilding Iraq would
cost "tens of billions" of dollars and that most of this
cost would be paid by US taxpayers. Bremer recently set
the cost of providing clean water at $16 billion and
reliable electric power at $13 billion. He made no
estimate about the cost of rebuilding the oil industry,
although he did suggest it might cost $100 billion over
the next five years to reconstitute Iraq's "national
infrastructure."
In March, even before Baghdad fell, a
non-competitive contract to rehabilitate Iraq's oil
fields, with an upper limit of $7 billion, was awarded
to Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer,
Halliburton, by the Army Corps of Engineers. (As of the
end of August, Halliburton had already been paid $700
million for oil field work, according to information the
corps provided the Washington Post.) As recently as
June, the CPA had said Iraq's oil production would
return to pre-war levels by the end of August. In July
this slipped to October; now it has slipped to October
2004. Yet as early as March 27, one week after the war
began and well before any evaluation of the condition of
the oil infrastructure was possible, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured the House
Appropriations Committee that oil would be Iraq's
self-financing rebuilding engine: "We're dealing with a
country that can really finance its own reconstruction,
and relatively soon."
Facing an ever-growing
black hole from failed oil revenues, the CPA unveiled in
late August its latest gambit to revive Iraq's economy:
opening the country to outside investment. The
US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, according to the
New York Times, reacted very cautiously. Even though it
nominally will have the opportunity to review major
investment offers, there is concern that traditional
industries, rendered relatively inefficient by 23 years
of war, sanctions and under-investment, would quickly be
swamped by new factories, throwing more people out of
work in a country where unemployment hovers near 60
percent.
Indeed, food and agriculture, services
and manufacturing are among major segments of the
economy not exempted from foreign investment. What the
CPA's scheme does exclude are natural resources
(including oil), basic services (electricity, water, and
sewage) and areas that would remain under CPA control
because of "national security" reasons (eg "retraining"
members of Iraq's former intelligence service, the
Mukhabarat, to work for the CPA). Moreover, the CPA's
proposal omits any requirement for investors to reinvest
their profits in Iraq. This sets up conditions similar
to those in post-Soviet Russia when billions of dollars
were exported and stashed in foreign banks while the
economy plunged.
While foreign investment is
generally considered a plus for economic growth, the
terms of the CPA plan seem to run counter to
recommendations of the Pentagon-appointed review group
that visited Iraq in late June to assess conditions.
Headed by former deputy defense secretary John Hamre,
the panel put economic development as the third of seven
priorities (behind public safety and greater Iraqi
involvement in reconstruction efforts). Specifically, it
recommended:
Creating short-term, large-scale public works
projects that would absorb sizable numbers of people in
the labor pool;
Jump-starting a significant number of state-owned
enterprises, even those that would not be competitive,
because of the great need to produce more job
opportunities;
Initiating a "massive" micro-credit program, similar
to those that have been successful in impoverished,
war-ravaged countries, that would open new avenues for
economic activity to new players, especially women.
Private foreign investment will not be
interested in any of these areas as economic returns
would be minimal, if any, and not worth the risk given
the lack of security in Iraq.
One characteristic
of black holes is that they grow in size as they absorb
energy from the surrounding cosmos. Iraq has already
snuffed out thousands of lives and absorbed tens of
billions of dollars. Bush reiterated that a "substantial
commitment of time and resources" still lies ahead.
Yes, Iraq is not a quagmire. But at a time when
US budget deficits of $401 billion this year and $480
billion for 2004 are forecast, Iraq looms as an
ever-expanding funnel into which human lives, human
talent and monetary resources are being poured, never to
be recovered. That, by any measure, defines a veritable
black hole.
Dan Smith (dan@fcnl.org) is a
military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and
a retired US army colonel and senior fellow on military
affairs at the Friends Committee on National
Legislation.
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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