http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54816-2004Jan4.htmlForesight Was 20/20
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A17
The Bush administration has been hammered for failing to anticipate or plan for the many problems of postwar Iraq or to set aside the money to pay for them. Its spokesmen insist, as they did before the war, that there was no way of knowing in advance what challenges might come up and what it might take to meet them.
Yet, looking back at what Washington's foreign policy community expected from an intervention in Iraq, it's striking how much of the trouble the U.S. mission now faces was accurately and publicly predicted.
On my desk is a pile of more than a dozen studies and pieces of congressional testimony on the likely conditions of postwar Iraq, prepared before the invasion by think tanks of the left, center and right, by task forces of veteran diplomats and area experts, and by freelancing academics.
<snip>
Nor, it turns out, was it so hard to predict how much the war would cost or how many troops might be needed. A Council on Foreign Relations task force report cited a range of 75,000 to 200,000 U.S. soldiers; there are 130,000 there now. Former State Department official James Dobbins stressed in a footnote that "this is not a commitment America alone can long sustain." As for costs, most of the independent estimates fell between $100 billion and $200 billion; William D. Nordhaus of Yale published a widely quoted study predicting direct costs of $150 billion to $740 billion over 10 years. So far, the Bush administration has committed to spend more than $160 billion in the first two years.
It's not that these predictions weren't heard inside the administration; some were echoed by the State Department's own postwar Iraq project. But the small group of Pentagon civilians who monopolized control over the occupation chose to ignore the expert opinion -- they were more swayed by Iraqi exiles, who insisted the country could be rapidly transformed if only existing institutions, such as the army, were completely dismantled.
L. Paul Bremer, who took charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority in June, confessed that until his appointment he had been absorbed by his private-sector career and hadn't read most of the Iraq studies. <snip>
Almost all the studies recommended that the United States try to avoid the political trouble it now has by handing control over Iraq, or at least its political transition, to the United Nations, and by exercising its influence indirectly. At the same time, they warned against a speedy departure. "While moving the process along as quickly as possible, the United States must not be limited by self-imposed timelines but rather should adopt an objectives-based approach," said Djerejian and Wisner. The administration ignored that first piece of advice, to its great cost. If it is to avoid disaster in 2004, it had best remember the second.
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