Truth - Al Franken [97]
“There’s a lot of money there,” Wolfowitz marveled, “and to assume that we’re going to pay for it is just wrong.”
As Wolfowitz summed it up to a House committee a few weeks later, “we’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”
The party line was firm. Here’s Andrew Natsios, the Bush administration’s chief for international development at the State Department, appearing on Nightline. To be fair, Natsios didn’t paint the war as quite the financial opportunity that Wolfowitz had described. Still, the price tag for the reconstruction of Iraq was both attractively low and extremely precise: exactly $1.7 billion.
KOPPEL: I want to be sure that I understood you correctly. You’re saying the, the top cost for the U.S. taxpayer will be $1.7 billion. No more than that?
NATSIOS: For the reconstruction.
Ted Koppel tried again.
KOPPEL: As far as reconstruction goes, the American taxpayer will not be hit for more than $1.7 billion no matter how long the process takes?
NATSIOS: That is our plan and that is our intention.
An incredulous Koppel tried a different angle.
KOPPEL: If it’s cost-plus, in other words, if they come back to you in another six months or in another year and say, gee, you know, we gave you the best estimate we could but here’s what it ended up costing and it ended up costing double what we said it was gonna cost—
NATSIOS: Oh, no, no, we have, that’s the amount of money we have to spend. We’re gonna do less if it costs more than that, because we have an appropriation, we’re gonna go within the limits of the appropriation.
KOPPEL: But what you are saying is, maybe, maybe fewer tasks will be accomplished. The amount of money, however, is gonna be the same?
NATSIOS: That’s correct. 1.7 billion is the limit on reconstruction for Iraq.
Like all encounters with the press, this interchange was posted on a government website, but was taken off when it was proven to be embarrassing and crazy. Natsios still has his position at State. However, he has not yet been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Natsios understood his job. Not so Lawrence Lindsey, director of Bush’s National Economic Council, who had pulled a Shinseki6 while talking to the Wall Street Journal the previous fall. After Lindsey committed the unpardonable sin of telling the Journal that the war could cost up to $200 billion, in retrospect an optimistic underestimate, he was fired. “Larry just didn’t get it,” an anonymous administration official (wild guess: Karl Rove) told the Washington Post.
Natsios, Wolfowitz, and the anonymous administration official were wildly off the mark. As of this writing, the war has cost $183 billion. As of the writing I’m planning to do next week, the war will have cost $184.5 billion. See how this works?
Of course, if we cut and run by the time this book hits the shelves, maybe the whole disaster will slide in under the $200 billion mark. On the other hand, if the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is correct, the cost of the Iraq War could exceed $700 billion. That’s more than the cost, in current dollars, of either the Korean War ($430 billion) or the Vietnam War ($600 billion), and without the prospect of the clear and decisive victories we achieved in those conflicts.
How much you think the war is going to cost depends on how long you think we’re going to be there. On February 7, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said, “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” Of course, he was talking about how long it would take to topple Saddam, not how long an occupation might last. If someone asked