IRAQ PREDICTIONS REVISTED

“A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond,” the Washington Post notes. “The inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq, [the Bush] admin­is­tra­tion pre­dicted, would come at lit­tle finan­cial cost and would mate­ri­ally improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as lib­er­a­tors, Bush offi­cials pre­dicted, and the top­pling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democ­racy through­out the Middle East.
“Things have not worked out that way, for the most part.”

There is evi­dence that the eco­nomic lives of Iraqis are improv­ing, thanks to an infu­sion of U.S. and for­eign cap­i­tal. But the admin­is­tra­tion badly under­es­ti­mated the finan­cial cost of the occu­pa­tion and seri­ously over­stated the ease of paci­fy­ing Iraq and the warmth of the recep­tion Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democ­racy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the oppo­site effect…
On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a tele­vised inter­view the costs to U.S. tax­pay­ers of rebuild­ing Iraq. “The American part of this will be $1.7 bil­lion,” he said. “We have no plans for any further-​​on fund­ing for this…“
…The admin­is­tra­tion has already sought more than $150 bil­lion for the Iraq effort.
In its pre­dic­tions a year ago, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion sim­i­larly under­es­ti­mated the resis­tance the United States would face in Iraq. “I really do believe we will be greeted as lib­er­a­tors,” Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 inter­view.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz derided a general’s claim that paci­fy­ing Iraq would take sev­eral hun­dred thou­sand U.S. troops. And Rumsfeld, in February 2003, pre­dicted that the war “could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months…“
Considerable eco­nomic activ­ity has resumed in Baghdad and other major cities, while liv­ing stan­dards are bet­ter than at any time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the country’s oil rev­enue is grad­u­ally climb­ing. “What’s impres­sive — and maybe more credit goes to Iraqis than to us — is that eco­nomic activ­ity has picked up. Clearly, there’s money out there. People are going to jobs and work­ing,” said Henri Barkey, for­mer State Department expert on Iraq and now chair­man of Lehigh University’s International Relations Department.
[An] ABC News poll con­firms this. Fifty-​​six per­cent of Iraqis said things are bet­ter than before the war, and 71 per­cent expect that their lives will be even bet­ter next year. 

THERE’S MORE: Are Iraqis bet­ter off now than they were a year ago? The Christian Science Monitor offers a detailed score­card.

March 19th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.