Oh, not to beat a dead horse, but if you read the CBO footnotes, you realize that the number I gave you not only doesn’t include reconstruction costs, it also doesn’t include two other categories: “undistributed” (“Includes mobilized reservists supporting the various operations from the continental United States as well as the cost of maintaining the number of active-duty troops above current authorized levels.”) and “classified and coalition support”. These two categories, of which at least a good part should probably be considered as part of the cost of the Iraq war, are an additional $57 to 89 billion.
Well, here are some folks who don’t think it is going so “swimmingly”. (This is courtesy of an admittedly partisan source MoveOn.org but I have seen many of these quotes reported in straight news sources and they are easy enough to investigate yourself since footnotes are provided.):
Fair enough. Just so we are clear, though, I did not say that bush’s remarks proved he knew casualties would be as high as they are. Only that it proved he was saying all along there would be more casualties.
OK.
Ok, but again, was he talking about the war or was he talking about reconstruction or both. If he was talking about the war only, then the claim that he was right is disengenuous. If he was talking about both, then fine. My problem with the article you cited was its mischaracterization of the troop numbers makes me suspicious. Frankly, I have looked more closely at the history of this aspect of the administration’s early claims. Espacially in regards to the flap between Rumsfled and Shinseki. As I explained before, Shinseki made an estimate about several hundred thousand American troops (I think I saw 500,000 once, but it could have been much closer to 300,000) The article you cited claimed simply that he estimated over 200,000. Accurate, but not correct. This is what makes me suspicious about their claims about the budget chief’s estimate.
Actually I think they counted on quite a bit of help from allies as well. And you are correct on both counts. Reconstruction should be included and they did underestimate its cost.
I agree with your summary of the CBS numbers. Thanks very much for the link, BTW.
This is correct. If the former budget chief was talking about the total expenditures to 2014 then he was low and the administration was very very low. If, however, he was talking about the invasion and shooting war itself, then he was indeed quite high. I only suggest this because at the time he made those statements, everyone was talking about the shooting war, and few were talking about the occupation. At last publically.
I agree as well that miscalculations were made regarding the contributions from Iraq’s oil and allies.
My only problem is that we tend to make assumptions about the Bush administration’s early estimates from public statements which don’t seem to match many of their other public statements. So we have the argument with Shinseki that several hundred thousand troops is way too high, and that the budget estimate of $100 to $200 for the war is “way way high”. We take these to indicate that the Bush adminstration had some estimates in mind wich were way under these others. Further, sometimes, we take these sorts of things to mean that the Bush adminstration has been selling this as an easy and cheap war all along. Meanwhile every time an administration official speaks about the war he is careful to mention that it is not over and there is much work still to do.
After digging into the Shinseki controversy, I concluded that the charge that the Bush administration wanted to conduct the war with far fewer troops than they eventually needed is not true. Certainly not to the level the Shinseki was talking about. I’ll admit I have not dug into the financial side as much. But it seems to me that simply allowing that the budget director’s estimate may have been for the war alone would bring the discussion back to a simply discussion. There may be no need to invoke incompetence or self deception.
You always make me do this, jshore. I come in here and want to talk out of my ass for a while, and you make me do research*. Well, I looked into the early estimate of $100-$200 billion. It seems that this was an off the cuff remark made by Lawrence B. Lindsey. He was an economic advisor to the Whitehouse until he was fired along with Paul O’neil. His comment appears to have been more along the lines of “even if the war costs 2% of GDP the economy would not collapse.” I could not find the original quote, but I found several references to it. Here they are for your enjoyment. 
From here: *In September 2002, former Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey said war could cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, speculation that was immediately dismissed by White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels.
Daniels himself said in December that war could cost between $50 billion and $60 billion, but quickly clarified that it was impossible to tell how much the war might cost and that he was simply trying to compare a new war with its only close historical precedent, the first Gulf War, which cost about $60 billion.
*
And here: *“He said it could, could be $60 billion,” Duffy said. “It is impossible to know what any military campaign would ultimately cost. The only cost estimate we know of in this arena is the Persian Gulf War, and that was a $60 billion event.”
[…]
In September, Daniels disputed an estimate by then-Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey that war with Iraq could cost $200 billion. Daniels believes Lindsey’s estimate was “the upper end of a hypothetical,” his spokesman said. *"
It still seems that they may have been talking about the shooting war with very little consideration for the later occupation.
If this is a correct characterization, the $200 billion number might only have been an out of the hat guess. "Bush’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, has indicated that the prospective war’s impact on the economy would be minor even if its cost were to reach $200 billion." It may not have been an estimate at all. Just a statement about the ability of the economy to absorb that amount. In which case, it is even more probable that he was talking about a short term expenditure instead of a ten year number.
This is an NYT story that objected to the 100-200 billion claim. "Daniels would not provide specific costs for either a long or a short military campaign against Saddam Hussein. But he said the administration was budgeting for both, and that earlier projections of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, President Bush’s former chief economic adviser, were too high." So at the very least, the “way way high” quote was talking about the shooting war. Not the occupation.
Last one. Closer to the original Lindsey guestimate. "Lawrence B. Lindsey, the recently dismissed White House economic czar, briefly threw out a back-of-the-envelope price tag of $100 billion to $200 billion, assuming that the U.S. and its allies win a quick victory." Again, seeming to be just the war part. This article also has this: *“Under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a group of distinguished scholars has prepared a thoughtful research paper that tries to calculate the cost. They’ve come up with a wide range – from $99 billion under the most optimistic assumptions to a worst-case total of $1.9 trillion. Neither total, they note, takes into account the benefits of disarming Saddam Hussein or of removing him from power if he has indeed developed weapons of mass destruction. *” Just FYI.
I include this link because it contains some early releases of what “the plan” had been. For the shooting part of the war, not the occupation. NOTE: I am not trying to argue that the war has been uner budget or anything like that.
[QUOTE]
[ul][li]The administration budgeted for the military buildup and 30 days of heavy fighting and bombing, followed by several months of skirmishes. Officials say the war lasted 26 days, from the launching of the first missiles March 19 until mid-April, when Iraqi political and religious leaders met with U.S. officials on forming an interim government. [/li][li]Fewer expensive high-tech weapons were fired. For example, as many as 200 anti-missile Patriots were expected to be fired, but less than 25 were used. Each Patriot costs $2.3 million. [/li][li]Planners had earmarked $489 million to put out as many as 500 oil well fires that Iraqis might ignite. Fewer than 10 wells were set ablaze, which cost about $5 million to extinguish the fires and repair damage. [/li][li]Planners budgeted $593 million to care for as many as 2 million refugees, a problem avoided when urban combat was less extensive than expected. The refugee count was less than 100,000. In addition, $200 million was earmarked for emergency food supplies for Iraqis, but no major shortages occurred. [/li][li]Troops are staying longer. The plan called for shipping more than 400,000 troops and equipment to the region and returning most of them within six months, at a round-trip cost of $30 billion. Now, at least 160,000 troops are staying in Iraq indefinitely, which means the cost of bringing them home can be deferred.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
*Keep up the good work, BTW.
P.S. I know this is too long already, but I feel I should appologize for the “order of magnitude” remark in my last post. Somehow I begin to channel my old physics professor when I talk to you. I’m sorry if it sounded condescending or snide.
That’s okay. I didn’t find it snide, although I did find it amusing that you were only willing to consider $160 billion to be the same order of magnitude as $200 billion and not close to it, especially when one considers that the $200 billion really should have been $100 to $200 billion and the $160 billion is a number that, with a bit of luck, will take us through the end of FY2005…i.e., a year from now (and even then, is probably closer to a number not including reconstruction than one including it).
As for all your attempts to justify that maybe the estimates were just for the “shooting war” and not for the occupation, my response would be:
(1) I wonder how you make this distinction. Don’t you think it is a bit of an abuse of terminology to have the “shooting war” to apply to the part of the Iraq debacle that results in less than 14% of the American casualties?
(2) Well, if the administration was considering the “war” not to include the subsequent “occupation” (during which the vast majority of the American soldiers have been shot) then isn’t this deceitful? And, if they did mean it to apply to the whole thing then how did they get it so wrong? (I assume you’ll agree that $50-60 billion vs. $146-327 billion [with some additional stuff that probably ought to be included not in there] is even beginning to strain the idea of getting the right order of magnitude.) It basically comes down to a question about the administration like SimonX has posed before: Mendacity or incompetence? We report, you decide.
By the way, myown WAG is that it was a little bit of a combination of mendacity and incompetence. On the one hand, I agree that the Administration comparison to the Gulf War seems to suggest that they may have been neglecting the occupation part. On the other hand, I think if pressed the Administration would have pooh-poohed the idea of that being very expensive (like they did about the reconstruction by mentioning oil revenues as I seem to recall). After all, if someone could still believe by September of last year what elucidator quoted Perle as saying, imagine what they believed before the war and subsequent months of chaos following it!
Yea, after I posted that I kept going over it in my head and simply could not figure out what possed me to say such a thing. As I said, I must have been channeling my old physics professor. He was always more worried about mistakes in orders of magnitude than in factors of 6 or even 7.
I make the distinction because that is the distinction made at the time. Remember the objection to some of the speeches I linked to saying the war would be hard, that they seemed to be talking about the shooting war?
No, the shooting war was much shorter. And remember, I am only applying this to statements made in the past. If you ever find me saying now that the Iraq war only took a month or that it only cost 150 lives, feel free to chastize me for not considering the occupation as part of the war. But in 2002, as a matter of general usage the term Iraq war usually refered to the shooting war and not the occupation.
In a way, yes. As I said I object to the way this war has been budgeted. But the issue is not whether the adminstration has been deceitful, the issue is why does our system allow an administration to ask for funds off budget so easily. Why is it not possible for Congress to insist on estimates from the administration earlier perhaps with promises to keep them private. Why can’t we simply include a large budget item for the war.
But you see how asking questions like this is different from asking Why does the administration lie to us about the cost of the war?
Of course, but again, go back and read the contemporary comments made by Mitch Daniels about the 50 to 60 billion. He says pretty explicitly that they do not include any cost of occupation.
Well, some of it does. But I feel that there are more important questions at stake here. The ability of the government to mount such a large of the books operation needs to be curtailed. It needs to be done in a way that does not allow congress command authority over the military or comprimise our national security. But it needs to be done. Debating the mendacity or incompetence of this particular administration is interesting politically, but useless systematically. It leaves out the middle where a perfectly honest attempt to do what is right simply failed.
I can agree to some extent. I cannot imagine an organization as large as the Executive branch or the American government not contianing a good measure of both.
Well, yes they did tend to talk about oil revenues and alliance help. But they also kept saying that there was no way to know how much it would cost. The one study mentioned in one of my links put the cost for the war and occupation at anywhere from $30 billion to $2 trillion. That range is wide enough to be equivilant to “we just don’t know yet” in my book. Especially given that it covers a couple orders of magnitude.
pervert: I guess we can leave it there at this point … I think we are mostly in agreement over the basic facts now, even if we differ a little on our interpretations of their significance.
[Besides which, there are these other threads out there now that you’ve said crazier things in. ]
[/QUOTE]
- Americans - don’t take this personally, but I guess you might - tend to vote based on what they’re afraid of. You’re nice, smart folks, but you seem to be inordinately governed by fear. Bush and his team are very, very good at exploiting that; their campaign is based on scaring people and getting people to vote against what they’re scared of. Kerry and his team are not, and in fact aren’t good at running a campaign at all from what I can tell.
[/QUOTE]
I’m an American and I don’t take this personally at all. Sadly, I echo your sentiment one hundred percent on both count–Bush’s fear-mongering is maddenlingly effective on a polity that has been cowering from innumerable bogeyman for a long time now and the Kerry campaign has had feet of clay time and time again. I’m just hoping they can snap out of it in the next month and a half (!), before we’re all stuck with four more years.
Bricker,
Incidentally, I appreciate your thoughtful position, even if we disagree on the issues. That is what politics should be about, I think. Not suggestions that a vote against the Administration is a vote for Al Qaida.
Thank you, and, obviously, I agree. 
His father, actually, but never mind.
I’m coming back to this thread after a work-induced absence, sorry for the bump. Since my points indicting the Bushites as the drooling aberrations they are were presented and supported in a number of long and detailed posts that still stand untouched, I thought this article would provide some good icing:
15 pages of analysis leave little doubt that mendacity was a far stronger influence on the Iraq affair than even the famed incompetence of the administration (indeed, that should be obvious to anyone observing the anguished flailings of administration members asked direct questions about the contradictions involved, c.f., Dr Rice interviewed by Wolf Blitzer yesterday on CNN). Not only was the planning demonstrably poor throughout the Iraq affair, but, should anyone really still believe otherwise, war in Iraq was clearly a predetermined goal to be pursued at any cost, and not a solution to an existing or imminent threat.
I’ll admit that Bush and company’s “flaws” are not “blindingly obvious” to everyone. Given an honest and open mind – perhaps too much to ask in a bipartisan predicament – the number of these sizeable problems that Bush supporters choose to acknowledge is inversely proportional to intake of propaganda.
Hi, Rick,
In my short time here, I have come to truly respect your voice as one of the ‘conservatives’ who thinks, as I like to think of myself as a liberal who thinks.
That said, I have to disagree with you. In my experience of this board (lurking for about a year, signed up last July, really started participating this past 4 months or so), this board is pretty far out of whack with the general public in one main way - this board is (and sorry if this sounds arrogant) a hell of a lot smarter than the general public.
We don’t just knee-jerk react, spit out ‘Queers are bad!’ or ‘Anybody can marry anybody they want!’ and then go vote. We actually question why such an amendment is bad (discrimination, states rights) or good (same sex marriage is unneccesary because of civil unions that are the same in force as marriage, etc…) and then we talk about it, maybe, just maybe, some of us are capable of changing our minds along the way. Then we go vote on it, or attempt to influence others who will vote on it, to go the way we have decided…
(Or the other option is to be like me - know that such an amendment is purely a political move and a sop to the Religious Right fan base of the Republican Party, had no chance in hell of ever being written into the Constitution, and as much as possible ignore the whole issue. I only have so much RAM, after all…)
The vast majority of people vote a party line. They vote it because their parents did, or because their friends do, or because they just feel like it, or because they always have. That makes up 80% of the voting public (roughly, on both sides of the Aisle). Then you have the 20% who make up the true independents. These are the only people who actually analyze the issues, and then decided their vote one way or another. They’re also the only people who really matter. Sometimes they don’t even vote for mainstream candidates, but usually they are honest with themselves and vote for the candidate that most closely tunes with their own values and beliefs.
Of course, some states lean more one way or another (such as my home state of MT ever going anything but Republican is pretty damn unlikely), and that changes the overall orientation of that state under electoral laws and in representative government, but that’s a whole 'nother topic for a whole 'nother day. Over all, across the country, that’s about how it pans out. And that’s about how Congress is made up (give or take) and pretty much every other part of the government.
I reconcile myself to the fact that my specific set of values is maybe unique to me. If people don’t agree with me, it is my role to try to convince them that I am right, and that they should support what I support. If I can’t do that, I have the choice of either re-analyzing my values, or else voting my conscience and not caring what the ‘sheeple’ think.
Face it - those of us who don’t get our political values from only one source (I read both Fox and The Washington Post, as well as tons of other sources online, as I am sure you and most others on this board do as well) will always think a bit different than those who only get their information from one source.