3 Flawed Assumptions About Postwar Iraq

By Unmesh Kher Friday, Sept. 19, 2003
    • Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz took some heat last week when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The President had just announced that he needed $87 billion to finance postwar military operations — most of which, $66 billion, would fund the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. Wolfowitz's questioners wanted an explanation. "You told Congress in March that, quote, 'we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction — and relatively soon,'" said Senator Carl Levin. "Talk about rosy scenarios!" Indeed, the architects of the Pentagon's postwar-Iraq plans were guided by several key assumptions that haven't panned out.

    Oil Would Fund Reconstruction
    Although war planners knew that Iraq's oil infrastructure would need fixing, they drastically underestimated just how much. In March, Wolfowitz told Congress that Iraq would generate anywhere from $50 billion to $100 billion in oil revenues over the first two to three years. Now it turns out that the ramshackle oil industry (much of its technology dates back to the 1970s) will make hardly any money this year from exporting oil, and only $12 billion next year. From 2005 onward, oil revenues could pull in $20 billion a year, but that would require buoyant oil prices and a halt to the widespread sabotage of wells and pipelines.


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    Oil production isn't the only problem. The Pentagon's plans assumed that Iraq's industrial base and utilities were in working order. Instead, they're in a sorry state. And without basic utilities, factories aren't generating very much of anything — including badly needed jobs that would help win hearts and minds. The new Electricity Minister, Ayham al-Samaraie, estimates it will cost $18 billion just to fix the power grid.

    Iraqi Troops Would Help Keep the Peace
    A large American peacekeeping deployment in Iraq was the last thing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted when he was planning the war. He and his deputy, Wolfowitz, hoped to bolster postwar security by redeploying elements of Iraq's 400,000 troops to supplement the relatively small invading force. With Saddam gone, the plan was for Iraq's civil servants and police to step in to help run the country while a U.S.-chosen governing council handled the nitty-gritty of administration until democracy blossomed.

    The first miscalculation was based on another faulty assumption — that Iraqi troops would stick around to surrender. As it turned out, only a tiny fraction of Iraq's military surrendered to coalition forces. The majority simply melted away. But the plan to use the few remaining Iraqi troops for peacekeeping was scrapped, and the way it was done boomeranged on the occupying authorities. Soon after arriving in Iraq, Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), ordered Iraq's military dissolved. He argued that this was merely a symbolic act, but it infuriated Iraqi troops who had put up little resistance to the invasion — as encouraged by leaflets dropped by the U.S.-led coalition. Some of those ex-soldiers are presumably among those who continue to attack the American occupiers. Bremer agreed to keep paying roughly half the troops he had dismissed, and he is now training volunteers to staff the new Iraqi military, which should have 12,000 soldiers within a year. A new police force is being trained, but those currently working for the CPA are targets for harassment and even assassination. The Iraqi Governing Council, appointed by the U.S., has little authority, and its members are seen by many Iraqis as collaborators with the occupying power.

    Resistance Would Fade Quickly
    The Pentagon did anticipate a certain amount of postwar resistance — a small amount that wouldn't last long. But the Pentagon didn't envision that thousands of American troops would be under almost constant attack by guerrillas or that so many of the fighters would be foreigners who regard the U.S. occupation of Iraq as the Super Bowl of jihad. The Pentagon apparently calculated that as the country settled down and its oil spigots opened and helped finance reconstruction, resistance would quickly be marginalized. Even after it became clear this summer that attacks on allied troops were intensifying, Rumsfeld described them as the exertions of a few Baathist "dead-enders." Yet a pair of Army studies published before the war cautioned that the goodwill of Iraqis would be fleeting and violent nationalism rife --that things, in short, could quickly become messy. "There were a lot of people in the Army who were aware of what the occupation might require," says Conrad Crane, an Army War College scholar who co-wrote both reports on Iraq's postwar challenges. "That message didn't seem to get to Central Command or the Defense Secretary's staff."