Analysis: How Bush got Iraq war cost wrong

[Roland99]

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050126-021958-8636r

A Heritage Foundation study by Ariel Cohen and Gerald O'Driscoll argued, "The Bush administration should provide leadership and guidance for the future Iraqi government ... (including) a massive, orderly and transparent privatization of state-owned enterprises, especially the restructuring and privatization of the oil sector." Commented John B. Judis in The New Republic on Jan. 20, 2003, "The study has been well-received by administration neo-conservatives."

Neo-conservative pundits with equal faith and fervor argued that Iraqi oil revenues would finance the country's own reconstruction after the war and that they could even be used to offset some U.S. military operating costs, surely a cheap price to pay for liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam's terrible yoke. But it hasn't worked out that way.

<...>

What happened to the vast oil-production bonanza that was going to flow from Iraq? It hasn't happened, and quite possibly never will. No one doubts the oil is there. But what the war planners and energy strategists never factored into their considerations was that, far from welcoming the U.S. Army and Marines as their liberators, the Iraqis -- Sunni and Shiite alike -- might resent any continued U.S. military occupation and very quickly make it too hot to handle, which is exactly what has happened.

The Pentagon hawks and their favorite energy strategists also turned out to have no strategy for rebuilding Iraq or maintaining security in the oil fields and pipelines running from them.


Ideology run amok.

[Old and In the Way]

1. That's the danger when an ignorant and hubristic pResident

surrounds himself with a bunch of deluded, out-of-touch chickenhawks and nary a critical nayserer amongst them.

[Roland99]

2. And any naysayer gets fired.