Shades of Vietnam
WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT BUSH'S most egregious misstatement about the situation in Iraq is that he is asking Congress for $87 billion to stabilize it. That is baloney. He is in fact asking Congress for a second installment (the first in April was $79 billion) on a war that has no geographical, time, or force limitations beyond the capacity of the brains of the ideologues who are making up what some of them like to call World War IV as they go -- in secret, of course.
There will be another installment -- probably this winter -- and almost certainly another after that. The only real question is which will come first in 2005 -- a running total in excess of $300 billion or a different president who might start by telling the truth about what he is doing.
As befits a secretive and deceptive administration, the whole ($87 billion) is being emphasized at the expense of the parts and their true sum. Looking diligently at the parts would show that the whole has been misstated -- way on the low side. The "sticker shock" from $87 billion was bad enough, but administration officials were not going to let the figure of $100 billion get into the headlines and on TV.
This is where the real analogy with America's Vietnam disaster lies. The analogy is false on most fronts -- different war, different enemies, different part of the world. The analogy most popular at the Pentagon -- France's failed war with pro-independence revolutionaries in Algeria -- is probably just as false.
The real analogy is with the lengths to which the administration is willing to go to avoid telling the truth about the nature of its commitment, the true cost, and the lengths to which Congress is willing to go to accommodate it. Even the effort to keep the total of the latest money installment below $100 billion in President Bush's speech to the nation has a Vietnam ring. In the mid-1960s, as Lyndon Johnson desperately tried to combine an escalating war with the Great Society (not unlike this war and trillions in upper-income tax cuts), he spent weeks devising ruses and gimmicks to keep the total federal budget under $100 billion, including absurd instructions about turning lights off at night in the White House; the budget request made it under $100 billion, but by the time the country got the bill the real figure was way beyond that.
The numbers are a lot larger today, but the techniques are the same.
One example in the Bush request involves the $15 billion being requested for immediate investment in Iraq's broken-down infrastructure. According to administration officials, who continue to withhold critical details, this figure was chosen on the assumption that other countries would be contributing at least twice as much. As far as the eye can see, the administration officials expert on the situation inside the collapsed country estimate $50 billion to $75 billion in reconstruction costs to create a basically functional economy. I am not aware of a single congressman or think-tanker of any political persuasion who thinks that more than a tiny fraction of that is going to come from other countries. It is also hard to find anyone who believes that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund can accommodate Iraq's needs without stealing from a host of other developing societies with equally pressing requirements. If we were being told the truth, there would be another $50 billion in money the US government doesn't technically have on the table.
Another clue is in the request for more than $2 billion as a reserve against a possible mobilization of the reserves and call-up of more National Guard units. This is one of the most underreported consequences of planning wars on the fly -- the abuse of people's patriotic desire to serve by violating the trust of people who signed up with one set of assumptions and are now being forced to live with another.
Still another example involves a seemingly small, $200 million request for military and intelligence operations in the Horn of Africa, an area that includes the still-failed society of Somalia. This is the tip of a non-Iraq, non-Afghanistan iceberg -- the slow spread of big-time US involvement around the world with virtually no disclosure and debate.
President Bush's speech 10 days ago was a very rare political event -- a carefully prepared and executed presidential initiative that laid a large egg with the public, actually driving Bush down further in the opinion polls. That happened for narrow, superficial reasons -- the price tag and Bush's ominous tone.
What is even more interesting is that the initiative hasn't improved with age, primarily because no one will answer the basic questions of how much, how long, and how many.
The issue is not whether Bush will get his money; he should and he will. The issue is whether Republicans in Congress will use the request to pry out more of the truth or will become part of a growing credibility problem.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
