Bollettino

A couple of weeks ago, LI was circulating a little op ed piece to various outlets, desperately hoping for a hit. This was before the War. The op ed began:

"For those who doubt that the Bush administration is invading Iraq to install a democracy, there were two telling stories in the last week of February. One, a small story about Post Saddam Iraq in the March 3 Business Week, contained a comparison of the cost of reconstructing and holding together Iraq and the revenues currently produced by Iraqi oil fields:

"Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."

The other story was in the Washington Times. A congressional committee was grilling Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue behind Bush's rush to war. Wolfowitz was stonewalling about the cost of the war and the occupation. At one point, however, the committee did break on through to the other side - getting a revealing glimpse of the thought process that is taking place at the highest levels of Bush's White House. Wolfowitz testified "it is wrong to believe that the United States will foot the bill for occupation. He said Iraq itself generates $15 billion to $20 billion annually in oil exports and has up to $20 billion in assets frozen because it invaded Kuwait in 1991."There's a lot of money there, and to assume we're going to pay for it is wrong," he said."

So the scenario we are being told will bring in democracy looks something like this. Post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled by some junta of Iraqi exiles whose first exercise of power, supervised by their American superiors, is to hand over the only source of income Iraq has, in order to pay for the war that installed them in power.

Surely, in Wolfowitz's remark, we see the specter of a lie. The question is, what lie is it? Is it a lie to the American people that the cost of this war, like the Gulf War, will be borne by others - or is it the lie that America is going to change the regime in Iraq to a democratic one? Both can't be true."

Of course, nobody took or even nibbled at my bait. However, now that the first phase of the War has been signed on the dotted line, the outlets that I sent it to are starting to publish op eds that gingerly examine exactly the difference between the Bush pronouncements about paying for the war in the magic pre-war time and after the guns have fallen silent. Happily, it looks like Wolfowitz's lie was that the Americans were going to eat up Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion. That doesn't look possible even for an administration that always jettisons finesse for rudeness, and holds as pre-eminate the satisfaction of its gross appetites.

This is not to say that, in our design of the Wolfowitz paradox, we weren't extending an almost rebarbative amount of generosity towards the good intentions of the D.C. warriors. Democracy, in D.C. speak, is still Smilin' Jay Garner. The gap between democracy as a recognizable form of government and the governance of proconsuls has still not registered in the minds of the press corps.

But onto the oil. This is from the AP:


"U.N. experts visiting Iraq in 2000 noted severe corrosion, blowouts and pollution in the oil fields and concluded some wells had been irreparably damaged. Daily capacity has been falling by 100,000 barrels a year since a 1990 peak of 3.5 million barrels a day.Even agriculture is in trouble. The United Nations estimated before the war that less than half the total cultivable area of Iraq is farmed, largely due to extreme soil salinity and waterlogging caused by poor irrigation practices.

Many people are counting on oil money to help rebuild the country. Yet Khadduri points out Iraq's oil production is worth at most $22 billion a year.Preliminary estimates on the cost of rebuilding Iraq range from $20 billion a year for the first few years to as much as $600 billion over a decade. On top of that, oil has to pay for food, education, medical care and other necessities -- plus $200 billion or more in debts owed to countries like Russia, France and China and compensation claims to Kuwait and others.``People overblow, overestimate the thing about the oil as if it's going to be manna from heaven,'' Khadduri said. ``The bonanza people are talking about, I don't see it, not in foreseeable future.'' "

Now, of course we aren't saying that Wolfowitz came out and said, hey, I was lying about how we were going to pay for this thing. We still expect the US to try to loot Iraq. The massive looting, the riot of looting, is even now being quietly set in motion by the Pentagon and the US Aid office, with their juicy contracts for "rebuilding' the country. Cameras should be stationed there. The Shi'a chest pounding is nothing compared to the War profiteering chest pounding, a sound of truly religious import, that booms out of certain Executive office divisions in D.C.

And then there is the Bush estimate for reconstructing Iraq.

Readers, Guess how much the Bush administration estimates this will cost:

1. 98.6 billion dollars

2. 15 billion dollars

3. 6 billion dollars

4. 3.6 billion dollars

5. 890 million dollars.

If you guessed no. 4, give yourself an Afghanistan knit pat on the back. Since we went into the War on fraudulent premises, it is only fitting that we are going out of the War on fraudulent forecasts.

The NYT article that fills in the preliminary figures reminds us that the main influence of Enron on the Bush-ites has still not been plumbed to its full and slimy depths. Just as Enron inflated itself through mark to market accounting, crediting as current revenue future estimates of revenue, so, too, the Bush administration's supply side optimism is a variation of the same thing. The way the Bush-ites get the 3.6 billion dollar figure is by subtracting, from future costs, estimates of future "earnings," so to speak -- that is, that Iraq, under the new regime of course, will pay back whatever money the US plows into the place.

Just as Enron was able to manipulate the yield curve to hit any profit target it wanted to, the administration simply marks the curve to show not only projected oil revenues nobody else is projecting, but some kind of market bonanza happening in Iraq.

Has the sheer idiocy at the core of optimism ever been so blatant, so easy to expose, or so oddly accepted, once so exposed, by a public that seems to have lost its sense of revulsion in its instinct for obediance? We think not.