The NY Times reports that the White House and Pentagon set up a secret task force to assess Iraq’s oil-production capabilities before the war. That task force concluded that Iraq’s oil capacity was severely damaged, wrecked by twenty years of economic sanctions.

So why, then, did Paul Wolfowitz tell Congress last March that “we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon?”

Read more:

Shortly after the war began in March, the administration’s budget office provided Congress and reporters with a background paper on Iraq. It said that Iraq would “not require sustained aid” because of its abundant resources, including oil and natural gas.

On March 27, Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told the House Appropriations Committee that his “rough recollection” was that “The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years.”

Testifying in the Senate that same day, Mr. Rumsfeld emphasized that “when it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayers we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government.” He noted that the war’s costs were not knowable, but he also said an important source of money for reconstruction would flow after the United States worked “with the Iraqi interim authority that will be established to tap Iraq’s oil revenues.”

At the outset of the war, the administration had asked Congress for $62 billion for Iraq, which included $1.7 billion for reconstruction and $489 million for oil-related repairs.

In a televised interview in late April, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the United States Agency for International Development, the group overseeing Iraq’s reconstruction, said that amount was “it for the U.S.” He said any other reconstruction money would come from elsewhere, including other countries and future “Iraqi oil revenues,” which he predicted at “$20 billion a year.”

In an interview this week, Mr. Natsios said he had based those comments on “the discussion in the interagency process at the time,” adding, “That’s what the Office of Management and Budget was telling us.”

As I see it, one of two things happened here:

1) The Bush administration deliberately ignored the conclusions of its own commissioned task force and misled Congress about Iraq’s post-war production capacity. Why? Because it’d be much easier to sell a war if they could low-ball the cost of reconstruction. This war would have been a much tougher sell if Congress had known we’d be looking at $1 billion a week for the foreseeable future.

Once the war was over, and the real story about Iraq’s oil program made known, the White House would then rely upon conservatives who would vote to see the Iraqi project to its completion, and on liberals who would feel a sense of moral duty to rebuild what we tore down.

2) The highest levels of the Bush administration didn’t know about the task force’s findings due to mismanagement or bureaucratic error, or because the task force (despite being secret and commissioned by the Pentagon) was too low-level to pass over the desks of guys like Wolfowitz or the White House budget office. Consequently, the findings — which proved correct — were, like Ambassador Wilson’s report, never seen by the right people before the case was made to Congress and to the America people.

I’m guessing the White House goes with explanation #2.

I don’t find that any more comforting. It’s become more and more apparent that this administration was at best extremely selective in deciding what intelligence it would rely upon in making the case for war. At worst, it actively withheld intelligence that could have proved damaging to the war effort.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2003 at 4:44 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.