The Hidden Cost of Peace

Anti-Americanism will exist. Rebuilding Iraq won't be cheap. And that's if things go well.

By Bill Powell

March 17, 2003

Soon, perhaps even as you are reading this, the nasty, brutish, and excruciatingly long run-up to war will be over. The campaign to liberate Iraq, replete with the "shock and awe'' of the opening salvos that the Pentagon speaks of, will have begun. Fading to the background, if only for the moment, will be the bitter fights with current (but perhaps not future) allies; the less than elegant diplomacy on all sides that helped create those divisions; and the wrenching uncertainty, the we're-with-you-but-we're-really-worried attitude that characterizes the homeland's view of what is the first preventive war in the Bush administration's fight against terror. America will be at war against Saddam Hussein for the second time in a dozen years, and this time it's for keeps.

That conflict may not last long. Indeed, though Bush himself has never publicly speculated on just how long it would take to topple Saddam, you know that in the privacy of his own thoughts and prayers he is hoping it's not weeks but days. Now more than ever, given all the china that has been busted up during the ugly, prewar phase of this conflict, the Bush administration desperately needs this to be over quickly.

It needs photos of liberated Iraqis welcoming victorious troops, if not necessarily dancing in the streets and placing flowers in our soldiers' guns. And it needs, in the days following war, tranquility. Calm, not chaos.

It needs all of that, badly, because the costs of the peace, both diplomatic and financial, are going to be enormous--even if things go well inside Iraq. If they don't, the price, in terms of blood and in terms of treasure, could go from enormous to burdensome, even for a country as wealthy and powerful as the U.S. Bush's war in Iraq, a war of choice, not of necessity, is such a huge gamble in part because so much depends on what happens after the shooting stops. For all the handwringing about how the U.S. has abandoned Afghanistan since the Taliban's fall, as long as al Qaeda (or some reasonable facsimile) doesn't reconstitute itself there, from the U.S. perspective that is progress. Iraq, at the heart of the tumultuous Middle East, with its 23 million people and vast oil reserves, is altogether different, more important, and much more dangerous.

The diplomatic fallout over the war demonstrates that more clearly than anything else. Something, inevitably, was going to knock the world out of its post-Cold War inertia--the era in which the West couldn't think of anything to do, so it just made what it already had (NATO, the EU) bigger. Sept. 11, followed by Iraq, were those big things. We are, most assuredly, in the post-post-Cold War era, and things are going to look very different, almost no matter what happens. Take just one country as an example, picked not entirely out of the blue. France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine in late February that he has always worked for "transatlantic solidarity," and that will be as true "tomorrow" as it was "yesterday." If he actually believes that, he is in diplomatic dreamland. Even if everything goes smoothly in Iraq and the cafeteria at the House of Representatives goes back to selling French fries (they're "freedom'' fries now), that would not be true.

France is now the standard-bearer of a potent anti-Americanism, a position it actively sought and eagerly exploited during the Iraq debate. (Germany, another erstwhile ally, is its eager No. 2.) True, if the war goes quickly and the aftermath calmly in Iraq, some of the poison that currently exists in America's relationships will inevitably diminish. If things go badly, however, anti-Americanism will shift from being merely potent to being toxic. That will have serious consequences. The Bush administration could have a tougher time doing everything from winning cooperation in the war on terror to negotiating trade pacts. How the U.S. deals with this whole phenomenon will be central to the rest of George Bush's tenure in the White House, whether it's two more years or six more. As Bush must surely know, keeping anti-Americanism at bay, and in fact dialing it back, are critically important to our ability to manage what remains--excusez-moi, France--a unipolar world. How the U.S. manages the peace in Iraq, in turn, is going to be key to the President's ability to do just that. The diplomatic stakes, in other words, could hardly be higher.

And what about the stakes in real terms, a.k.a. dollars? They're pretty steep too. Kenneth Pollack, a former NSC staffer and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, says, "The American people [will] demand that the Iraqi people be better off when we leave than they were before we attacked." That is, you can't replace Saddam, as one former American military official puts it, with "some other mustache, a guy who's a thug, but just not as much of a thug as Saddam, and then leave." This standard is basic, and indeed Bush has publicly committed himself to it, emphasizing that a liberated Iraq should be a beacon in the totalitarian Middle East. The problem is, it requires almost by definition that the U.S. get way under the fingernails of a post-Saddam Iraq. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy at the Defense Department, testified in February that after a victory "it will be necessary to provide humanitarian relief, organize basic services, and work to establish security for liberated Iraqis." That means, just for starters, that the U.S. needs Shiite Muslims in the south to not rise up in sectarian vengeance against the Sunni minority that has brutalized the country for decades. It needs the Turks and the Kurds, no matter how much they don't trust each other, to stand down. This is not even close to a given. Rubar Sandi, head of the U.S.-Iraqi Business Council, says flatly that the possibility that Turkish-Kurdish fighting destabilizes postwar Iraq is "my biggest fear right now." Beyond that, of course, we are going to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, vet Iraqi officials to, as Feith put it, "determine who we will work with," and begin to rebuild an Iraqi economy ravaged by sanctions and now war. It is not going to be easy, it is not going to be quick, and it is not going to be cheap.

The administration has never said just how long we will be in Iraq, or how much we will spend there. The mantra has been "for as long as necessary, and not one day longer," and in truth, there's a reason for that: No one really knows, and it depends so much on how the war and the succeeding weeks proceed. Still, with war now upon us, some outside the administration have taken a credible shot at predicting how much this is going to cost. The Council on Foreign Relations, for one, put the price tag of doing postwar Iraq right at $20 billion a year for "several years,'' and needless to say the United Nations is not going to be picking up the bulk of that tab. We are.

For an economy our size, that's a significant but affordable sum to spend. It could be higher, of course, possibly a lot higher. If Saddam torches his oilfields, as he did on the way out of Kuwait, it will be a short-term disaster. The UN-run oil-for-food program currently helps feed the Iraqis, but with no crude flowing in the wake of war, it would add several hundred million dollars a month to the U.S.'s tab just to avoid mass starvation. Unfortunately, U.S. intelligence says Saddam has already laced some of his oilfields with explosives.

If the U.S. means it about sticking around and helping Iraq become the standard-bearer for positive change in a malevolent region, the coming peace will be arduous and time-consuming. It will also be dangerous. The war to dislodge Saddam from Kuwait in 1991 has, in fact, little to teach us about what the U.S. is about to undertake. It's possible that 1983 may be a better template. That's when more than 241 Marines were killed in a terrorist bombing at a barracks in Lebanon. What if something similar happens in postwar Iraq? George W. Bush's political idol, Ronald Reagan, an icon of American strength and resolve, turned tail and fled. It's one thing to spend treasure keeping peace in a place worth the effort. But what of blood? How much? Hopefully we won't find out. But we may.