Subscribe“And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11. This is part of this secret history. President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, ‘What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.’"[emphasis mine]
Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.
”Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible,” says Woodward.
“Gets to a point where in July, the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. …Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."
WASHINGTON — It weighed 28 tons and took up as much room as 74 washing machines. It was $2.4 billion in $100 bills, and Baghdad needed it ASAP.Gee, ya think?
The initial request from U.S. officials in charge of Iraq required the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to decide whether it could open its vault on a Sunday, a day banks aren't usually open.
"Just when you think you've seen it all," read one e-mail from an exasperated Fed official.
"Pocket change," said another e-mail.
Then, when the shipment date changed, officials had to scramble to line up U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes to hold the money. They did, and the $2,401,600,000 was delivered to Baghdad on June 22, 2004.
It was the largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.
Disclosure of the frantic transfer in the final days of U.S. control over Iraq came during a daylong hearing Tuesday that indicated growing worry from Congress over U.S. oversight of spending in Iraq.
Both Republicans and Democrats appeared taken aback by the volume of cash sent to Iraq: nearly $12 billion over the course of the U.S. occupation from March 2003 to June 2004, said a report by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who had reviewed e-mails and documents subpoenaed from the bank.
The cash — a total of 363 tons, generated mostly from oil revenues — was Iraqi funds that had been held in trust by the Federal Reserve under the terms of a United Nations resolution.
The June 2004 money transfer was needed to run the country as the interim Iraqi government took over from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, officials said.
Rep. Christopher Shays ( R-Conn.), chairman of the House national security subcommittee, criticized the Pentagon's handling of the money known as the Development Fund for Iraq.
"It's very clear that … we didn't have systems in place to account" for the funds, he said.
"It doesn't mean they weren't spent well, but, given my sense of human temptation, I suspect some of it was, frankly, taken," Shays said.
"I can't believe that all this cash just floating around all went perfectly to the right place."
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Still, the White House downplayed those figures. Then-undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz famously suggested that "we’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." Pressed for a figure by Congress, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was elusive. “I don’t know that there is much reconstruction to do.”
Less than two months after "Mission Accomplished", senior administration officials were congratulating themselves on a "short war", speaking of Iraq in the past tense. "The business plan for the war was roughly as successful as the military plan," Mitch Daniels said in July 2003. "The projections look pretty darn good.". In this context, Rumsfeld estimated a cost of $6B per month.
Almost three years later, a congressional timeline of Iraq and Afghanistan funding entitled "Iraq on the Installment Plan" outlines the various budget and emergency supplementals requested by the White House, which in May of 2005 exceeded the $200B dollar mark. Through November 2006, Congress has appropriated approximately $357B for total costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These estimates and tallies only account for monies appropriated by the Congress to fund operations. They reflect the price tag, but not the costs -- which include the monetary value of lost human lives, disability pay and medical care for returning veterans, interest payments on debt incurred, and costs to the American economy.
In a paper examining both the direct and macroeconomic costs of the war on Iraq, assessing both conservative and moderate scenarios, former CFO and Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget at the US Department of Commerce Linda Bilmes, and former chief economist of the World Bank and Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz have estimated the true cost of the Iraq War to be between $1 and $2 trillion dollars.
posted by edverb at 8:42 PM on January 8, 2006