Donald Rumsfeld Lied to American People About Conditions in Iraq

... and greatly underestimated the cost of reconstruction, according to quotes described by Rumsfeld's spokesman as accurate.

While then Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld was telling the American people how swimmingly reconstruction was progressing in Iraq, he is quoted in secret conversations revealing his real view:

Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience appears on the five year anniversary of my appointment as Inspector General in Iraq. Shortly after that appointment, I met with Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, to whom I reported, to discuss the mission. His first words were, "Why'd you take this job? It's an impossible task."

Apparently the jabs Rumsfeld made at the press about their negative coverage in Iraq wasn't because the reports were inaccurate, but because they contrasted with the view the Bush administration needed to get re-elected.

The report also details how inept the administration was in predicting the course reconstruction would take:

The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.

“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

This latest history of the Bush Administration's complete botching of the Iraq War and Reconstruction comes from within the administration itself, and was authored by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here, according to the New York Times. The report is titled Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience".

Among the many quotes demonstrating that then Secretary of State Rumsfeld lied to the American people about the facts on the ground is this:

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

The report is peppered with proof that the Bush administration was more concerned with being reelected than with actual governing. Here's another:

When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

And here's the effort typical of a C student, no surprise given that George W. Bush could barely manage a C average as a college student:

In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency’s plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort.

The report clearly states what happens when you elect an idiot to be President:

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, “the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.”

Guess Harvard's business school doesn't teach very good managment skills. Maybe if they were more selective in their recruitment. Of course, now Harvard professors insist Bush was not a typical student.

Right.

Hopefully, Wall Street firms will take note of President Bush's performance and stop hiring Harvard MBA's.

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