Nearly $60 billon. That is the very, very low-end estimate of what American taxpayers will pay just this year for Dick Cheney’s misadventure in Iraq.
That $60 billion is just the interest on what was added to the national debt for the direct costs of the Iraq War from 2003 to 2014. Cheney’s passing earlier this week is a reminder of his huge share of the responsibility for that war and the cavalier way in which the U.S. entered it.
Cheney’s calm demeanor and soft-spoken manner belied his hubris. His imperial vice presidency was a disaster for the country. It also sowed the seeds for the destruction of the neocon-internationalist wing of the Republican Party, laying the foundation for the current angry populist politics that succeeded it.
Cheney was arguably the worst vice president in American history.
The curious thing is that he did a good job in the Gulf War in 1991 as secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. But in that war, his power was suitably circumscribed by a strong White House staff and an experienced president.
There was also a narrow, definable goal in the region and consensus political support for getting involved. Also, more than 80 percent of the expense was paid by other nations, leaving the U.S. covering about $7.3 billion (in 1991 dollars). That’s a pretty decent cost-to-benefit to safeguard Persian Gulf oilfields at a time when the U.S. was heavily dependent on imported oil.
In hindsight, the failure to eliminate Saddam Hussein might have been a mistake. But at the time, there was no plan to do it and little support for it. Instead of Hussein’s rule collapsing on its own, as many Western observers had expected, he clung to power by initiating a massacre of his domestic opposition to maintain power and send a warning message.
Cheney’s second go-round seemed more about taking advantage of the situation to settle an old score. Iraq, a nation arbitrarily created at the end of World War I, was (and remains) a mass of squabbling ethnic groups and religious sects, wracked additionally by clan violence. Low on education and health indices, suspicious of outsiders and hostile toward the West, the country was only held together by Hussein’s police state.
Arrogant Cheney and his former Nixon-era boss, Donald Rumsfeld, ignored these facts. They did little planning for after the conflict and bulldozed all opposition. The inexperienced George W. Bush foolishly followed along. Unsurprisingly, once the Iraqi police state had been dismantled, the nation collapsed into violence. The only thing most Iraqis agreed on was that they did not want a foreign occupation.
As a result, the actual war in 2003 cost $42.5 billion — well below the pre-war estimate of $50-60 billion. But the war’s cost over the next five years of the Bush-Cheney tenure was a staggering $462 billion.
And the estimates I am using are just the Pentagon expenditures directly on the war. The real bill is far higher. For one thing, the war was entirely financed by debt, so that interest will compound into the future. If one includes the subsequent fight against ISIS — whose rise was one of many unexpected results of the war — plus occupation costs from 2009, the direct costs exceed $1.3 trillion.
And then there are all the expenditures not captured within the Defense budget: USAID, the CIA and the whole federal alphabet soup. There are estimates of $2 trillion and even as high as $4 trillion. That high estimate represents 10 percent of today’s national debt and nearly $200 billion in interest payments.
Of course, that does not include the more than 4,400 deaths of military personnel and nearly 32,000 wounded, not to mention the cost in lost productivity due to injuries, PTSD, increased drug use, domestic violence and other ills associated with the trauma of war.
Granted, Saddam Hussein was a problem in 2003, with sanctions, public admonishments and other half-measures failing to contain him. But the full-scale invasion and occupation was akin to dropping plastic explosives down a gopher hole.
A man with Cheney’s experience should not have made such mistakes. For that matter, neither should Rumsfeld. The combination of these toxic twins and a weak president was a disaster. There was no counter to Cheney and Rumsfeld, neither intellectually nor within the bureaucracy.
In a past interview cited in The Wall Street Journal’s obituary, Cheney said, “‘Let somebody else do it, we’ve done our share.’ … Well, that makes no sense at all, if 19 guys with airline tickets and box cutters can take down the World Trade Center and Pentagon.”
True. But keeping the nation safe and engaging in preventative military action requires thoughtful planning, preparing for contingencies, a level-headed approach and well-defined goals. Cheney did none of that.
Instead, arrogance and hubris ruled the day. America is still paying for it.
Keith Naughton, a longtime Republican political consultant, is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Republican political campaign consultant in Pennsylvania.
