Senators attack lack of Iraq data

WASHINGTON -- Senators from both parties assailed two senior Bush administration officials on Tuesday for failing to give even rough projections on the length, cost and troop levels for the postwar effort in Iraq.

In a contentious hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President Bush's budget director, Joshua B. Bolten, and deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, said it was difficult, if not impossible, to make those forecasts, given the fluid security situation on the ground and the administration's efforts to recruit international forces to help replace U.S. troops.

The Pentagon says it is costing $3.9 billion a month to keep nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but the officials refused to say what the costs and what troop levels might be needed in the future, or what reconstruction costs might be. Bolten said the total recovery costs this year would be $7.3 billion

Democrats in particular, along with Republicans, scolded the two officials, warning them that public support hinged on candid administration estimates of future costs, if they were rough figures. Some senators even suggested the vagueness masked a postwar plan adrift.

"Because of some combination of bureaucratic inertia, political caution and unrealistic expectations left over from before the war, we do not appear to be confident about our course in Iraq," Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., who is chairman of the foreign relations committee, said in a statement.

Other Republicans were equally blunt. "I think you, Mr. Bolten, should be more forthright in terms of what the costs are going to be so that we have some idea, and the American people, how long, how much," said Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Several lawmakers accused Wolfowitz, an architect of the administration's Iraq policy who just returned from a five-day trip there, of sugar-coating the problems of stabilizing the country, and of dwelling on what the administration has called Iraq's role in global terrorism, to the exclusion of other threats.

Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, R-R.I., accused Wolfowitz of "shifting the justification of what we're doing" in Iraq from weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein's tyrannical three-decade rule.

But the testiest exchanges came among Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the panel's ranking Democrat, and Bolten and Wolfowitz.

Biden asked if the government expected to spend $4 billion a month on the troops into 2004.

"We don't have any reason to expect a dramatic change in that number, but I wouldn't want to predict beyond the next couple of months, because the situation is so variable," Bolten said.

But Biden said lawmakers would soon vote on a fiscal 2004 budget, and he insisted that Bolten be more precise. "What the devil are you going to ask us for?" Biden demanded.

Bolten acknowledged that the Bush administration could not accurately estimate the costs of troops or reconstruction, "simply because we don't know what they will be."

At which point, Biden exclaimed, "Oh, come on now! Does anybody here at the table think we're going to be down below 100,000 forces in the next calendar year?" He added, "When are you guys starting to be honest with us?"

Then Wolfowitz jumped in to defend the administration. He spoke of the urgency to provide security, jobs and essential services like electricity to Iraqis, before they turn against the U.S. occupation.

"I'm not happy with where we are right now," Wolfowitz said. "If there's any way to accelerate anything, we are looking at it."

Wolfowitz said the military was looking at ways to speed up the training of Iraq police, civil defense and army forces; accelerate emergency sources of electricity; and devise a plan to pay Arab families to move out of the homes of Kurdish families who had been forcibly relocated under Saddam's rule.

"We have a time now when investments that might seem inefficient to someone trying to design the perfect scheme for standing up power or the perfect scheme for training an army, doing things rapidly will have big payoffs," Wolfowitz said.

Senators peppered Wolfowitz with questions about the stream of U.S. soldiers killed in guerrilla attacks. "People are deeply concerned about the loss of troops, particularly this last week," said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

Gen. John M. Keane, the Army's acting chief of staff, who also testified at the hearing, explained: "We are fighting an opponent who is living in among the people. And it disarms our technology rather dramatically to be able to see and understand who they are, where they are and what they are doing."

For that reason, Wolfowitz said, the United States needs more intelligence on where hostile fighters are hiding.

"We don't need more American troops," Wolfowitz said. "What we need most of all are Iraqis fighting with us."

Biden, however, expressed skepticism that Iraqi security forces could operate independently soon. "The well-intended Iraqis who are signed up to come back, they almost looked like the Katzenjammer Kids as they tried to parade for us," said Biden, who visited Iraq in June. "They're well-meaning, they're trying hard, but, boy, do they need a lot of work."

Wolfowitz said the administration would welcome a new U.N. resolution to attract peacekeepers from countries like Pakistan and Iraq, but only if it did not restrict the authority of L. Paul Bremer, the senior American civil administrator in Iraq.

"I'd be very enthusiastic about the right kind of resolution," Wolfowitz said, "and very concerned about the wrong kind."

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