[Chewbacca]

The 3rd ID's situation is shameful, with no clear plan in place for troop rotation before the occupation, the brass kept giving return-home dates and yanking them back like a dis-tasteful game of keep away. All the while soldiers trained to fix electronics and man artillery guns are being used as security gaurds in what has been charcterized as a shooting gallery. The pentagon is finally expected to announce a troop rotation plan this week. About freaking time! Only a few months overdue by my reckoning.

There is alot more evident than the unexpected escalting guerilla resistance to suggest the occupation of Iraq was poorly planned and is being poorly executed.

Here is an editorial to touch on some of the key financial points.

Editorial

The motto of America's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, is simple and to the point: "Always Low Prices. Always." Piling them high and selling them cheap is as much a principle of American life as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But should it also be the basis of American foreign policy? Back in April, administration officials talked as if the reconstruction of Iraq would somehow be self-financing. That seemed optimistic at the time; today it is simply incredible. What we are witnessing is not so much "Empire Lite" -- in Michael Ignatieff's catchy phrase -- as "Cut-Price Colonization." Americans need to realize now that nations cannot be built the way Wal-Mart sells patio sets: on the cheap. Without jobs and wages, many of the young men of Iraq will find the temptations of violent crime and guerrilla warfare impossible to resist. But for economic recovery to take place, three things are urgently needed: first, the effective imposition of law and order; second, the repair and restoration of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, telephones); and third, substantial expenditure on reconstruction to modernize the dilapidated oil fields and stimulate economic activity in other sectors. There are two reasons these things seem unlikely to be achieved anytime soon. The first reason is that the United States is attempting "nation-building" -- the fashionable euphemism for empire-building -- on a shoestring. This may surprise some readers who were shocked to hear last week that the Defense Department had almost doubled its estimate of the cost of occupying Iraq, to $3.9 billion a month. That certainly sounds like serious money. If you accept retired general Tommy Franks's projection that U.S. forces will need to remain in the country for four years, that would add up to a total bill of $187 billion. Serious money, no doubt, when the total defense budget this year amounts to around $370 billion. But these sums cover only the costs of military occupation. Not a penny will go toward either aid or reconstruction. Just how much foreign money does the Iraqi economy need for reconstruction (as opposed to short-term humanitarian aid)? Estimates range from $6 billion over two years (according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies) to $593 billion over five years (according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, another Washington think tank). But even if the figure is somewhere in the lower end of this huge range -- say, $100 billion, as estimated by economics professor William Nordhaus of Yale University -- it is hard to imagine the Bush administration paying more than a tiny fraction of it. This, after all, is the government that admitted last week that the budget surplus of $334 billion which it forecast for this year back in 2001 has -- thanks to a combination of recession, war and tax cuts -- become a deficit of $455 billion. And this is the government that has so far spent next to nothing on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, where nation-building has supposedly been underway for a year and a half. According to New York University's Center on International Cooperation, just $1.6 billion has so far been disbursed by the international community for Afghan reconstruction. Barely a tenth of this sum has been spent on projects that are now completed. As of May, the United States had paid out just $5 million directly to the post-Taliban government it called into existence. The second reason Iraq's recovery will be delayed -- if not bungled altogether -- is the United States' dogged refusal to cede any responsibility for the occupation to the United Nations. As a result, there is very little prospect of substantial financial contributions to Iraqi reconstruction from other countries. Last week both Chris Patten, the European Union commissioner for external relations, and French President Jacques Chirac made it plain how reluctant the Europeans are to subsidize an Anglo-American occupation they sought to prevent. This matters because the United States is unlikely to spend as much money on either aid or reconstruction as the Europeans would. Official figures suggest that EU member states allocated $19.7 billion dollars to foreign aid in 2001, compared with an American figure of $10.7 billion. But according to recent figures from the Center for Global Development in Washington, European aid to developing countries is worth three times more when adjustment is made for conditions, costs and interest payments. Is it possible to run an empire on the Wal-Mart principle of "always low prices"? Maybe. But that was not the way it was done in West Germany and Japan after World War II. And since those are President Bush's favorite examples of successful nation-building, he will only have himself to blame when the hoped-for economic miracle in Iraq becomes an economic debacle. Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.