ick Cheney peaked too soon. We've still got a few days left until Halloween.

It was scary enough when we thought the vice president had created his own reality for spin purposes. But if he actually believes that Iraq is "a remarkable success story,'' it's downright spooky. He's already got his persona for Sunday: he's the mad scientist in the haunted mansion, fiddling with test tubes to force the world to conform to his twisted vision.

After 9/11, Mr. Cheney swirled his big black cape and hunkered down in his undisclosed dungeon, reading books about smallpox and plague and worst-case terrorist scenarios. His ghoulish imagination ran wild, and he dragged the untested president and jittery country into his house of horrors, painting a gory picture of how Iraq could let fearsome munitions fall into the hands of evildoers.

He yanked America into war to preclude that chilling bloodbath. But in a spine-tingling switch, the administration's misbegotten invasion of Iraq has let fearsome munitions fall into the hands of evildoers. It's also forged the links between Al Qaeda and the Sunni Baathists that Mr. Cheney and his crazy-eyed Igors at the Pentagon had fantasized about to justify their hunger to remake the Middle East.

It's often seen in scary movies: you play God to create something in your own image, and the monster you make ends up coming after you.

Determined to throw a good scare into the Arab world, the vice president ended up scaring up the swarm of jihadist evil spirits he had conjured, like the overreaching sorcerer in "Fantasia." The Pentagon bungled the occupation so badly, it caused the insurgency to grow like the Blob.

Just as Catherine Deneuve had bizarre hallucinations in the horror classic "Repulsion,'' Mr. Cheney and the neocons were in a deranged ideological psychosis, obsessing about imaginary weapons while allowing enemies to spirit the real ones away.

The officials charged with protecting us set off so many false alarms that they ignored all the real ones.

President Bush is like one of the blissfully ignorant teenagers in "Friday the 13th'' movies, spouting slogans like "Freedom is on the march'' while Freddy Krueger is in the closet, ready to claw his skin off.

Mr. Bush ignored his own experts' warnings that Osama bin Laden planned to attack inside the U.S., that an invasion of Iraq could create a toxic partnership between outside terrorists and Baathists and create sympathy for them across the Islamic world, that Donald Rumsfeld was planning a war and occupation without enough troops, that Saddam's aluminum tubes were not for nuclear purposes, that U.S. troops should safeguard 380 tons of sealed explosives that could bring down planes and buildings, and that, after the invasion, Iraq could erupt into civil war.

And, of course, the president ignored Colin Powell's Pottery Barn warning: if you break it, you own it.

Their Iraqi puppet, Ayad Allawi, turned on Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush this week, in a scene right out of "Chucky.'' Mr. Allawi accused coalition forces of "major negligence'' for not protecting the unarmed Iraqi National Guard trainees who were slaughtered by insurgents wearing Iraqi police uniforms. Iraqi recruits are getting killed so fast we can't even pretend that we're going to turn the country over to them.

If you really want to be chilled to the bone this Halloween, listen to what Peter W. Galbraith, a former diplomat who helped advance the case for an Iraq invasion at the request of Paul Wolfowitz, said in a column yesterday in The Boston Globe.

He said he'd told Mr. Wolfowitz about "the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion, the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen.'' He told Mr. Wolfowitz that mobs were looting Iraqi labs of live H.I.V. and black fever viruses and making off with barrels of yellowcake.

"Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites,'' he said.

In his column, Mr. Galbraith said weapons looted from the arms site called Al Qaqaa might have wound up in Iran, which could obviously use them to pursue nuclear weapons.

In April 2003 in Baghdad, he said, he told a young U.S. lieutenant stationed across the street that H.I.V. and black fever viruses had just been looted. The soldier had been devastated and said, "I hope I'm not responsible for Armageddon.''

Too bad that never occurred to Dr. Cheneystein.

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October 28, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Faith, Hope and Clarity

By ROBERT WRIGHT

t is striking that in spite of all the electoral fireworks over policy in Iraq, both presidential candidates offer basically similar solutions. Their programs stress intensified Iraqi self-help and more outside help in the quest for domestic stability. Unfortunately, these prescriptions by themselves are not likely to work.

Both candidates have become prisoners of a worldview that fundamentally misdiagnoses the central challenge of our time. President Bush's "global war on terror" is a politically expedient slogan without real substance, serving to distort rather than define. It obscures the central fact that a civil war within Islam is pitting zealous fanatics against increasingly intimidated moderates. The undiscriminating American rhetoric and actions increase the likelihood that the moderates will eventually unite with the jihadists in outraged anger and unite the world of Islam in a head-on collision with America.

After all, look what's happening in Iraq. For a growing number of Iraqis, their "liberation" from Saddam Hussein is turning into a despised foreign occupation. Nationalism is blending with religious fanaticism into a potent brew of hatred. The rates of desertion from the American-trained new Iraqi security forces are dangerously high, while the likely escalation of United States military operations against insurgent towns will generate a new rash of civilian casualties and new recruits for the rebels.

The situation is not going to get any easier. If President Bush is re-elected, our allies will not be providing more money or troops for the American occupation. Mr. Bush has lost credibility among other nations, which distrust his overall approach. Moreover, the British have been drawing down their troop strength in Iraq, the Poles will do the same, and the Pakistanis recently made it quite plain that they will not support a policy in the Middle East that they view as self-defeating.

In fact, in the Islamic world at large as well as in Europe, Mr. Bush's policy is becoming conflated in the public mind with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy in Gaza and the West Bank. Fueled by anti-American resentments, that policy is widely caricatured as a crude reliance on power, semicolonial in its attitude, and driven by prejudice toward the Islamic world. The likely effect is that staying on course under Mr. Bush will remain a largely solitary American adventure.

This global solitude might make a re-elected Bush administration more vulnerable to the temptation to embrace a new anti-Islamic alliance, one reminiscent of the Holy Alliance that emerged after 1815 to prevent revolutionary upheavals in Europe. The notion of a new Holy Alliance is already being promoted by those with a special interest in entangling the United States in a prolonged conflict with Islam. Vladimir Putin's endorsement of Mr. Bush immediately comes to mind; it also attracts some anti-Islamic Indian leaders hoping to prevent Pakistan from dominating Afghanistan; the Likud in Israel is also understandably tempted; even China might play along.

For the United States, however, a new Holy Alliance would mean growing isolation in an increasingly polarized world. That prospect may not faze the extremists in the Bush administration who are committed to an existential struggle against Islam and who would like America to attack Iran, but who otherwise lack any wider strategic conception of what America's role in the world ought to be. It is, however, of concern to moderate Republicans.

Unfortunately, the predicament faced by America in Iraq is also more complex than the solutions offered so far by the Democratic side in the presidential contest. Senator John Kerry would have the advantage of enjoying greater confidence among America's traditional allies, since he might be willing to re-examine a war that he himself had not initiated. But that alone will not produce German or French funds and soldiers. The self-serving culture of comfortable abstention from painful security responsibilities has made the major European leaders generous in offering criticism but reluctant to assume burdens.

To get the Europeans to act, any new administration will have to confront them with strategic options. The Europeans need to be convinced that the United States recognizes that the best way to influence the eventual outcome of the civil war within Islam is to shape an expanding Grand Alliance (as opposed to a polarizing Holy Alliance) that embraces the Middle East by taking on the region's three most inflammatory and explosive issues: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the mess in Iraq, and the challenge of a restless and potentially dangerous Iran.

While each issue is distinct and immensely complex, each affects the others. The three must be tackled simultaneously, and they can be tackled effectively only if America and Europe cooperate and engage the more moderate Muslim states.

A grand American-European strategy would have three major prongs. The first would be a joint statement by the United States and the European Union outlining the basic principles of a formula for an Israeli-Palestinian peace, with the details left to negotiations between the parties. Its key elements should include no right of return; no automatic acceptance of the 1967 lines but equivalent territorial compensation for any changes; suburban settlements on the edges of the 1967 lines incorporated into Israel, but those more than a few miles inside the West Bank vacated to make room for the resettlement of some of the Palestinian refugees; a united Jerusalem serving as the capitals of the two states; and a demilitarized Palestinian state with some international peacekeeping presence.

Such a joint statement, by providing the Israeli and Palestinian publics a more concrete vision of the future, would help to generate support for peace, even if the respective leaders and some of the citizens initially objected.

Secondly, the European Union would agree to make a substantial financial contribution to the recovery of Iraq, and to deploy a significant military force (including French and German contingents, as has been the case in Afghanistan) to reduce the American military presence. A serious parallel effort on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process might induce some Muslim states to come in, as was explicitly suggested recently by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. The effect would be to transform the occupation of Iraq into a transitional international presence while greatly increasing the legitimacy of the current puppet Iraqi regime. But without progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, any postoccupation regime in Iraq will be both anti-United States and anti-Israel.

In addition, the United States and the European Union would approach Iran for exploratory discussions on regional security issues like Iraq, Afghanistan and nuclear proliferation. The longer-term objective would be a mutually acceptable formula that forecloses the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran but furthers its moderation through an economically beneficial normalization of relations with the West.

A comprehensive initiative along these lines would force the European leaders to take a stand: not to join would run the risk of reinforcing and legitimating American unilateralism while pushing the Middle East into a deeper crisis. America might unilaterally attack Iran or unilaterally withdraw from Iraq. In either case, a sharing of burdens as well as of decisions should provide a better solution for all concerned.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration, is the author of "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership.''

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T'S often said that truth is the first casualty of war. During a presidential campaign, that may be more apt than ever. Consider a seemingly simple question: What is the cost of the Iraq war to the United States? President Bush and Senator John Kerry have given different answers, but both candidates have ignored what may be the biggest cost item: the war's impact on the overall economy.

After all, the real cost of war is not only the money spent but also the economic effects, good or bad. For example, World War II led to huge levels of production and employment in the United States, while the Vietnam War dragged down economic growth as it wore on.

So, after 19 months of conflict in Iraq, how has the war affected America's economy, and what about the future?

Of course, calculating the net effect of a continuing war is neither easy nor exact. That's why many analysts are reluctant to try. But a few knowledgeable economists have made reasoned estimates, and the results are surprising.

The economic cost incurred so far may be as large as - or larger than - what has actually been spent directly on the war. (While estimates vary, the official figure for spending stands at around $120 billion since the conflict began.) And there are likely to be major economic costs as long as the war continues.

But start with the economic impact to date. Two economists, Warwick J. McKibbin of the Brookings Institution and Andrew Stoeckel of the Center for International Economics in Australia, have calculated that the war may have already cost the United States $150 billion in lost gross domestic product since fighting began in March 2003. That is close to one percentage point of growth lost over the past year and a half. If that figure is correct, the nation's annual economic growth rate, which has been 3.7 percent during this period, could have been nearly 4.7 percent without the war.

Where does that $150 billion figure come from? The study took into account factors like higher oil prices, increased budget deficits and greater uncertainty. When analyzing the effects of uncertainty, the authors estimated the impact of the war on financial markets, business investment and consumer spending.

Of course, the results of any economic model are open to debate, and the $150 billion estimate is no exception. Some economists, like David Gold at the New School University, argue that the figure may be too low while others, like Mark Zandi of Economy.com, contend that it's on the high side.

But if Mr. McKibbin and Mr. Stoeckel are correct in their estimate, the real cost of the war to date, including direct spending and lost economic growth, is in the neighborhood of $270 billion.

Most economists would agree that the war has hurt the economy, mainly through higher oil prices and continuing uncertainty. The war's effect on oil prices is hard to disentangle from factors like higher global demand and supply disruptions, but it is commonly thought that the war's role has been significant.

"It isn't a coincidence that we have oil prices breaching the key $50-a-barrel threshold one and a half years into this war," said Stephen S. Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief global economist.

Mr. Zandi says the war has clearly "had a very large impact on our economy and on the psyches of business and consumers." He explained it this way: First, in the period before the war, fear and uncertainty held back the economic recovery. Then, as the initial invasion succeeded, the economy recovered strongly and found its footing again. Now, as the war drags on, higher oil prices and shaky confidence are dampening the pace of growth and job creation.

What really worries economists, though, is the future economic impact. "The longer this war runs, the weaker our long-run growth will be," Mr. Zandi said. That is because spending on things like the occupation and peacekeeping in Iraq does not do anything to bolster the American economy's productive capacity.

And it adds to the growing budget shortfall. "With a budget deficit already at 3.5 percent of G.D.P.," Mr. Roach said, "that's a really big deal."

To see how big the future economic costs could be, consider a study prepared by William D. Nordhaus, a Yale economist. Back in 2002, when the merits of going to war with Iraq were being debated, Professor Nordhaus published a thorough analysis of the potential economic costs. It has become the most influential study on the topic. (Mr. McKibbin and Mr. Stoeckel collaborated with Professor Nordhaus, and they relied on many of his assumptions to build their

model.)

Professor Nordhaus calculated how much output the economy would lose, based on two possibilities: a quick victory or a long conflict. Although he has not updated his results, the long-conflict version has turned out to be pretty accurate so far. He estimated that such a conflict would result in $140 billion in direct government spending, a figure that we are already near. He also predicted that oil prices would spike and that heightened uncertainty would hurt the economy. In addition, he expected large additional costs associated with the occupation and peacekeeping operations as well as with reconstruction and nation-building efforts.

Adding it all together, he came up with a whopping figure of $1.9 trillion in costs during the decade after the invasion.

OF course, any analysis of the war's economic impact over time is not complete without considering the potential future benefits to the United States and the rest of the world. Increased political stability in the Middle East, stable energy markets and diminished global terrorism could pay major dividends. In fact, many people in Washington hope that the benefits will ultimately outweigh the costs, however large.

So far, though, 19 months into the conflict, those kinds of benefits remain beyond the horizon. And until more time passes, estimating the likelihood and magnitude of those benefits lies in the realm of politics, not economics.

en. Tommy R. Franks climbed out of a C-130 plane at the Baghdad airport on April 16, 2003, and pumped his fist into the air. American troops had pushed into the capital of liberated Iraq little more than a week before, and it was the war commander's first visit to the city.

Much of the Sunni Triangle was only sparsely patrolled, and Baghdad was still reeling from a spasm of looting. Apache attack helicopters prowled the skies as General Franks headed to the Abu Ghraib North Palace, a retreat for Saddam Hussein that now served as the military's headquarters.

Huddling in a drawing room with his top commanders, General Franks told them it was time to make plans to leave. Combat forces should be prepared to start pulling out within 60 days if all went as expected, he said. By September, the more than 140,000 troops in Iraq could be down to little more than a division, about 30,000 troops.

To help bring stability and allow the Americans to exit, President Bush had reviewed a plan the day before seeking four foreign divisions - including Arab and NATO troops - to take on peacekeeping duties.

As the Baghdad meeting drew to a close, the president in a teleconference congratulated the commanders on a job well done. Afterward, they posed for photos and puffed on victory cigars.

Within a few months, though, the Bush administration's optimistic assumptions had been upended. Many of the foreign troops never came. The Iraqi institutions expected to help run the country collapsed. The adversary that was supposed to have been shocked and awed into submission was reorganizing beyond the reach of overstretched American troops.

In the debate over the war and its aftermath, the Bush administration has portrayed the insurgency that is still roiling Iraq today as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, accident of history, an enemy that emerged only after melting away during the rapid American advance toward Baghdad. The sole mistake Mr. Bush has acknowledged in the war is in not foreseeing what he termed that "catastrophic success."

But many military officers and civilian officials who served in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003 say the administration's miscalculations cost the United States valuable momentum - and enabled an insurgency that was in its early phases to intensify and spread.

"I think that there were Baathist Sunnis who planned to resist no matter what happened and at all cost, but we missed opportunities, and that drove more of them into the resistance," Jay Garner, the first civilian administrator of Iraq and a retired Army lieutenant general, said in an interview, referring to the Baath Party of Mr. Hussein and to his Sunni Muslim supporters. "Things were stirred up far more than they should have been. We did not seal the borders because we did not have enough troops to do that, and that brought in terrorists."

A senior officer who served in Iraq but did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of his position said: "The real question is, did there have to be an insurgency? Did we help create the insurgency by missing the window of opportunity in the period right after Saddam was removed from power?"

Looking back at that crucial time, those officers, administration officials and others provided an intimate and detailed account of how the postwar situation went awry. Civilian administrators of the Iraqi occupation raised concerns about plans to reduce American forces; intelligence agencies left American forces unprepared for the furious battles they encountered in Iraq's southern cities and did not emphasize the risks of a postwar insurgency. And senior American generals and civilians were at odds over plans to build a new Iraqi army, which was needed to impose order.

The First Principles

In August 2002, leading administration officials circulated a top-secret document blandly titled, "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy." Months of wrangling at the United Nations were still ahead, but senior officials were drafting the principles that would guide the invasion if the president gave the order to strike.

The goals for Iraq were far-reaching. The aim was not just to topple a dictator, but also to build a democratic system. The United States would preserve, but reform, the bureaucracies that did the day-to-day work of running the country. There were some unstated objectives as well. Policy makers hoped that installing a pro-American government would put pressure on Syria to stop supporting terrorist groups and Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.

But grand goals did not mean huge forces. From the start, the Pentagon's plan to invade Iraq was a striking contrast to the doctrine for using military power that was developed by Colin L. Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Instead of assembling a giant invasion force over six months, as he did in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the administration intended to attack with a much smaller force as reinforcements were still streaming to the Middle East.

The strategy was consistent with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's push to transform the military so it would rely less on heavy ground troops and more on technology, intelligence and special operations forces.

Mr. Rumsfeld had long been impatient with what he thought was a plodding, risk-averse and overly costly way of waging war. At General Franks's Central Command, planners thought that the new approach was necessary for another reason: to catch the Iraqis by surprise and prevent any efforts to sabotage the oil fields or stiffen their Baghdad defenses.

"Almost everybody worried about what would happen if the war were prolonged," Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense, said in an interview. "This highlighted the importance of speed and surprise. It argued for this unusual and creative way of starting the war, with fewer forces than Saddam expected us to have and to have the flow continue after the war started."

If the Iraqi Army mounted a tougher fight than anticipated, Mr. Feith said, the Pentagon could continue to send forces. If the resistance was light, as many civilian aides expected, Washington could stop the troop flow. There would be "off ramps," in the vernacular of the Pentagon.

Achieving the administration's ambitions meant dealing with any turmoil that followed the collapse of Mr. Hussein's government and his iron-fisted security services. Administration officials assumed that American and multinational troops would help stabilize Iraq, but they also believed that the newly liberated Iraqis would share the burden.

"The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said in an interview. "You would be able to bring new leadership but that we were going to keep the body in place."

Early Warnings

Some military men, though, were worried that the administration would be caught short. Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first nine months of the Bush administration, was one of them.

General Shelton had contacts in the Middle East who had warned that Iraq could devolve into chaos after Mr. Hussein was deposed.

At a Pentagon meeting early in 2003 with former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former vice chairmen and their successors, he voiced concerns that the United States would not have sufficient troops immediately after the dictator was ousted. He cautioned that it was important to have enough troops to deal with the unexpected.

At the White House, officials also were thinking about how many troops would be needed.

Military aides on the National Security Council prepared a confidential briefing for Ms. Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, that examined what previous nation-building efforts had required.

The review, called "Force Security in Seven Recent Stability Operations," noted that no single rule of thumb applied in every case. But it underscored a basic principle well known to military planners: However many forces might be required to defeat the foe, maintaining security afterward was determined by an entirely different set of calculations, including the population, the scope of the terrain and the necessary tasks.

If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq. If Bosnia was used as benchmark, 364,000 troops would be needed. If Afghanistan served as the model, only 13,900 would be needed in Iraq. The higher numbers were consistent with projections later provided to Congress by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed that estimate as off the mark.

More forces generally are required to control countries with large urban populations. The briefing pointed out that three-quarters of Iraq's population lived in urban areas. In Bosnia and Kosovo, city dwellers made up half of the population. In Afghanistan, it was only 18 percent.

Neither the Defense Department nor the White House, however, saw the Balkans as a model to be emulated. In a Feb. 14, 2003, speech titled "Beyond Nation Building," which Mr. Rumsfeld delivered in New York, he said the large number of foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo had led to a "culture of dependence" that discouraged local inhabitants from taking responsibility for themselves.

The defense secretary said he thought that there was much to be learned from Afghanistan, where the United States did not install a nationwide security force but relied instead on a new Afghan Army and troops from other countries to help keep the peace.

James F. Dobbins, who was the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and had also served as the ambassador at large for Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, thought that the administration was focusing on the wrong model. The former Yugoslavia - with its ethnic divisions, hobbled economy and history of totalitarian rule - had more parallels with Iraq than administration officials appeared willing to accept, Mr. Dobbins believed. It was Afghanistan that was the anomaly.

"They preferred to find a model for successful nation building that was not associated with the previous administration," Mr. Dobbins said in an interview. "And Afghanistan offered a much more congenial answer in terms of what would be required in terms of inputs, including troops."

As the Iraq war approached, Mr. Dobbins was overseeing a RAND Corporation study on nation building. The larger the number of security forces, the fewer the casualties suffered by alliance troops, the study asserted. When L. Paul Bremer III was appointed the chief administrator for Iraq in May 2003, Mr. Dobbins slipped him a copy.

By the end of 2002, the military was scrambling to get ready. The troop deployment plan had been devised so that the Pentagon could regulate the flow and send only as much as was needed. Throughout the process, Mr. Rumsfeld was scrutinizing the troop requests. Defense officials said he had wanted to ensure that the deployments did not outrun the United Nations diplomacy and added that requests for Iraq had to be examined because the United States faced other potential crises.

Concern in the Field

But some military officers were concerned about what they perceived as second-guessing at the Pentagon, and complained of delays. One major troop request submitted in late November was not approved until a month later, for example.

The issue came to the attention of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Congressional leader and a member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Mr. Rumsfeld, during an early February 2003 meeting with American officers in Kuwait. He said he would go back and press the secretary to stop messing around with tactical-level decisions, according to an account of the session by participants. "The worst they can do is take my designated parking space away," he said.

As the war drew near, Mr. Bush asked his senior commanders if they had sufficient forces, including enough to protect vulnerable supply lines. "I can't tell you how many times he asked, 'Do you have everything that you need?' " Ms. Rice said. "The answer was, these are the force levels that we need."

Senior military officers acknowledge that they did not press the president for more troops. But some said they would have been more comfortable with a larger reserve. And some officers say the concept of beginning the invasion while reinforcements were still being sent did not work so smoothly in practice.

On March 18, the day before the conflict began, the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff met to discuss plans for removing American forces once they had triumphed. Aides to General Franks argued that the meeting was premature.

As the American forces drove toward Baghdad in the early days of the war, the fighting was different than had been expected. Instead of a clash of armies, however mismatched, the American forces had to contend with paramilitary forces and even suicide bombers. Thousands of Saddam Fedayeen paramilitary troops had infested Iraq's southern cities and were using them as bases to attack American supply lines.

But after several days of hard battle, the Americans resumed their march north and began moving in for what they thought would be a climactic confrontation with the Republican Guard. With seemingly little doubt that the Americans would win, talk of withdrawal soon resurfaced.

In mid-April, Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld's closest aides, arrived in Kuwait to join the team assembled by General Garner, the civil administrator, which was to oversee post-Hussein Iraq. Mr. Bush had agreed in January that the Defense Department was to have authority for postwar Iraq. It was the first time since World War II that the State Department would not take charge of a post-conflict situation.

Speaking to Garner aides at their hotel headquarters in Kuwait, Mr. Di Rita outlined the Pentagon's vision, one that seemed to echo the themes in Mr. Rumsfeld's Feb. 14 address. According to Col. Paul Hughes of the Army, who was present at the session, Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was determined to avoid open-ended military commitments like those in Bosnia and Kosovo, and to withdraw the vast majority of the American forces in three to four months.

"The main theme was that D.O.D. would be in charge, and this would be totally different than in the past," said Tom Gross, a retired Army colonel and a Garner aide who was also at the session. "We would be out very quickly. We were very confused. We did not see it as a short-term process."

Mr. Di Rita said in an interview that he had no responsibility for force levels, but added that military commanders wanted the postwar troop numbers to be as low as necessary.

Thomas E. White, then the secretary of the Army, said he had received similar guidance from Mr. Rumsfeld's office. "Our working budgetary assumption was that 90 days after completion of the operation, we would withdraw the first 50,000 and then every 30 days we'd take out another 50,000 until everybody was back," he recalled. "The view was that whatever was left in Iraq would be de minimis."

Not Enough Troops

Even as Mr. Hussein's government was losing its struggle to hold onto power, some preliminary reports suggested that Iraq could remain a battleground.

The National Intelligence Council had cautioned in a January 2003 report that the Iraqis would resent their liberators unless the American-led occupation authority moved quickly to restore essential services and shift political controls to Iraqi leaders. But those efforts turned out to be frustratingly slow.

While much of the country was chaotic and lawless, the American generals there were still not sure that they were facing a determined insurgency. The limited number of United States troops, however, posed problems in policing the porous borders, establishing a significant presence in the resistant Sunni Triangle and imposing order in the capital.

"My position is that we lost momentum and that the insurgency was not inevitable," said James A. (Spider) Marks, a retired Army major general, who served as the chief intelligence officer for the land war command. "We had momentum going in and had Saddam's forces on the run.

"But we did not have enough troops," he continued. "First, we did not have enough troops to conduct combat patrols in sufficient numbers to gain solid intelligence and paint a good picture of the enemy on the ground. Secondly, we needed more troops to act on the intelligence we generated. They took advantage of our limited numbers."

In Baghdad, some neighborhoods were particularly restive, but American forces were hampered in carrying out patrols. The Third Infantry Division, the first big unit to venture into the city, had about 17,000 troops. But it was a mechanized division, and only a fraction could carry out patrols on foot. The tank crews had to wait for body armor.

North and west of Baghdad, in the volatile cities of the Sunni Triangle, resisters found refuge while they plotted new attacks.

In Falluja, which would become a hotbed of the insurgency, no troops arrived until April 24, two weeks after American forces entered Baghdad. Soldiers from the 82d Airborne were the first ones there. But because of constant troop rotations and the limited number of forces, responsibility for the city repeatedly shifted. The chronic turnover made it difficult for the Americans to form ties to residents and gather useful intelligence. Today, the city is a no-go zone surrounded by United States marines.

Lt. Col. Joseph Apodaca, a Marine intelligence officer who is now retired, said there were early signs in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south that the paramilitary forces American troops faced might be the precursor of a broader insurgency. But chasing after potential rebels was not the Marines' assigned mission, and they did not have sufficient troops for this, he said.

"The overall plan was to go get Saddam Hussein," Colonel Apodaca recalled. "The assumption seemed to be that when people realized that he was gone, that would get the population on our side and facilitate the transition to reconstruction. We were not going to chase these guys when they ran to the smaller cities. We did not really have the force levels at that point to keep the insurgency down."

Hoping Multinationally

In Washington, however, White House and Pentagon officials thought that the most dangerous part was over. The goal of quickly enlisting Iraqi support appeared to be frustrated when the police abandoned their posts and Iraqi military units did not surrender en masse. But the administration thought that more of the burden could be shifted to multinational forces.

On April 15, 2003, Mr. Bush convened his National Security Council and discussed soliciting peacekeeping forces from other countries so the United States could begin to pull out troops. Even though there had been widespread opposition to the invasion, administration officials thought that some governments would put aside their objections once victory was at hand and the Iraqis began to form a new government.

Pentagon officials briefed the president on a plan to enlist four divisions: one made up of NATO troops; another from the Gulf Cooperative Council, an association of Persian Gulf states; one led by Poland; and another by Britain. The thinking was that the United States would leave no more than a division or two in Iraq.

The next day, General Franks flew to Baghdad and instructed his commanders to draw up plans to begin pulling out. At that palace meeting with his commanders, he noted that it was possible for the United States to wear out its welcome and keep too many troops in Iraq too long. A functioning interim Iraqi government was expected within 30 to 60 days, he said. He told his commanders to be prepared to take as much risk going out as they did coming in.

After that discussion, the general and his officers took part in a satellite video conference with Mr. Bush. The president asked about integrating foreign troops into the security force. Noting that Secretary of State Powell and Mr. Rumsfeld would be asking other nations for troops, the general said he planned to talk to officials in the United Arab Emirates about an Arab division.

General Franks's talk of being prepared to take risks alarmed General Garner, the civil administrator. Fearing that an early troop reduction threatened the mission of building a new Iraq, General Garner took his concerns to Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the chief allied land commander.

"There was no doubt we would win the war," General Garner recalled telling General McKiernan, "but there can be doubt we will win the peace."

Soon after, the Pentagon began turning off the spigot of troops flowing to Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld had started to question whether the military still needed the Army's First Cavalry Division, a 17,500-member force that was slated to follow the lead invasion force into Iraq. He and General Franks discussed the issue repeatedly.

"Rumsfeld just ground Franks down," said Mr. White, the former Army secretary who was fired after policy disputes with Mr. Rumsfeld. "If you grind away at the military guys long enough, they will finally say, 'Screw it, I'll do the best I can with what I have.' The nature of Rumsfeld is that you just get tired of arguing with him."

A Canceled Deployment

General Franks insisted that he had not faced pressure on the First Cavalry issue. "It was Rumsfeld's idea," he said, referring to the cancellation of the deployment. "Rumsfeld did not beat me into submission. Initially, I did not want to truncate the force flow, but as it looked like we were likely to get greater international participation, I concluded that it was O.K. to stop the flow."

General Franks also said he accepted the suggestion only after his field commanders agreed that the division was not needed. But a former staff officer to General McKiernan said the land war commander had wanted the unit to be deployed and was disappointed that he had to do without the additional division. The deployment of the division was canceled on April 21.

It was not long, though, before the optimistic talk of a speedy withdrawal of American forces was set aside. Neither NATO nor Persian Gulf nations wanted to put forces into Iraq. An American general was sent to New Delhi to talk to the Indians, but any hope of securing Indian troops quickly faded. Turkey later offered peacekeeping troops, but the Iraqis would not accept them. Only the Polish-led and British-led divisions became a reality.

Soon after arriving in May, Mr. Bremer, who replaced General Garner as the chief occupation official sooner than expected, became concerned that American forces were stretched too thin. In late June, John Sawers, the senior British official in Baghdad, sent a confidential report to his government, which chronicled Mr. Bremer's concerns.

'A Difficult Week in Iraq'

"It has been a difficult week in Iraq," Mr. Sawers wrote. "The new threat is well-targeted sabotage of the infrastructure. An attack on the power grid last weekend had a series of knock-on effects which halved the power generation in Baghdad and many other parts of the country. "

"The oil and gas is another target, with five successful attacks this week on pipelines," he continued. "We are also seeing the first signs of intimidation of Iraqis working for the coalition."

"Bremer's main concern is that we must keep in-country sufficient military capability to ensure a security blanket across the country," Mr. Sawers reported. "He has twice said to President Bush that he is concerned that the drawdown of US/UK troops has gone too far and we cannot afford further reductions."

Mr. Bremer also questioned whether multinational forces "will be sufficiently robust when push comes to shove," Mr. Sawers reported.

According to United States officials, Mr. Bremer raised the troop issue in a June 18 video conference with Mr. Bush. Mr. Bremer said the United States needed to be careful not to go too far in taking out troops. The president said the plan was now to rotate forces, not withdraw them, and agreed that Washington needed to maintain adequate force levels.

Still the American forces shrank, from a high of about 150,000 in July 2003 to some 108,000 in February 2004, before going up again when violence sharply increased early this year. Some of the troop declines were offset by the arrival of the Polish-led division in August 2003.

General Franks said he had sought to assure Mr. Bremer that he would have enough troops in late May. While Mr. Bremer argued that he could not get Iraq's economy going until the American military made the country safer, General Franks asserted that the slow pace of reconstruction was undermining security.

"Some people say there can be no economic building in a country until there is security," General Franks recalled, referring to Mr. Bremer and others in the Coalition Provisional Authority. "When I would talk to Jerry Bremer, I would say, 'Listen Jerry, you want to talk to me about security in terms of forces. I want to talk to you about the C.P.A. and how many civilians - wing tips, I call them - you guys have out in these 18 provinces in order to take large sums of money, move them around in civil works projects, and get the angry young men off the streets so that fewer troops will be necessary."

This debate between Mr. Bremer, who declined to comment for this article, and the senior military officers in Iraq would become a continuing refrain.

What Went Wrong?

For some who served in Iraq, the summer of 2003 was a time of lost opportunities. Now there is a passionate debate about what went wrong.

"Combat is a series of transitions, and the most critical part of an operation is the transition from combat to stability and support operations," one general said. "When you don't have enough combat power, you end up giving the enemy an opportunity to go after your vulnerabilities."

General Franks, for his part, said the United States had sufficient combat forces in Iraq but did not initially have enough civil affairs, military police and other units that are intended to establish order after major combat is over. The issue, he said, was not the level of forces, but their composition.

While saying he was not criticizing Mr. Rumsfeld, General Franks suggested that this was partly a result of difficulties in getting all of the Central Command's force requests approved quickly at the Pentagon. He also said delays in obtaining funds from Congress for reconstruction efforts and the decision of many foreign governments not to send troops had contributed to the continuing turmoil in Iraq.

Ms. Rice puts the blame for the insurgency primarily on the fact that many Iraqi forces fled during the American push to Baghdad, only to fight another day. She also said the minority Sunni population, which had been in power under Mr. Hussein, felt unsettled, contributing to a "permissive environment."

"Any big historical change is going to be turbulent," she said. "There was a lot of planning based on the assumptions, based on the intelligence. It is also the case that when the plan meets reality, it's what it didn't think of that really becomes the problem. So the real question is, can you adjust and make the changes necessary?"

General Garner said the administration's mistakes had made it easier for the insurgency to take hold.

"John Abizaid was the only one who really had his head in the postwar game," General Garner said, referring to the general who served as General Franks's deputy and eventually his successor. "The Bush administration did not. Condi Rice did not. Doug Feith didn't. You could go brief them, but you never saw any initiative come of them. You just kind of got a north and south nod. And so it ends with so many tragic things."

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October 20, 2004

'CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS'

Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

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hen I read "The Motorcycle Diaries" for the first time, it was just a sheaf of typewritten pages. Still, I identified immediately with this man who narrated his adventures in such a spontaneous way. As I continued reading, I began to realize that the writer was my father.

There were moments when I took his traveling companion's place on the motorbike and clung to my dad's back, journeying with him over the mountains and around the lakes. I admit there were some points at which I stopped reading, especially when he describes so graphically things I would never talk about myself. When he does, however, he reveals yet again just how honest and unconventional he could be. To tell you the truth, the more I read, the more in love I was with the boy my father had been.

I got to know the young Ernesto Che Guevara better: the 23-year-old who left Argentina with a yearning for adventure and dreams of the great deeds he would perform, and who, as he discovered the reality of our continent, continued to mature as a human being and to develop as a social being. Slowly we see how his dreams and ambitions changed.

The young man who makes us smile at the beginning with his absurdities and craziness becomes increasingly sensitive as he tells us about the complex indigenous world of Latin America, the poverty of its people and the exploitation to which they are submitted. In spite of it all, he never loses his sense of humor, which instead becomes finer and more subtle.

My father, "ése, el que fue" ("myself, the man I used to be"), as he identifies himself, shows us a Latin America that few of us know, describing its landscapes with words that color each image and reach into our senses, so that we can see what his eyes took in.

His awareness grows that what poor people need is not so much his scientific knowledge as a doctor, but rather his strength and persistence in trying to bring about the social change that would enable them to recover the dignity that had been taken from them and trampled on for centuries. With his thirst for knowledge and his great capacity to love, he shows us how reality, if properly interpreted, can permeate a human being to the point of changing his or her way of thinking. I was only 6 when my father died, 37 years ago today, so I have few memories. I got to know my father only as I grew up. My mother, Aleida March, loved him very deeply, and shared his ideals, which she passed on to her children. What I remember most is my father's great capacity for love.

I often describe myself as a genetic accident; I had the honor and privilege of being the daughter of a man and a woman who are very special people. And I am also a product of the Cuban revolution.

I am a pediatrician, specializing in allergies, in Havana. When I was young, my father's image did influence me, but I later chose medicine as a way to be closer to my people. I've also worked as a doctor in Nicaragua, Angola and Ecuador.

We are happy as a family when my father's image inspires people to learn more about him and his thinking, but often the commercialization seems to us like a lack of respect for who he was and what he stood for.

Since the 1980's, we - Che's family and others - have been working on his unpublished manuscripts. These were maintained as part of his personal archive, and in large part were and continue to be jealously guarded by my mother. To publish anything written by him that he himself did not intend for publication - as is the case with the notes that became "The Motorcycle Diaries" - serious editing work is required. We can't omit text, but at the same time we can't be completely sure he would have given his permission for the text to be published as it was originally written. That is why we have a commitment to edit what he wrote without changing what he meant - a very difficult task.

A Cuban publishing house published "The Motorcycle Diaries" for the first time in 1993. Of the many books that my father wrote, it is one of my favorites, because this book brings the young Ernesto closer to other young people in the world today - which is the most important thing - showing how people can be changed if they are sensitive to their surroundings.

Although there is only one copy of the Walter Salles' film "The Motorcycle Diaries" on the island, those Cubans who have seen it have great things to say about it. It is entertaining, tender and profound.

Though we no longer live in the 1950's and 1960's, unfortunately the conditions in Latin America that provoked a profound change in the young Che Guevara still exist in many parts of our continent and the world, and with an increasingly brutal impact. Have the film and the book become so popular because his strength and tenderness are a model for the people we need in these times? I believe this is the case and I am proud to live among people who not only love him, but who put into practice his desire to create a world that is far more just.

Aleida Guevara, the eldest daughter of Ernesto Che Guevara and Aleida March, is the author of the forthcoming"Chávez, Venezuela and the New Latin America." This articlewas translated by Pilar Aguilera from the Spanish.

eality keeps rearing its ugly head. The Bush administration's case for the war in Iraq has completely fallen apart, as evidenced by the report this week from the president's handpicked inspector that Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles in the early 1990's.

Coming next week are the results of a new study that shows - here at home - how tough a time American families are having in their never-ending struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. The White House, as deep in denial about the economy as it is about Iraq, insists that things are fine - despite the embarrassing fact that President Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs during his four years in office.

The study, jointly sponsored by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, will show that 9.2 million working families in the United States - one out of every four - earn wages that are so low they are barely able to survive financially.

"Our data is very solid and shows that this is a much bigger problem than most people imagine," said Brandon Roberts, one of the authors of the report, which is to be formally released on Tuesday. The report found that there are 20 million children in these low-income working families.

For the purposes of the study, any family in which at least one person was employed was considered a working family. Very wealthy families were included.

The median income for a family of four in the U.S. is $62,732. According to the study, a family of four earning less than $36,784 is considered low-income. A family of four earning less than $18,392 is considered poor. The 9.2 million struggling families cited by the report fell into one of the latter two categories. And those families have one-third of all the children in American working families.

Not surprisingly, the problem for millions of families is that they have jobs that pay very low wages and provide no benefits. "Consider the motel housekeeper, the retail clerk at the hardware store or the coffee shop cook," the report said. "If they have children, chances are good that their families are living on an income too low to provide for their basic needs."

Neither politicians nor the media put much of a spotlight on families that are struggling economically. According to the study, one in five workers are in occupations where the median wage is less than $8.84 an hour, which is a poverty-level wage for a family of four. A full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is not even sufficient to keep a family of three out of poverty.

Families with that kind of income are teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. Any misfortune might push them over the edge - an illness, an automobile breakdown, even something as seemingly minor as a flooded basement.

For the families in these lower-income brackets, life is often a harrowing day-to-day struggle to pay for the bare necessities. According to federal government statistics, the median annual rent for a two-bedroom apartment in major metropolitan markets is more than $8,000. The annual cost of food for a low-income family of four is nearly $4,000. Utility bills are nearly $2,000. Transportation costs are about $1,500. And then there are costs for child care, health care and clothing.

You do the math. How are these millions of poor and low-income families making it?

(A lot of those families are going to get a shock this winter as price increases for crude oil get translated into big jumps in home heating bills.)

The economy relies heavily on the services provided by low-wage workers but, as the report notes, "our society has not taken adequate steps to ensure that these workers can make ends meet and build a future for their families, no matter how determined they are to be self-sufficient."

Mr. Roberts said he hoped the study, titled "Working Hard, Falling Short," would help initiate a national discussion of the plight of families who are doing the right thing but not earning enough to get ahead. "Seventy-one percent of low-income families work," he said. More than half are headed by married couples. But economic self-sufficiency remains maddeningly out of reach.

Even in a presidential election year, these matters have not been explored in any sustained way. We're quick to give lip service to the need to work hard, but very slow to properly reward hard work.

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October 8, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Ignorance Isn't Strength

By PAUL KRUGMAN