The dreary task of drafting and executing national budgets hardly makes for riveting reading, yet it demands far more attention than it has received. This is particularly the case in dysfunctional and poorly administered countries such as Iraq. After all, the legitimacy of the government, and indeed of the very state itself, absolutely depends on its ability to not only fund its operational expenses, but indeed to properly budget for longer term projects—in infrastructure, education and otherwise—that will bring to the citizenry an increased standard of living. Yet there is little work on the subject as it pertains to Iraq, despite the immense attention that has been given to that state over the past fifteen years.

This book deserves credit for addressing that deficit of attention. It does so comprehensively and thoroughly, not only addressing those issues specific to budget design and execution in Iraq in the post conflict era, but also situating them historically against the broader means by which Iraq developed and carried out budget policy, from the late Ottoman era forward. Savage carefully demonstrates how badly the budget was managed during the Ba’ath era, with large amounts of the state budget, relating to institutions of security and defense in particular, shrouded in mystery, and largely dictated by a Soviet-style Ministry of Planning.

By virtue of this useful context, by the time Savage brings us to the post war era, he had made us far more aware of the mammoth problems with which the occupying powers were faced. Exercising their power through an entity known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), those occupying powers manage notable successes, chief among them a revamped policy for budget design laid out in CPA Order 95 and still effective law in Iraq today. Through Order 95, the budget was made more transparent, the Ministry of Finance was rendered its chief architect, and many of the problems of the Ba’ath era budget making were thereby excised. Savage does not hesitate to point out certain failures as well. In particular, he devotes an entire chapter to a rather large one, and this was the unsuccessful effort to design a budget process using computers in place of pencil and paper. Due to a combination of extreme bureaucratic intransigence on the part of Iraqis, along with poor project design and even worse implementation on the part of the contractors charged with the task, the project went nowhere. Amazingly enough, Iraq continues to design and operate its budget entirely by pencil and paper.

Overall, the work is thorough, carefully considered, and praiseworthy. Yet it does suffer from a significant flaw that mars an otherwise admirable effort. Specifically, Savage’s extensive research and interviews only seems to have reached so far as the CPA, its contractors, and those Iraqis who were closely affiliated with it, including, for example, Ali Allawi, a former Minister of Finance. Other key players, from Adil Abdul Mahdi to Bayan Jabr (referred to rather confusingly in this account as Baqir al-Zubeidi), do not appear to have been interviewed. This may not be Savage’s fault, as it is impossible to know their willingness to stand for interviews, let alone the ability of some key actors to speak English. Yet the result is a rather obvious tendency to credit expatriate and CPA driven accounts over those of local actors. Thus, he insists that despite criticisms to the contrary, “some organized prewar economic planning did take place” (p. 49). Professor Savage then seems to cite favorably a Department of Treasury official who tells us of “a huge plan with many subcomponents.” Yet when the time actually comes to develop a budget policy after the invasion, it is the U.S. Department of State that is given the task of advising the Ministry of Planning, which is the Ministry that had been most closely involved in budget making in the Ba’ath era, while the Department of the Treasury advised the other major Ministry involved in the process, the Ministry of Finance. In short, when first taking control of the Iraqi state, the United States split the Iraqi budget making tasks across two United States agencies, and then assigned the State Department, which had no particular expertise in budget making, the job of advising the more important Ministry. This hardly seems particularly well thought out, to put the matter charitably. Professor Savage provides two explanations for this bizarre result, both given to him by those with whom he has spoken. The first was the CPA’s “lack of information and understanding of how the Iraqi ministries actually worked and how the Iraqi budgeting system functioned” (p. 65). The second reason was that the United States sought to minimize the role of the Ministry of Planning because, to quote one U.S. official cited by Professor Savage, “we tend to be against ministries of planning. We don’t see the importance of ministries of planning as much as we see the importance of some other kinds of ministries” (p. 66).

Both reasons merit severe criticism, and suggest the United States was far less prepared than its personnel claimed when speaking to Savage. The problem with the first explanation is that the premier role given to the Ministry of Planning is perfectly obvious to anyone who had bothered to read the Iraqi 1985 Law of the Unified Budget, which had been publicly available for nearly two decades before the invasion. Anyone who had read that law, and was even faintly familiar with the budgeting methods of the Soviet Union, would have known exactly how the division of tasks between the respective Ministries of Planning and Finance was intended to operate. The methods are nearly entirely transplanted from the Soviet Union. Yet, of course, nobody in the administration seemed to know that, as the second explanation makes clear. This is because they were “against” such ministries and Soviet methods of financial organization, and therefore, being against them, decided they were not “important.” This demonstrates willful ideological blindness, not careful study and preparation.

Other examples of this problem of trusting expatriate sources more than was justified exist, among them the rather unfair treatment by another of Savage’s interviewees of one of Iraq’s few capable politicians, Adil Abdul Mahdi, and his dismissal as being a “French Socialist” who somehow opposed the United States because he “wasn’t totally convinced of market principles” (p. 136). One would think the term “French Socialist” would be sufficient grounds for eye rolling, let alone the fact that Abdul Mahdi represents an Islamist party and negotiated a fairly significant debt deal with the Paris Club, a group of capitalist nations that seemingly did not find it impossible to deal with him. Could it be that the problem lay less with Abdul Mahdi and more with a U.S. administration that was so ideologically driven from the extreme right that it would not countenance anything short of full adoption of a Washington Consensus model of economic development, with disastrous consequences? One would require a broader set of perspectives than are offered here to explore the question.

In any event, this limitation is unfortunate, but should be viewed in its proper perspective. Even with such shortcomings, this book is by far the most careful, detailed, and considered work on the Iraqi budget, and the methods by which it works, and it is likely to remain so for some time to come.