Iraq—Five Years and Some Accounting

Five years into the costly Iraq War, the most compelling question is still the initial one: why? Why invade a nation that hadn’t attacked us and didn’t pose a credible threat to us? Why set the reckless and arrogant precedent of pre-emptive war?

The Bush administration has trundled out a series of reasons.

The initial reasoning went like this: Saddam Hussein is working on weapons of mass destruction that could threaten American interests. This reasoning was backed by Condi Rice’s statement that we don’t want the proof of Hussein’s WMD to be a “mushroom cloud” and Dick Cheney’s theory that even a 1% chance of a WMD attack justified invading and occupying Iraq.  Five years on, it’s become clear that the threat was significantly and intentionally exaggerated. As for Cheney’s “1% Rule,” such absolutism and arrogance cannot be taken seriously; can you imagine a world where every nation followed that doctrine?

A second reason involved the suggestion, made repeatedly by administration officials, that Iraq had some connection to al Qaeda and/or the 9/11 attacks. This suggestion has also been repudiated. Saddam’s secular Baathist Party was hostile to the sectarian fundamentalism of al Qaeda and vice-versa. No credible connection between Iraq and either 9/11 or al Qaeda has ever been uncovered.

A third reason is Bush’s alleged crusade to spread freedom and democracy to the Arab world. This is either the height of naivete, or the height of cynicism. Only a naive misunderstanding of how democracy takes hold and develops would lead one to honestly believe it could be imposed militarily on a fractious nation like Hussein’s Iraq. Only the most brazen cynicism would lead one to use freedom and democracy as rhetorical flourishes masking a cold economic and geopolitical calculation.

Considering the political costs of this invasion and occcupation—the elevation of Iran to regional supremacy, the sundering of the fragile truce between Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the destabilization of the region and its oil exporting capacity, the loss of America’s moral authority, the erosion of American civil liberties—shouldn’t we be revisiting the real reasons behind what many consider the greatest strategic American foreign policy mistake ever?

And why do we as a nation continue to ignore the costs of this war for the Iraqi people? The tally of documented civilian deaths is approaching 90,000. The number of casualties is probably five to ten times that number. Between two and four million Iraqis have been displaced. Countless millions have been psychologically traumatized in Iraq, and an entire generation has been denied the progress and prosperity the war has delayed or destroyed.

Consider those human costs, and the real reason for the invasion takes on a truly questionable character.

The real reason for the invasion was to establish a front on which to fight al Qaeda and jihadism far from our own shores. President Bush has said as much, with hardly a ripple of reaction: “We will fight the terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home.” We lost 3000 people on 9/11 when a conspiracy planned and executed by mostly Saudis operating in Afghanistan pierced our homeland. Now Iraq has lost 90,000+ and has been set back decades in its development while Bush literally kisses the cheeks and holds the hands of the Saudis, who, along with Exxon and friends, enjoy unprecedented profitability.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to put even a fraction of the resources we’ve expended in Iraq into Afghanistan, where the Taliban is making a comeback, instead? Deposing Saddam was a noble and desirable goal; wiping out the entire Baath Party infrastructure was neither justified nor desirable, however, unless the real goal was to create anarchy for an extended period during which al Qaeda and its allied jihadists could be fought in a place of our choosing.

We chose Iraq as our battlefield, not as our enemy.

Meanwhile, we’ve suffered 4000 deaths and 40,000 serious injuries, and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has estimated the eventual monetary cost of the war at three trillion dollars.

Can any reasonable person justify that kind of disproportionate and wrongly-targeted response?

One man who continues to call Iraq a just war is George Bush, whose ill-conceived and reckless use of force had at least one silver lining: the president, absent from combat when he had the chance, got to land a real live fighter jet onboard a real live aircraft carrier.

Mission accomplished, sir. That was one expensive photo op.

Newsprism

Related news satire at Timeless News

Note: This is not advocating withdrawal from Iraq. I’ve written about the conundrum that makes this war such a profound tragedy: it was immoral to invade in the first place, but it would be at least as immoral to withdraw before a stable Iraq emerges, which might be never.