OUR VIEW – Iraq war awaits the verdict of history
Facebook
Holland Sentinel
Sentinel editorial board
08/12/2010
Holland, MI —
President Obama's announcement that all American combat troops will be out of Iraq by the end of this month may have come as a surprise to many casual news consumers — as far as the U.S. news media are concerned, Iraq has been a non-story for some time. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have switched places: Afghanistan, long the "forgotten war," is now the central conflict and Iraq the sideshow.
It would be short-sighted for Americans to let Iraq fade from their consciousness without taking stock of the cost and lessons of the seven-year conflict and to assess whether the end of the war — for the United States — truly means "mission accomplished."
It's too early to form conclusive judgments, in part, because the war really isn't over. Sectarian strife continues in Iraq, though at a much lower level than in the worst days of the war, with insurgent activity on the upswing in recent months. And the United States will still have up to 50,000 troops working in Iraq in training and non-combat roles at least until the end of 2011, when all American forces are scheduled to leave under a U.S.-Iraqi agreement. It will take many years to determine if Iraq can sustain even a limited democracy with freedom of speech and religious tolerance.
The stated motivation for the war — the presence of weapons of mass destruction — proved to be non-existent, and it will take the perspective of future historians to finally determine if the claims were tragically inaccurate or actually fraudulent. However, the U.S.-led invasion did eliminate a particularly nasty and dangerous dictator in Saddam Hussein and gave the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and democracy — no small accomplishment. On the other hand, it would be hard to convince many Iraqis that they're better off now than they were in 2003. Seven years after the invasion, the Iraqi government can't provide regular electric service and Iraq remains one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. More than 2 million Iraqis fled their homeland during the war and only a small percentage have judged their country safe and stable enough to return.
We'll cite just a few statistics here illustrating the cost of the war: 4,414 U.S. service members dead and more than 30,000 wounded, with a cumulative cost of $737 billion according to the National Priorities Project. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths vary widely, but run into the hundreds of thousands.
Liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves can debate the war as hotly today as they did in 2003. What they should be able to agree on is the danger of hubris in the face of war. It was arrogant for anyone to boast that a war would be cheap, quick and easy. Even more than the danger of faulty intelligence, what the Iraq war demonstrated was a woeful lack of was preparedness for the aftermath of the initial hostilities. War seldom follows a script and often opens a Pandora's box of unpredicted, even unimaginable, eventualities.
As our attention now focuses on the even more challenging war in Afghanistan, we should take a moment to commend the Americans who have fought to give the Iraqi people a chance at a better future. At the same time, we should remember the unpredictability of war and commit our country to foreign conflicts only when we fully consider all the human and financial costs.
