4,419. That’s the number of Americans who have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, according to the Pentagon. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, maimed, or traumatized in various ways. And although it’s hard to get an accurate count, it’s likely that more than 100,000 Iraqis have perished.
As U.S. troops head home ahead of President Obama’s Sept. 1 deadline for ending major combat operations in Iraq, it’s worth asking: What did all this sacrifice achieve?
No dispassionate observer can doubt that Iraq, the United States, and the rest of the world are well to be rid of Saddam Hussein, one of history’s worst tyrants. He continually menaced his neighbors, invading two of them (Iran and Kuwait) and launching missiles at a third (Israel). At home, the paranoid dictator presided over a nightmarish police state in which anyone suspected of disloyalty – including school children – were abducted, tortured and murdered by the regime’s vast security apparatus. All told, the Iraqi dictator was responsible for the death of nearly two million people. He was Iraq’s weapon of mass destruction.
It took U.S. troops to free Iraqis from Saddam’s sadistic grip. Despite the many blunders the Bush administration committed following the invasion, that act of liberation is to America’s everlasting credit.
Now it remains to be seen what Iraqis will make of it. It’s easy to be pessimistic. Terrorist acts, though down, are still almost a daily occurrence. Sectarian rivalries have abated somewhat, but still seethe under the surface and could yet fracture the country. Five months after its last elections, Iraqi politicians seem paralyzed, unable to agree on a new government.
But if Iraqi democracy is a mess, even a messy politics is preferable to no democracy at all, as James Traub has argued Slowly, fitfully, a brutalized people have begun to take control of their own destiny. The United States, which will keep an “overwatch” force of 50,000 in the country for another year, still has considerable influence. There’s a reasonable chance that Iraq could continue to evolve into the Arab world’s first functioning democracy.
But even if you grant that the United States has accomplished much in Iraq, many Americans, and not just critics of the war, still wonder whether it was worth the cost. That’s a very different question, and one we’re likely to be debating long after the last U.S. soldier has left Iraq.
Tags: 4419, Iraq, Pentagon, sacrifice, Saddam Hussein
Does the removal of Saddam actually make the US better off?
The two countries that created the most problems for US foreign policy are Iran & Iraq.
Under Saddam they were serious threats to each other and this tied up major portions of their power to contain their threat from the other.
This conflict towards each other reduced their ability to cause trouble for the US, especially after the first Gulf war.
By eliminating Saddam we have allowed Iran to redirect its resources in a direction that makes life more complex and difficult for the US.
So the basic question remains, did the war actually improve US security.
At the least, that remains an open question.
In discussing the “war” in Iraq, we must always remind ourselves that this was a “war” invented by neo-cons, so that George Bush could be a self-proclaimed “war president.” It was a war with no connection to 9/11. It was a war that was anticipated [perhaps, dare I say, hoped for] by the signers of the 1998 “New American Century” document. There will never be a way to justify the deaths of Americans and Iraqis in this trumped-up war, because it had no valid reason to have been started.