It will be years before we have a clear view of the Iraq war and its consequences. Right now, all we can do is take a look at what has happened so far and how those events appear to weigh on the scale.
Was the war necessary?: There is little evidence that it was from the standpoint of U.S. national security. Joseph Cirincione, a weapons proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowmenf for International Peace, says, “It is increasingly obvious that Saddam did not have weapons programs on the scale that the administration stated before the war. We have had three months of U.N. inspections at over 600 sites. We have now had over four months of searches by thousands of U.S., British and Australian troops which have discovered nothing of significance. It is unlikely that Saddam could have hidden, destroyed or moved weapons on the scale that the administration claimed he had before the war without us seeing it or some evidence of it.”
The fallback argument that the war was justified anyway because it rid Iraq of a despicable tyranny has some validity. Does anyone really wish Saddam and his thuggish sons were still in power? On the other hand, the invasion cost the lives of between 6,000 and 8,000 Iraqi civilians. And if we plan to rescue every country with a bloodthirsty government, we are overreaching in a way that can only spell disaster.
Is it a quagmire?: From the standpoint of coalition casualties, Iraq certainly is no Vietnam, and it is foolish to suggest that it is. At the height of the fighting in Vietnam, 500 Americans a week were coming home in body bags and the war ultimately cost more than 54,000 American lives. In contrast, coalition deaths total 292 and have averaged about 15 per week. Any death is a tragedy to someone, but from the broad military perspective, coalition casualties in Iraq are light.
However, Iraq may indeed become a quagmire in terms of the time and money it will take to get it functioning in some minimally self-sufficient way. We’re spending about $3.9 billion a month just onmaintaining the roughly 143,000 troops we have there. Congressional anger erupted yesterday over the uninformative testimony of President Bush’s budget director, Joshua Bolten, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz about how long we may remain in Iraq and what it may cost.
Are the Iraqis better off?: Let's ask them. Billmon at Whiskey Bar has the details and commentary on a very interesting new poll of Iraqis. Interestingly, despite lingering fears that Saddam may somehow reassert himself, 50 percent of those polled said the U.S. and Britain were right to invade. However, only 23 percent thought the U.S. motive was to “liberate the people of Iraq from dictatorship,” while 47 percent thought the war was fought to secure oil supplies and 41 percent thought it was fought to help Israel.
Are we winning hearts and minds?: Maybe, though we’ve got a long way to go on that front. The U.S. does seem to have made some important progress in Fallujah, which until recently was considered the most dangerous place in Iraq for U.S. troops. New tactics, which including withdrawing U.S. troops to the outskirts and dealing more respectfully with residents, appear to have reduced animosity there.
Baghdad blogger Salam Pax says real resistance to the coalition in Iraq has now been reduced to Baathist holdouts and Islamic extremists. This should be good news, but, Pax says, “While dealing with these two groups, the Americans will manage to piss off the rest of the population. Take for example the Task Force 20 raid a couple of days ago in Mansur [a Baghdad neighborhood where several Iraqi civilians were killed when they failed to stop their cars]. They got some ‘intelligence’ and surrounded an area that they had bombed with bunker-busting bombs just four months ago. They were not even being shot at or anything. These are people who were driving in their cars through their neighbourhood streets. And got the sheikh of the biggest tribe in Iraq angry in the process. Great job.”
Did the war slow weapons proliferation?: According to Vice President Cheney, the Iraq invasion was supposed to teach other nations the consequences of developing weapons of mass destruction. It appears, however, to have had precisely the opposite effect: both Iran and North Korea, the other members of the “Axis of Evil,” seem to have accelerated their nuclear weapons programs. Again, the Carnegie Endowment’s Cirincione: “The war has eliminated the state threat of Iraq, at least for now. That is a net plus and we're all better off for that. However, it has not shown gains with other states of concern. Both Iran and North Korea appear to have accelerated their programs and come to the conclusion that they had better acquire nuclear weapons sooner rather than later.” How this game of chicken will end is purely speculative, but it certainly has done nothing to stablize the WMD problem.
So, overall, has it been a success?: As I noted at the beginning of this post, it’s too soon to say what history’s judgment will be. However, the Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online has lined up his arguments that it was. “First, none of the oft-repeated and dire predictions — increased terror, an inflamed Arab street, the fall of ‘moderate’ governments in Jordan and Egypt, a ruined Turkish economy, millions of refugees, thousands dead, endless sectarian fighting, and other horsemen of the Apocalypse — have followed from Saddam's ouster. Indeed, the end of Saddam Hussein has already brought dividends in other areas.” Read it all here
Now settle down for months, and probably years, of argument over whether what we did was right or successful.
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