Roughly 39,000 troops are in Iraq now. They are pretty much all due to come home by December 31st this year. That is great news!
Our troops were first sent over there in March of 2003, almost nine years ago. Nine years! I have read that since then, 4,482 of our troops have been killed and that 32,213 have been wounded at a cost of 715 billion dollars.
Without being accused of being unpatriotic, I wonder, can we now review and ask some tough questions?
Do we remember that we started this war as a pre-emptive strike? Do we remember that we were told that we must start this war because Saddam Hussein housed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and that he was supposedly ready to use these against us and our allies? Do we remember that all this turned out to be false? Did the Bush administration lie to us or were they just being ignorant?
There were other reasons also given, according to the “Iraq War Resolution” of October 16, 2002 by a joint session of congress that formally authorized then president’s Bush’s military action against Iraq. In light of these other reasons (national security, fight against terrorism, etc.), did this war accomplish its stated purpose? How will we know and how shall it be measured?
In short, was this war worth the cost? If not—and I believe that most Americans will now say that it was most certainly NOT worth the cost—what went wrong? Why is it that we were so easily duped into this action—to the point that anyone who tried to argue against entering into this war at the time was hollered down as naïve, ignorant, wimpy, unpatriotic, and worse?
Why did the media not get it right at the time? Why did they not dig deeper and ask the tough, penetrative, cynical questions that might have revealed the emptiness of the stated cause for going to war with Iraq in the first place? And if they did, why were we not listening?
What has this war gained us? If this was a war for national security, are we more secure as a direct result of this war in Iraq? If this war was also about freeing the Iraqi people from a brutal and repressive tyrant, are they now less oppressed, fully and truly democratically free? I suspect that time has yet to tell on that one. Is Iraq now more secure against being used as a hide out for terrorists, and if so will it continue to be so in the future? That’s “iffy” isn’t it. Again, time will tell.
As a result of this war, is the whole Middle Eastern geo-political arena (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.) more secure, safer and more stable? Or is there a risk of renewed violence and national/international instability in the area (consider the possibility of Iranian interference in Iraqi development e.g.)? And again, time will tell, another iffy situation.
Would there, could there have been a better way to have addressed our fears and concerns (regarding WMD, for example) then immediately resorting to sheer brute military force? What might these other means have looked like in the real world? And why were these possible other means not more seriously looked into at the time?
We’ve thrown tons of money into the war effort itself, now how are we going to treat our Iraqi war veterans who have been both physically and psychologically injured by this war. Will we have—provide—the money to help them back home in their time of need for rehab, hospital and medical care, physical therapy, and more? Or are we going to say that we’ve spent too much already, so they’re on their own? After all, are we not economically worse off as a nation, as a direct result of the cost of this war in Iraq?
Now that we see how mistaken this pre-emptive strike, war policy has been, how might we prevent this kind of serious error in military intelligence and grave misjudgment in military action from happening again? Or is that even possible?
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