Health & Fitness
Our Iraqi Occupation - An Overall Calamity
Toll of Those Killed and Wounded is Staggering, Cost of $2 to $3 Trillion Crippling to a Country Which is Insolvent
I have scrutinized numerous newspaper editorials about our occupation of Iraq as we have reached its tenth anniversary. Among the accounts I have read, only The Wall Street Journal takes a "gung-ho" supportive stance on the conflict.
From all that I have read and know about our occupation, I conclude that it has been a calamity from the point that we eliminated the villainous Saddam Hussein.
I have never concluded that the George W. Bush administration lied us into war, rather that we went to war with a naive and foolish view, that the conflict would make the world safer and that it would spur a domino effect of Middle Eastern countries becoming friends of democracy and the West. Additionally, Donald Rumsfeld and the "neo-cons" pushed President Bush to occupy Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, finding more fuel to add to the fire when we were attacked on September 11, 2001.
We lost about 4500 soldiers and tens of thousands were physically and emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives. The Civil War spawned by the occupation and its poor management post-Saddam Hussein is estimated to have killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians and to have injured an incalculable number of residents.
Estimates vary from $2 trillion to $3 trillion as the ultimate cost of this escapade. We can justifiably blame President Barack Obama for being a big spender and adherent to the cradle to grave care model of government, but we cannot blame him for a cent of the Bush Iraq War national debt, a staggering burden.
Even President Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates, no liberal stooge, said that he would hope that any American president would recognize the folly of occupying a Middle Eastern country in the future.
Was it a good thing to remove a ruthless dictator? In and of itself, certainly, but the horror unleashed by it made this mission a colossal mistake for which we will be paying forever, including in the diminished reputation of the United States in the eyes of the world, no small matter for a nation which fancies itself a world leader.
Iraq is now run by another dictator who imprisons and tortures political foes and who is likely to be more an ally of our sworn enemy, Iran, than of the United States, the nation which sacrificed so much to "save" it.
Our Iraq occupation, on balance, was a colossal error.
