F. Brinley Bruton and Ghazi Balkiz at NBC News look at the grim numbers 10 years after President Bush announced the invasion of Iraq:
[P]resident [Bush] had stressed that "a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions."
An estimated $61 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds later, reality has fallen short of these expectations.
Iraq is considered one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and many of the improvements promised have not materialized. Sectarian tensions regularly explode into open violence.
The entire piece paints a depressing picture of how Shock & Awe have given way to pain and suffering in a nation plagued by lack of services, unemployment and poverty.
More analysis of this landmark anniversary below the fold.
R. Jeffrey Smith of The Center for Public Integrity pens a must-share piece about the waste, fraud and abuse that was "commonplace" in the Iraq reconstruction effort. A report by Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr. has found that "contracting abuses and mismanagement that wasted at least $8 billion of the $60 billion spent by Washington on Iraq’s postwar recovery":
James Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador in Iraq from 2010 to 2012, told Bowen that “the U.S. reconstruction money used to build up Iraq was not effective. ... We didn’t get much in return.” [...] The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money laundering. Such a huge investment “could have brought great change in Iraq,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, but the gains were often “lost.” [...] An Iraqi government watchdog agency, the Board of Supreme Audit, noted last year that $800 million in profits from illicit activities was being transferred out of Iraq each week, effectively stripping $40 billion annually from the economy, according to Bowen’s report.
Robert F. Dodge, in a guest column at the Times of Trenton, reflects on the costs of the war:
Dollar estimates of the combined war costs range from $1.4 trillion to $4 trillion spent and obligated, or a bill of between $4,500 and $12,742 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. The human cost and death toll are immense. It is estimated that between 225,000 to more than 1 million have been killed when we take into account all the lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. To this tragedy are added the tens of thousands who came home injured, with similar numbers of injured in the war-zone countries. Significant brain and spinal injuries to coalition forces approach 20 percent, and 30 percent of soldiers suffer from PTSD. The costs of treating these problems will continue for decades to come.
Former advisor
Richard Clarke on the Bush administration's breach of trust:
On Tuesday, at this 10th anniversary of the American Invasion of Iraq, we would do well to remind ourselves about some painful facts. [...] [T]he leaders of the Bush administration were intent on invading from the beginning of their time in the White House. When the 9-11 attacks occurred, Bush cabinet members immediately discussed how that tragedy could be used to justify an invasion.
Bush himself asked me to try to pin the blame for 9-11 on Iraq.
The Daily Beast has a slideshow of the most iconic images of the Iraq War.
Newsweek correspondent Scott C. Johnson recalls in stirring details of his convoy being attacked. "The possibility of death became real," he writes, when his car flipped over and he was trapped inside:
I was wearing military-issue boots that I had picked up at a store in Kuwait City. I kicked, and the window didn’t budge. I kept kicking. I kicked until I saw a crack, then another. A web began to form. I kicked as hard as I could; I kicked the s--t out of that window. A small hole began to form, a tiny thing at the center of the web, and I kicked it until it became about as big as my head. I could hear the attackers shouting nearby. The firing continued. I heard feet. I heard the click of chambers, the dumping of bags, running, panting, breathing.
USA Today's editors sum up the Bush legacy:
Imagine that in the rush toward war with Iraq, the sales pitch had gone like this:
"We must put our troops in harm's way to depose a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, and give Iraqis a chance at democracy. This will not be easy. It will take eight years, cost the lives of 4,488 U.S. troops and leave tens of thousands more grievously injured. Al-Qaeda will gain a new foothold, and the civil war we unleash will kill more than 100,000 Iraqis. We will spend $3 trillion, our war in Afghanistan will be orphaned and the big winner will be Iran. But Iraq will be a better place."
That, of course, is an assessment of the war Tuesday on the 10th anniversary of the invasion. The outcome could not have been known with such precision in advance. But if history has made anything obvious, it is that the Bush administration used false premises to peddle the war.
In
this video, CNN's Christian Amampour asks "where were the journalists?":
After the war, some of the United States’ leading newspapers were forced to apologize for getting it so wrong.
But two reporters consistently got it right: Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, former Knight Ridder reporters for the McClatchy newspapers.
In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour marking the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, they cited reporters’ access to top officials in Washington as one of the top problems. The top-level bureaucrats, they said, had more of a propensity to spin toward the line that the Bush Administration was pushing.
John Arquilla at Foreign Policy brilliantly examines "the illogic of Iraq":
Exactly 10 years ago the American invasion of Iraq commenced, launching one of military history's most egregious strategic non sequiturs. Not since Napoleon Bonaparte's ill-fated expedition to Egypt and Syria (1798-1801) -- from which he ultimately fled, losing an army and a fleet -- has the world seen a great power so humbled in the pursuit of illusory goals. Napoleon's dream was to use his incomparable army to spread French revolutionary and democratic ideals across a key portion of the Muslim world. But, as historian Lynn Montross once noted, "The masses were too fatalistic to be stirred by promises of a liberty they neither understood nor trusted."
The grand American goal in the Middle East, pursued some two centuries after Napoleon but with nearly the same idea in mind that had motivated him, foundered for similar reasons. The military occupation of Iraq, predictably, sparked a general uprising. But whereas Lord Nelson's great victory at Aboukir Bay forced an end to the French campaign, no such dramatic intervention drove American forces out. So they stayed, at a cost of over a trillion dollars, tens of thousands of soldiers' lives lost or shattered, and with the mounting Iraqi death toll rising well above 100,000. A debacle.