Why is it the most important Questions rarely, if ever, get asked?
Especially by the oh-so serious ones, ready to start the next conflict at the drop of a hat?
Here's one such echo-chamber, that once dared to utter the unthinkable ...
Was the Iraq War Worth It?
Expert Roundup; Council on Foreign Relations, cfr.org -- December 15, 2011
Was the nine-year U.S. war in Iraq worth it? Boston University's Andrew Bacevich says the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, but stresses that the "disastrous legacy" of the war transcends lives lost or dollars spent. [...] Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution expresses hope that over time the "the war will not be seen historically as a mistake or failure."
Andrew J. Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and History, Boston University:
[...]
Yet few of those defenders have demonstrated the moral courage -- or is it simple decency -- to consider who paid and what was lost in securing Saddam's removal. That tally includes well over four thousand U.S. dead along with several tens of thousands wounded and otherwise bearing the scars of war; vastly larger numbers of Iraqi civilians killed, maimed, and displaced; and at least a trillion dollars expended -- probably several times that by the time the last bill comes due decades from now. Recalling that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda both turned out to be all but non-existent, a Churchillian verdict on the war might read thusly: Seldom in the course of human history have so many sacrificed so dearly to achieve so little.
Yet in inviting a narrow cost-benefit analysis, the question-as-posed serves to understate the scope of the debacle engineered by the war's architects. The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is U.S.
[...]
Continuing with this somewhat "taboo" theme ...
Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion: study
by Daniel Trotta, reuters.com -- Mar 14, 2013
(Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.
The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war's death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.
[...]
FEW GAINS
The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women's rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.
[...]
So I ask again,
Was the War in Iraq worth it?
Follow-up bonus question:
And at what point does the cost of perpetual War -- become Too Much?
(5 Trillion, 10 Trillion, ... 100,000 lives lost?)