Three Years

As I'm sure you have heard over and over, this is the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq (or, as some outlets phrase it, "the US-led" invasion). By now, even the Administration's apologists admit that critical assumptions underlying the attack and assumptions about the outcome were grievously wrong. This morning, I saw video of Rumsfeld, in the days after the toppling of Saddam's statue, talking about rounding up a few "bitter-enders." The arrogance and obtuseness of the remark reminds me of Churchill's tale of the French generals who said in 1940, "In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." Churchill replied, "Some chicken; some neck."

Seeing Rumsfeld now, or watching Bush in his borrowed flight suit pronouncing that, "Major combat operations are over," would be burlesque if it were not tragic.

Before the invasion, I noted the uncomfortable fact that the people of Iraq--apart from the Kurdish minority--were unwilling to overthrow Saddam. Perhaps we should not condemn a nation to barbarism simply because its citizens cannot remove a brutal dictatorship (such hard-and-fast policy would reward the efficient tyrant), but the presence of at least an organized resistance seems a good place to start when assessing whether to risk American lives, treasure and influence by committing the nation to war.

One can debate the morality of the war, but I have felt since before it began that if nothing else the war was dumb. It was an unnecessary conflict against a dictator who, loathsome as he was, posed no serious threat to the United States or our chief Middle East allies, Israel, Egypt and Jordan.

The history of the past three years has, I think, shown that--for once--my thinking was right. Look at the cost of the war: More than 2300 American dead, including many of our best officers and NCOs, more than 17,000 more wounded, many of them seriously. Add to that tens of thousands of thousands of veterans who are and will suffer from serious psychological after-effects. Then there are the Iraqis, to whom our media give much less coverage, but who have suffered much more: Conservative estimates say that more than 30,000 Iraqis have died; some say the figure is several times that number. I have seen no estimate of the wounded.

Those are just the direct effects of the war. The less obvious effects are even worse. Soon, we will have spent $300 billion, at a time when the government's finances are hemorrhaging money; our children and grandchildren will pay off that debt, plus interest, to bankers in other countries. Iraq has taken time and energy away from urgent problems at home--not least being to truly secure the country from those who would destroy it. Were it not for the war, New Orleans might conceivably have been prepared for a major hurricane. We have also given North Korea and Iran a free run to obtain and/or expand nuclear arsenals. We have shredded our credibility in the Middle East and in most of the Muslim world--not to mention our standing with old allies in Europe. The Iraq war has made it easier for the Sudanese government to foment and continue genocide, first in Darfur and now in the neighboring nation of Chad.

Then there is the moral corruption that the war has worked on this country. Think of Abu Ghraib and the cover-up of command responsibility. (Today's New York Times has a major story about another instance of American abuse of prisoners in Iraq.) Iraq has given political cover to the administration's violations of humane standards, international treaties and international law at Guantanamo Bay, and to warrantless surveillance of Americans at home.

All this for what? Mr. Bush says that we are establishing democracy in Iraq. That country is a "nation" that was the artificial construct of imperial interests less than a century ago (as the war threatened, I wrote to Tom Friedman, one of the liberal defenders of the war, and told him that Iraq is not a nation but a geographic expression; once again I regret to observe that I seem to have been right). Iraqis have little common national history, centuries of hostility toward one another and no experience of democracy, or even responsive or representative government. If you think that the Iraqis could develop a democratic system in a few years, consider this: the time that passed between the first English settlement in what is now the US and the Declaration of Independence was roughly the same number of years that elapsed between the signing of the Declaration and WWII. All that time, the colonies were developing, refining and debating the system that became the American republic. Even with that experience, our system was hardly a perfect democracy; indeed, its imperfections are still matters for debate today. What chance, then, would the Iraqis have even if they were as cohesive a nation as we were in 1789?

Iraq may not be the greatest mistake that the United States makes in the 21st Century, but if something worse comes along, I fear for the republic.