Tomorrow marks the official termination of American "combat operations" in Iraq. When President Obama took office in January of 2009, there were over 140,000 American troops occupying Iraq. Today, that number is down to less than 50,000. The last American combat brigade crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait a few weeks ago. The remaining troops are intended to serve as a transitional force, training Iraqi troops and being held in reserve in case of an emergency. If all goes well, by this time next year, all American forces will have been completely withdrawn.
The distinction between combat troops and transitional troops is, when you get right down to it, nothing but semantics. America's military misadventure in Iraq won't truly end until the feet of the last American soldier leave the soil of ancient Mesopotamia. But there can be no denying that the great reduction of troop strength in Iraq marks a significant success for President Obama, who is achieving one of the major goals he set forth during his presidential campaign in 2008, and one in which popular opinion in the United States is very much on his side.
There remains a divide between those who believe that the invasion of Iraq was necessary and justified and those who believe the entire episode to have been a disastrous fiasco. The true history of the Iraq War won't be written for decades, but it is a fair guess that historians will declare the decision to invade Iraq to have been a grave and costly mistake on the part of the United States.
The war has been immensely costly in terms of human life. More than 4,400 Americans soldiers have died in Iraq, along with hundreds of troops from the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, Spain and a host of other countries. As far as Iraqi civilian casualties, accurate numbers are impossible to determine, it seems likely that as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a directly result of the invasion. The war has been bloody, indeed.
The war has been costly in treasure as well as in human blood. Indeed, the financial cost of the Iraq War is likely to top an astounding $1 trillion. Think of how much better off the world would have been had these funds been turned towards lowering the American deficit, reducing the tax burden on the American population, or used for purposes other than warfare.
The war has made the struggle against international terrorism far more difficult. It diverted resources away from the more significant campaign in Afghanistan, giving the Taliban and its allies the time they needed to regroup. Today, thanks to the distraction of the Iraq War, the Taliban are today stronger than ever. The continuing struggle in Afghanistan would not have been necessary if the Bush administration had finished the job back in 2003. A general rule of warfare is to finish the war in which you are already engaged before starting a second one.
Even worse, the invasion of Iraq inflamed Muslim popular opinion against the United States. Most of the world's Muslims have never accepted the rationales of the Bush administration, seeing only an overbearing superpower invading a relatively weak nation that had never attacked America. Besides, a foreign occupation of one's country is a humiliating and angering trauma, especially if it includes disgraceful incidents such as the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Every eight-year-old boy who was awoken in the middle of the night by American soldiers breaking down his door and dragging off his father or his older brother is a potential Al Qaeda recruit in the coming years.
The United States invaded Iraq after the United Nations Security Council had specifically rejected such an attack, greatly undermining the rule of international law. Article Two of the U.N. Charter clearly states that no nation can attack another nation except in self-defense. Article Six of the United States Constitution clear states that ratified treaties like the U.N. Charter form part of the supreme law of the land of the United States. By invading Iraq unilaterally and without provocation, the United States was launching a war that was illegal both under international law and its own domestic law. It was also undermining the international system which has been carefully crafted over decades to help ensure the peace of the world.
Finally, we have the glaringly obvious fact that there was simply no reason to invade Iraq. The entire war was undertaken to line the pockets of government contractors and to satisfy the absurd ideological convictions of the neoconservatives. Despite the assurances from the Bush administration, repeated over and over again in 2002 and early 2003, Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction of any kind and was clearly not a military threat to anyone, least of all the United States. The media was duped into supporting the war and, through them, so were the American people.
If anything good is to come out of the Iraq War, let's hope it's an object lesson about how not to conduct foreign policy. It was a mistake that must never be repeated again in the future.
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