Iraq paid a heavy price
Baghdad's tally of Iraqi dead shows the cost of poor planning
Those who favored the war in Iraq are right to claim that, in an important sense, it was a mission accomplished.
The vile dictator Saddam Hussein was deposed, along with his secret police, his enmity for Israel and whatever ambitions he might have harbored toward an arsenal of mass destruction.
But would the American people have stood for the expedition — would the Iraqi people have said thanks but no thanks — had we and they but known that the cost of the strife that followed was, by a new and clearly conservative estimate, the deaths of more than 85,000 Iraqis?
The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry came up with the figure of 85,694 people killed, 10,000 missing and 147,195 wounded in the sectarian violence that erupted after the U.S.-led mission to eliminate Saddam had accomplished its worthy goal.
And that doesn't count the 4,349 American troops who have also died in Iraq. The vast majority of those American deaths, and those that are yet to come, would have been avoided if the Iraq war had turned out to have been the clean-and-jerk operation its advocates promised.
The official figures are almost assuredly low, not because of any official effort to sugar-coat the report but because the chaos that followed the invasion, the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the sectarian violence that erupted was so decentralized and erratic that it would be impossible to catalog every violent death. It also doesn't count fatalities caused by other side-effects, such as destroyed roads and closed or swamped medical facilities.
It wasn't success in war that caused all that death in Iraq, and that continues to take innocent human lives almost every day. It was failure to anticipate, or even care about, what would come after.
All the information we have been given about the preparation for and execution of the 2003 invasion, information that participants have not even attempted to refute, is that anyone who raised questions about or suggested planning for the post-war occupation or administration of Iraq was pointedly ignored.
Vice President Dick Cheney and his friends basically promised us that U.S. troops would have rose petals strewn in their path, and that the Iraqi people — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds alike — would join in a rousing chorus of "Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead."
The idea that the loss of Iraq's longtime iron hand would not be followed by widespread violence, score-settling and opportunistic turf-building was an illusion of the worst kind. It was a fantasy not shared by many unheeded officials at the time, and one that clearly would not have passed muster with Gens. Eisenhower or MacArthur.
Rather than suffer from the Vietnam Syndrome, the planners of the Iraq war suffered from a Kuwait Syndrome, the belief that wars can be fought easily and the resulting muss quickly cleared away.
That's not the way it works in the real world. And anyone planning to take the United States down the road to any more wars, against even the most deserving target, must factor that into his calculations.
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