The Iraq War: 5 Years Later
Posted on March 19, 2008 - Filed Under Bush, Iraq |
On March 19, 2003, it began. “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger,” President George W. Bush said while announcing that the United States had declared war on Iraq.Today the Iraq War enters its 5th year of combat.
It’s 5 years after shock and awe, the military campaign designed to puncture the Iraqi leadership. 5 years after much talk on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to America.Of course we now know there were no WMD’s, and perhaps even more significantly, that there was no link between Hussein and Bin Laden. In fact, we’ve learned in time that they were enemies of each other. To date, almost 4,000 Americans have been killed during the conflict.
Reports of Iraqi deaths vary, but some conservative estimates put the figure at 80,000. The $800 billion that will be spent by the end of this year, trails only the $2 trillion spent during World War II.”Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight America can and must win” President Bush is going to say in a speech this afternoon at the Pentagon.
President Bush likes to tout statistics about the war since the surge in troop levels from 2007. No doubt that US troop fatalities per month are down and there is a sense that we are gaining the upper hand in combating the insurgents. But Iraq is still a dangerous place and terrorist attacks - something that did not exist prior to our invasion - still occur often. Yesterday a bomb killed 6 Iraqis in northeastern Baghdad. On Monday, a suicide bombing in Karlbala killed 50.
Vice-President Cheney has a rather upbeat assessment of the war. “If you look back on those five years, it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor,” he said recently while in Iraq.As news of US troop deaths has dropped, replaced by news of the US economy dropping, voters now rank the economy as a more important issue to them than the war.
This should not suggest that voters are pleased with the Iraqi imbroglio. If you ask people on this date, 5 years ago, if they wish the US had not invaded, most will answer yes.But the real ultimate judgment on the Iraq War will come from the history books and scholars over the next 15 years. If history elects to look less kindly on this war than its contemporaries, the legacy of President Bush will be one of failure.
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With respect, we all knew BEFORE the misguided war that Hussain and bin Laden were enemies. We all knew that Iraq has absolutely no part in the attacks on America, but the flag waving fury of a wounded American people was deaf to logic and that allowed evil men to set forth evil plans with little or no resistance from those who might otherwise have stood in their way.