Editorial: Whether war was right or not no longer most important question
Thursday marked Day 2 of Year 6 of the Iraq war.
We concede that's a pessimistic way of viewing the fifth anniversary of the war, yet we believe it reflects our need to look forward in Iraq, not back to March 19, 2003.
Vice President Dick Cheney, visiting Iraq on the eve of the anniversary, stressed that the invasion had been the right thing to do.
In a speech Wednesday, President Bush -- whose presidential legacy has largely been written in Iraq -- echoed that sentiment.
Today, though, attempting to justify an action taken more than five years ago misses the point. It has become irrelevant whether our entry into Iraq was the right thing to do.
The point is that we did it. And beyond the initial military phase of invading Iraq, we did it extremely badly.
Our focus now must be on a strategy for extricating our forces and forcing the Iraqi government to assume control of its own country. Preventing Iraq from becoming a terrorist haven will require diplomacy with other countries in the region, including Iran, not veiled threats of another war.
We no longer expect that from the current administration. Bush's now-familiar recitation Wednesday did nothing to encourage us in that respect. "The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win," Bush said. This assumes that we will even know how to recognize "victory" in Iraq if it ever arrives. So haphazard was the post-invasion planning for this effort, so fluid have been the stated goals and accomplishments for it, that it's impossible to know now when it might be deemed a success.
On May 1, 2003, we were told major combat operations were over in Iraq -- victory. Then came the first elections for new Iraqi National Assembly on Jan. 30, 2005 -- democracy in action, with victory surely at hand. October 2005 brought the new Iraqi constitution -- an embrace of liberty unprecedented in Iraq. And on and on, with our mishandling of the occupation playing directly into the strategy of an ever-growing insurgency.
If there is one aspect of this week's anniversary that merits a look backward, it is the cost of the war. The human toll is devastating: 3,991 Americans have been killed in Iraq as of this week. More than 300 coalition troops have died. Iraqi civilian deaths number between 82,000 and 90,000, according to Iraq Body Count, a civilian volunteer effort that scans hospital, morgue and official figures for its data.
The Pentagon says the war so far has cost $600 billion. The Congressional Budget Office puts it between $1-$2 trillion. The economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, estimates in a new book that it has cost $4 trillion.
No matter who you believe, it's a far cry from the $50 to $60 billion the Bush administration estimated the war would cost.
This week marked the last Iraq war anniversary Bush will observe in office.
His successor must be someone who, on March 19, 2009, will observe this grim anniversary not by looking back, but by reporting progress on a plan to swiftly end this war, bring our troops home and engage the United States as a diplomatic player -- rather than a ham-fisted bully -- in this critical region.
State Journal-Register