Just about every major news outlet in the world is noting that today is the one-year anniversary of the U.S. launching an invasion of Iraq. I don’t have any unique insight to add, but I wanted to point out a few items you might want to check out.
First, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Robin Wright note that virtually every belief the Bush administration had about Iraq before the war turned out to be completely and utterly wrong. From WMD, to the impact on the region, to our not-so-welcome reception, to the overall cost of the operation, the White House didn’t get anything right.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.
Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders.
And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.
The article hardly mentions of the biggest failure of them all — the WMD that served as the catalyst for war — but touches on a series of other embarrassing breakdowns.
Wrong about cost:
On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. “The American part of this will be $1.7 billion,” he said. “We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.”
That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone.
Wrong about Iraqi resistance:
“I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 interview.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz derided a general’s claim that pacifying Iraq would take several hundred thousand U.S. troops. And Rumsfeld, in February 2003, predicted that the war “could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” […]
But those upbeat assertions were undermined by an Iraqi resistance that proved much more difficult. Washington had not counted on the scope, capabilities and endurance of the resistance after formal hostilities had ended — or that Iraqis might eventually turn on their liberators. By yesterday, 574 American and 100 other coalition troops had died in Iraq. As many as 6,400 Iraqi soldiers are believed to have died in combat, and the insurgency continues to claim the lives of Iraqi civilians.
Wrong about the impact on the Middle East:
The administration’s forecast that the toppling of Hussein would start a wave of democracy and a disavowal of terrorism in the region has not yet happened. There has been progress; Libya, for example, has since relinquished its nuclear weapons program. But while the administration had often predicted that Hussein’s ouster could resolve the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the standoff between the two has worsened.
The New York Times, meanwhile, notes that if the administration had presented an accurate picture about Iraq and the alleged threat to the U.S. a year ago, the war would never have happened in the first place.
No matter what the president believed about the long-term threat posed by Saddam Hussein, he would have had a much harder time selling this war of choice to the American people if they had known that the Iraqi dictator had been reduced to a toothless tiger by the first Persian Gulf war and by United Nations weapons inspectors. Iraq’s weapons programs had been shut down, Mr. Hussein had no threatening weapons stockpiled, the administration was exaggerating evidence about them, and there was, and is, no evidence that Mr. Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
The Times editorial also details a discouraging landscape in the war’s wake. Our Iraqi invasion has “done virtually nothing to stop terrorism,” has placed an “enormous strain” on our troops and reserves, while the White House has “barely begun the job of repairing the [diplomatic] damage from its virtually unilateral rush to war last year.”
And lastly, Paul Krugman notes that Bush, through careful manipulation, has created a political environment where he isn’t held responsible for his devastating mistakes.
[T]he bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration’s policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president’s assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that’s the way he wants it.