Fighting terrorism - who or what defines if 10+ years of war is worth the cost?
Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren, who was recently put on paid suspension by the State Department for his blog posts and, he believes, his explosive tome on failed reconstruction efforts in Iraq, had this to say to Antiwar.com in a recent email:
The United States lost 4,485 soldiers (and counting — who will be the last to die for this mistake?), with thousands more crippled or wounded, spent a couple of trillion dollars that helped wreck our economy at home, and did not get much in return. Blood for oil? Only in the sense that one of out of every eight U.S. casualties in Iraq died guarding a fuel convoy. Iraqi oil output is stuck at prewar levels and will be for some time. Iraq had its civil society shredded, underwent eight years of sectarian civil war, saw over 100,000 killed, and is home now to a small but bustling al-Qaeda franchise. The United States left without brokering a deal between the Kurds and the Arab Iraqis, leaving that kettle on full boil.
So who won the war? Iran. Iran sat patiently on its hands while the United States hacked away at its two major enemies, Saddam and the Taliban, clearing both its east and west borders at no cost to Tehran. (Iran apparently reached out to the U.S. government in 2003, seeking some sort of diplomatic relationship, but after being rebuffed by the engorged Bush administration, decided to wait and watch the quagmire envelop America.) We leave Iraq now with an increasingly influential Iran seeking a proxy battleground against the United States and a nicely weak buffer state on its formerly troublesome western border.
None of that tallies toward a stable Iraq. Indeed, quite the opposite. Worst-case scenario might look a lot like the darkest days in Lebanon, with many of the same players at the table.
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