In fact, there's a good chance that Barack Obama wouldn't be president without his stance on Iraq, which early on was one of the defining differences between him and Hillary Clinton. And even among those in Congress there was disagreement. On the resolution authorizing the war, 126 Democrats, one Independent, and six brave Republicans voted against it. In the Senate, 21 Democrats, 1 Independent, and 1 Republican (Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee) voted no. The dissenters included the chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee (Florida's Robert Graham) and the Senate Armed Services Committee (Michigan's Carl Levin).
Of course, the media played a huge role in allowing -- indeed, enabling -- this catastrophe. What should have been a brake on a process fueled by lies was instead an accelerator. But here, too, there were those who got it right. As HuffPost's Max Follmer put it in 2008:
"In the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reporters in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington D.C. bureau were virtually alone in their questioning of the Bush Administration's allegations of links between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The team of Knight Ridder reporters, led by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway, produced stories that now read like a prescient accounting of how the Bush Administration sought to sell the war to the American people."
There was also the AP's Charles Hanley, who actually looked into the Iraqi sites that the Bush administration had claimed had failed inspections. "In almost two months of surprise visits across Iraq," he wrote, "U.N. arms monitors have inspected 13 sites identified by U.S. and British intelligence agencies as major 'facilities of concern,' and reported no signs of revived weapons building, an Associated Press analysis shows."
And the consequences of this disastrous war are still very much with us. In the seemingly endless manufactured crisis over the "fiscal cliff" and the sequester, it's amazing how much airtime and print space have been devoted to the deficit with the word "Iraq" barely getting a mention. Clearly a triumph of forgetting.
"It's really the decision of how to pay for it that has had such a negative effect on the U.S. economy," said Linda Bilmes, lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-author, along with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. "Because unlike any previous war in U.S. history, this was paid for entirely by debt at the same time that we cut taxes."
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, by 2019, the Iraq War and the Bush tax cuts will account for nearly half of our $17 trillion projected debt. And even less discussed than the ongoing costs of the war are the opportunity costs -- the many things we might have spent that money on instead. In 2010, Bilmes and Stiglitz wrote that not only was their $3 trillion estimate of the war's cost too low, but so was their estimation of the opportunity costs:
"The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had ... The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war."
In addition to the ongoing debt, there's the issue of the cost of the care for the millions of Iraq war veterans. "We will have a vast overhang in domestic costs for caring for the wounded and covering retirement expenditure of the war fighters," said policy expert Loren Thompson in 2011. "The U.S. will continue to incur major costs for decades to come."
Will those who argued vehemently to get us into the war advocate as single-mindedly on behalf of those who fought and died and got wounded in that war? I think we already know the answer to that one.
More proof of our losing struggle against forgetting could be seen just a few weeks ago, in the battle over Chuck Hagel's confirmation to be Secretary of Defense. Not only was opposition to his nomination led by those who were most wrong on the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in recent memory, the opposition was, to a large extent, actually based on the fact that Hagel had been right about Iraq. Having been in favor of the war initially, Hagel quickly saw it for what it was, and committed the grave error of speaking the truth. Like the fact that:
"Iraq is not going to turn out the way that we were promised it was."
And that:
The Iraq War was "ill-conceived" and "poorly prosecuted."
And:
"When I think of issues like Iraq, of how we went into it -- no planning, no preparation, no sense of consequences, of where we were going, how we were going to get out, went in without enough men, no exit strategy, those kind of things -- I'll speak out."
And yet, here we are, 10 years later, when being right about a war actually costs a nominee for Secretary of Defense confirmation votes.
And what of Iraq today? As it turns out, it's one of the closest allies of Iran. Just last week, it was reported that Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki has turned down the U.S. demand for sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program. Iraq also just approved the building of a pipeline for natural gas to flow across Iraq to connect Iran and Syria, which, as the AP put it, is "likely to strengthen Tehran's influence over its neighbors."
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