By the end of this month, all US military forces will have withdrawn from Iraqi cities. Effectively, the US war in Iraq is over. Was it worth it?
There are two quite separate balance sheets of costs and benefits, one for Iraqis and the other for Americans. It’s too early to give a final answer for the Iraqis, but for the United States the answer is definitely no.
No matter what happens in Iraq now, the Obama administration will not re-commit US troops to a combat role in the country, so we can calculate approximately how much the Iraq adventure cost the United States with some confidence. The total cost will work out at well over a trillion dollars, if we count the long-term cost of caring for the veterans.
Random attacks may kill a few hundred more American soldiers in Iraq before all the troops go home, but the final death toll will certainly be less than five thousand. That is only one-tenth of the fatalities that US troops suffered in the Korean War or the Vietnam War, so the cost in lives was relatively low for Americans. But what did the United States gain in return for that investment?
Not a subservient ally, certainly. When Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki held a meeting with 300 top Iraqi military commanders early this month, an American general showed up to monitor the proceedings as usual. He was politely asked to leave. Washington’s ability to influence decisions in Iraq is dwindling by the day. Nor has the Middle East become a safer place, because Saddam Hussein’s regime was no longer a threat to anybody except Iraqis long before the US invasion in 2003.
The current regime in Baghdad poses no threat to its neighbors either, but that changes nothing. There is a reservoir of experienced terrorist operatives in Iraq that did not exist before the US invasion, but apart from the minority of Al-Qaeda extremists they have little interest in operating beyond the country’s borders. And there will be no permanent US bases in Iraq.
So the balance sheet for the United States is in the red, but not catastrophically so. The investment did not produce any worthwhile returns, but the negative consequences were not great either, and the investment was not all that big. More money has been thrown at failing American banks in the past eight months than was thrown at Iraq in six years.
What about the Iraqis, then? For them, the price in lives was far higher: Up to two-thirds of a million deaths, by some estimates. They also suffered the almost complete collapse of an economy that was already severely damaged by Saddam’s wars and the subsequent trade embargo. The level of violence has dropped sharply from its peak in 2006-07, but the monthly death toll from political killings (which includes sectarian ones) is still higher than it was during the last decade of Saddam’s rule.
For the 80 percent of Iraqis who speak Arabic, the greatest costs have been the destruction of the old secular society, which even under Saddam allowed women more freedom than most other Arab regimes, and the brutal ethnic cleansing that resulted in an almost complete physical separation of the Shiite and Sunni populations. At least three million people are still afraid to return to their homes, and most never will.
On the other hand, Iraqis now have a more or less democratic system, with more or less free media. They have a government that is more corrupt and significantly less competent that the old Baathist regime, but will at least not waste the country’s wealth on foreign wars. Given ten or fifteen years of good luck and high oil prices, Iraq could climb back to the level of prosperity it enjoyed in the 1970s.
So was it all worth it? There is no consensus on that even among the Iraqis themselves. We may know the answer by 2020.
