-April 8th, 2008

As we passed the five year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq last week, President Bush reaffirmed his commitment to success in Iraq. He referred to the “understandable debate” over the merits of the war but reiterated that “removing Saddam from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win.” Most news channels offered some sort of summary and analysis of the last half decade that our nation has been at war in two countries.
Few people would argue that removing Saddam from power was a good thing. One question that should merit discussion is this: was invading Iraq the proper way of achieving that goal? To answer this question, one should consider the costs of the war, the conduct of the war, and the effects of each that we are now able to perceive.
The costs of war can be measured in many ways. Any way you calculate it, the financial cost of this particular war is staggering. Recently in a new book, Nobel Laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes estimate the total long term cost of the war at three trillion dollars. That’s trillion with a ‘t’.
Their book is called The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. They claim that this estimate is quite conservative and most likely underestimates the true cost by a significant margin. Their calculations include not only the money that has been spent on weapons, troops, and reconstruction, but also the long term medical needs of the many wounded soldiers.
This leads us to the human cost of the war. Most Americans are keenly aware of the US death toll which recently surpassed 4,000 dead and 30,000 wounded. Few are aware, however, of the Iraqi death toll that a recent report from the British polling agency Oxford Research Bureau estimates to be 1.3 million.
They claim this to be a conservative estimate as it does not include Karbala and Anbar provinces. This is much higher than the figure of 655,000 estimated by a study published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2006. Many specialists believe that the recent reduction in Iraqi violence has nothing to do with the surge but rather the fact that in the most war-torn regions there is no one left to kill. In addition there are approximately 2.5 million refugees that have been displaced by the violence.
Many have fled to Syria, which opened its borders to a massive influx of refugees. By any measure Iraq is one of the worst humanitarian crises in history. The skyrocketing infant mortality rates that spiked after the first Gulf War and increased during the current conflict are perhaps unprecedented in history.
It is worth noting that the two westerners most familiar with Iraq, namely Dennis Halladay and Hans Von Sponeck, were vocally opposed to the war from the beginning, predicting that it would be a catastrophic disaster. Halladay and Von Sponeck were the officials in charge of running the UN Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq. They worked in Bagdad for years and had hundreds of people reporting to them.
It is unlikely that anyone could have predicted that things would go so poorly in this conflict, but if anyone was in a position to attempt such a prediction, it was probably them. Unfortunately, they were both almost completely ignored by the mainstream media as they voiced their concerns in the lead-up to the invasion.
Both Halladay and Von Sponeck resigned their positions over the US-UK imposed sanctions on Iraq, which are believed to have been responsible for half a million Iraqi deaths, mostly children.
In another unfortunate example of omission by mainstream media reporting, an event occurring outside of Washington DC last week received very little attention in the news. Hundreds of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gathered at the outskirts of Washington DC to tell personal stories from the frontline.
The event was called Winter Soldier and was organized by the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. They spoke in detail about atrocities that had been committed by themselves and others. The picture of Iraq that was gradually painted by these soldiers was one of complete lawlessness, much like the Wild West, where the rules of engagement were virtually non-existent, and the killing of innocent civilians by soldiers was commonplace.
One by one these young men told stories of shooting Iraqis that turned out to be civilians, and the lack of concern exhibited by their superiors. Many of them told of the now common practice of carrying extra rifles and shovels in US military vehicles.
When an Iraqi is shot either by accident or on purpose and it turns out that he has no weapons on him, a rifle or shovel is often placed next to him and the official report will state that he was an insurgent that was shot while planting an IED. According to the soldiers confessions, carrying a shovel is sufficient reason to be shot by US troops with no questions asked by their superior officers.
Multiple soldiers from different units stated that the practice of planting shovels and rifles on dead Iraqi’s is commonplace. The picture conveyed by these soldiers was not one of evil men doing bad things. Rather it was one of ordinary people put in a terrible situation where any person walking by them could be the enemy, and any car could be filled with explosives.
Under these circumstances, the standard practice has become to shoot first and ask questions later. When soldiers witness these practices by their fellow soldiers, and see the officers tacitly approve of them, a dangerous precedent is set. The testimonies to this end were emotionally charged and many soldiers broke down in the process.
The video of the event is shocking and powerful. It is available on www.democracynow.org and can be found on YouTube. The event, Winter Soldier, was named after a similar one that occurred in Detroit in 1971. In that year veterans of the Vietnam War told of the similar crimes that were committed by US soldiers in that conflict. The title Winter Soldier was an ironic reference to a phrase by Thomas Paine deriding the ‘summer soldiers’ that abandoned the Continental Army in the winter at Valley Forge.
Despite the acknowledgement by President Bush that this war has come at “a high cost in lives and treasure,” he and others maintain that the costs are necessary. Others see our current path as one that is doing more harm than good. It has been argued that we would be safer now if we had chosen not to attack Afghanistan or Iraq.
One compelling piece of evidence for that theory is: since the invasion of Iraq, terror attacks have gone up sevenfold. This was observed in an analysis of Rand Corporation data by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank. Based on this finding, one could argue that for every terrorist we kill, we create seven more in the process.
So this brings us back to the question of whether invading was the correct means to bring Saddam down. Many democratic resistance groups within Iraq thought that he could have been toppled internally, without an invasion. This has been the fate of many other tyrants and dictators, so it is not at all unreasonable to assume that it could have happened.
Such was the fate of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, General Suharto in Indonesia, The Shah in Iran, and Ceausescu in Romania. Each of them was a brutal dictator that murdered, tortured, and repressed his population, and regrettably each one received considerable support from the US government.
Eventually, each was overthrown from within by a massive popular uprising. It is widely assumed that the reason this never happened in Iraq is the very sanctions that were applied to keep Saddam under control. They had the additional effect of forcing the population to rely on him and the food distribution system that he oversaw for their survival.
Any way you view the facts, the future does not look good for the citizens of Iraq. Conditions do appear to be improving, but they have only gone from ‘completely intolerable’ to ‘really bad’. Iraq is now recognized to be a breeding ground for terrorists, with ample opportunities for battleground experience. Numerous studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of Iraqi’s believe that the invasion and occupation is the primary source of the violence.
In light of this, it seems rather difficult to reflect on the last five years with anything but complete regret over the decision to invade, particularly after the recent release of a Pentagon report that concludes that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
The report was written for the Joint Forces Command by the Institute for Defense Analysis, and it completely contradicts Donald Rumsfeld’s statement that the CIA provided “bulletproof” evidence about the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
If the American people had not been lied to about this issue and others such as the certainty of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, perhaps they would not have allowed this war to happen in the first place. Most people still seem to be unaware that the invasion was a gross violation of article 51 of the UN Charter as well as the US Constitution.
From a strictly legal standpoint, if international laws were upheld in even the loosest manner, the current administration would all be labeled as war criminals and treated accordingly.

By Joel Sipe FPE
PhD Candidate