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Editorial: Five years and more of the Iraq war

March 23, 2008

The lessons of Iraq are clear. The numbers are simple. The solution and the outlook, sadly, are neither.

And, unless voters and presidential candidates focus a lot more attention on this issue than they have in recent weeks, clarity will continue to elude us. The woes of the economy, the tactics of the presidential horse race, and the sexual behavior of two New York governors are just a few of the stories that have helped push Iraq off the front page.

Right now, there's a brief surge - to use an overworked word - of attention on Iraq: Last week saw the fifth anniversary of the invasion on March 19, 2003. But we must pay continued attention to Iraq - and to the deteriorating situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, from which Iraq has too long distracted us. If we don't, we'll squander a precious chance to use the searing heat of a presidential election cycle to generate the light we need to see Iraq more clearly.

But before we discuss what's next, we should reflect on what has gone before.

The numbers

Let's start with 4,000 - the impending landmark of young Americans killed.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Estimates vary, but each civilian death, tragic in itself, carries the seeds of possible future violence by bereaved family members.

30,000. Nearly that many service members have been wounded. Medical science has saved their lives, but they and their families face decades of coping with crushing physical disabilities. And thousands will suffer for years from the crippling psychological disability of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Five years. This war has now lasted longer than the Civil War, longer than World War I, longer than World War II.

100. That's the number of years that Sen. John McCain once said he wouldn't mind seeing America spend in Iraq.

4.5 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes - roughly half are displaced inside the country and half are refugees in other nations.

$3 trillion. That's one estimate of the war's price tag, including caring for veterans and other costs. So say Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in their new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War." Compare that with $50 to $60 billion - the original Bush administration forecast of the war's cost.

The lessons

This page backed the invasion, even without UN approval, as did many other editorial pages. Despite "great reluctance" and "serious misgivings," we bought the basic Bush administration line that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat and had to be disarmed.

We cheered the fall of Hussein and his statue, but we also criticized the endless parade of blunders: the refusal to implement plans for the next steps after the decapitation of the government; the failure to prevent looting; the fruitless search for WMD and the inability to round up the very real stores of conventional weapons; and the decisions to de-Baathify the whole Iraqi government and to disband the Iraqi army. That left tens of thousands unemployed and bitter, many of them with knowledge of where to find the explosives they needed to mount an insurgency.

Now, after so many "turning points" - the capture of Hussein, the elections, the cobbling together of a government, Hussein's execution, the surge - we are left with a few bitter lessons:

Intelligence should drive policy, and not the other way around.

Preventive war is a bad idea unless we have highly accurate intelligence, a commodity in alarmingly short supply.

Force is a blunt instrument ill-suited to the planting of a delicate flower like democracy.

We can't go it alone, and the cooperation of other nations arises from respect, not from shock and awe. Iraq has cost us too much of that respect.