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Some telling facts but no real rationale

Ellis Henican

May 31, 2006

Tell me again why we're there.

It's four Memorial Days and counting since "Mission Accomplished." We still have 132,000 American troops in Iraq. A million of our men and women have served by now, giving of themselves in tragic and extraordinary ways. Yet the insurgency is growing bolder -- not fading away.

Tell me again why we're there.

Already, 2,465 Americans have been killed. Another 18,184 have been wounded. No one knows how many Iraqi civilians have died -- 30,000? 40,000? -- in this costly effort to save them.

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Tell me again why we're there.

Iraq remains one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Suicide bombs and IEDs have become so common, our troops are increasingly hunkered down on their bases and in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

Tell me again why we're there.

Life for most Iraqis is unspeakably hard. Jobs are scarce. Basic social services have all but collapsed. People are too frightened to leave their homes. Water and electricity are below prewar levels. Iraq's precious oil, which was supposed to pay for the nation's reconstruction, flows at a trickle instead.

Tell me again why we're there.

Our "coalition of the willing" is growing less willing by the day. Italy and South Korea are the latest outta-heres. How much longer will the Brits and Poles remain? In Britain, our biggest ally, opposition to the war is near-universal. It's helping to drive Tony Blair from office. By one fresh count, 1,000 British soldiers have deserted so far.

Tell me again why we're there.

The White House keeps hinting at a "draw-down" in U.S. forces. But 1,500 fighters are being shifted from a reserve force in Kuwait into the chaotic Anbar province in western Iraq. Into.

Tell me again why we're there.

We're barely done explaining the prison torture at Abu Ghraib. Now we have Haditha, Iraq's My Lai. Twenty-four Iraqi civilians dead. Investigators pointing at U.S. Marines. No one's been convicted yet, but the story is already damaging to U.S. credibility around the world. The charges could well include murder, which carries the death penalty.

Tell me again why we're there.

Iraq is the most dangerous war ever for journalists. Seventy-one have been killed so far. CBS lost two this weekend. Reporter Kimberly Dozier is clinging to life. No one can say when ABC anchor Bob Woodruff will be back on the air.

Tell me again why we're there.

This long-running fight has burdened our military and our treasury. The polls say our national patience is fading fast. At $2 billion a week, much of it borrowed from foreigners and our grandkids, this war will soon cost more than Vietnam. Our soldiers are exhausted. Our citizen fighters, the Reservists and Guardsmen, are being called back to Iraq for multiple tours.

Tell me again why we're there.

After months of angry wrangling, a new Iraqi government has been formed. Sort of. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's new leadership does not include ministers of defense or interior, the departments responsible for security. The Sunnis and the Shia couldn't agree.

Tell me again why we're there.

Saddam Hussein was a terrible tyrant, but how have Iraqis been liberated from his murderous regime? The terrorists of al-Qaida were all but absent from prewar Iraq. They run rampant now. The nation's borders, then secure, are now hopelessly porous. The Sunni, Shia and Kurds, their ancient hatreds long suppressed by Saddam's brutality, are inching toward civil war.

Tell me again why we're there.

The reasons we went in the first place were mostly false. Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction. He was nowhere near nukes. Saddam was, it now appears, a ranting egomaniac with a mere shell of an army, whose sanction-squeezed regime could well have collapsed on its own.

Tell me again why we're there.

Some day soon, Washington will want to warn the world about some genuine threat. And who will listen to us? The glow of 9/11 has given way to the resentment of this mess of a war. We'll say "Iran!" or "North Korea!" The world will shrug "Iraq."

Tell me again, "Why are we there?"