The invasion of Iraq, five years ago this Wednesday, was an “experiment in the transforming force of a confident superpower”, says The Independent. Ousting Saddam Hussein was to be the start; the objective was to create a “benign and democratic Middle East” and ensure “plentiful and secure” oil exports.
To date, the removal of Saddam remains its single achievement. Estimates of Iraq’s civilian death toll range from almost 100,000 to one million. More than two million of its people have fled. Any semblance of democracy is confined to the Kurdish region, as before the war. The government hides behind the walls of the Green Zone, and water and power supplies still fail to match the inadequate levels of Saddam’s day. Over five years, the US has lost almost 4,000 troops, with 30,000 wounded; the UK 175.
That’s without the financial cost, says David Herszenhorn in The New York Times. The Bush administration said the war would cost $50-60m. The Pentagon now tags the cost at $600bn; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the long-term cost at as much as $4trn. It is “futile”, five years on, to waste words on the folly of the invasion, says Max Hastings in The Guardian. “All that matters now are the present and the future.”
Bush’s troop surge has been a success. Far fewer Iraqi lives are being lost than at this time last year. Local ceasefires have made progress and Al-Qaida’s power is waning. “The great unanswered question is whether this amounts to sustainable progress or merely to a temporary hiatus which fails to address the fundamental issues that will affect Iraq’s future”.
Yet the cost is important. As Hillary Clinton pointed out, $1trn would pay for ‘healthcare for all 47m uninsured Americans and quality pre-kindergarten for every US child, solve the housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable for every American student and provide tax-relief to tens of millions of middle-class families’.