Eight and half years after the Iraq war began, it ended not with a victory parade, but with Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense, quietly turning out the lights in Baghdad at a handover ceremony.
While most Americans continue to express pride in the US military for a "job well done", many fewer Americans can explain exactly what that job was.
Republicans in Congress for example, acting in accord with their "always blame Obama" agenda, said the ongoing job in Iraq which they accused the President of abandoning, was to keep watch on Iran and other foreign terrorist elements that might seek to use Iraq as a base of operation.
Obama's opponent in the 2008 presidential race, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), denounced the President in harsh terms for pulling the US out of Iraq prematurely:
"I believe history will judge this president's leadership with the scorn and disdain that it deserves."
However, little mention was made by Republicans of the original war premise of George W. Bush, the Republican president who began the Iraq War in 2003. Bush had warned the nation and the world that Saddam Hussein posed a direct and imminent threat to the USA because of Iraq's stockpiles of WMD (weapons of mass destruction).
These alleged stockpiles, and Hussein's supposed willingness to share the weapons with Qaeda terrorists, formed the chief basis of Bush's argument for why the US had to invade Iraq and depose Hussein. Bush claimed that US intelligence on these questions was reliable, and presented it as such to the American people and the world.
Unfortunately, the intelligence and the premise—that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD—turned out to be dead wrong. No WMD stockpiles were ever found.
Bush subsequently blamed this on a failure of US intelligence, and on Saddam's consistent refusal to prove he had no WMD.
However, many critics of the war point out there was no failure in US intelligence on this point, but instead there was a willingness, indeed a fervor, on the part of Bush and his neocon allies to ignore intelligence that contradicted the basis of their argument for invading Iraq.
Indeed, the UN inspections teams that had, prior to the war, regularly reported no evidence of WMD in Iraq, were dismissed as incompetent, and Bush had his Secretary of State Colin Powell, go before the UN to make a presentation of evidence supporting the US decision to start the war. However, it later turned out the evidence Powell presented was false—Powell claims he did not know it to be so at the time.
We now know that George W. Bush had wanted to go to war in Iraq, even prior to 9/11, in part because the neocon version of history said Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, had made a mistake in the 1991 Gulf War by not capturing Baghdad and removing Saddam. George W. Bush was determined to correct that mistake. 9/11 gave him the opportunity.
Eventually, after Iraq had been devastated by the US invasion and the subsequent civil war, caused by the US failure to supply post-invasion Iraq with sufficient troops to secure it, the determination was made that UN inspections team had, since the time of the Gulf War, successfully thwarted Iraq's ability to develop and possess WMD. Saddam, because he feared a WMD-less Iraq would be vulnerable to its many enemies, allowed the world to believe Iraq still possessed WMD when it did not.
Since Bush and the neocons knew that the US would not go to war merely to correct Bush's father's alleged mistake, they began a propaganda effort to frighten Americans into believing:
a. Iraq had stockpiles of WMD.
b. Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11 and Qaeda.
c. Therefore, Saddam might hand over WMD to Osama bin Laden.
None of that was true. But it was implied or asserted so often by George W. Bush administration officials and allies that large numbers of Americans came to falsely believe it anyway.
And that helped to create a base of strong support for Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Nevertheless, global mass protests against the war were conducted prior to the US invasion, including in the USA. None of these protests changed Bush's plans.
Whereas some pre-war estimates for the financial cost of the war were in the few billions of dollars, the eventual financial cost of the war in Iraq to the USA turned out to be enormous: as much as $3 trillion.
The cost in lost and severely damaged human lives can only be approximated (especially in the case of Iraqi lives):
American casualties for the Iraq War:
4,484 killed
32,200 wounded
TOTAL—36,684 caualties
Iraqi casualties for the Iraq War:
Approximately 110,000
Note that the Iraqi casualty figure is controversial, since the US government had a policy not to account for Iraqis killed in the war. One study done by The Lancet, for example, alleged that well over half a million Iraqis had been killed in the war by 2006.
In addition, millions of Iraqis were displaced by the war, and the US systematically followed a program of ethnic division, essentially "cleansing", that partitioned Iraq into ethnic enclaves. Only by this, and by bribing the Sunni insurgency, was the US "Surge" able to quell the enormous violence of the Iraqi civil war.
By the time George W. Bush left office, in January 2009, the trust of the American people in their government, which had been at a record high on September 12, 2001, was largely eroded by the Iraq War fiasco.
For a while, many Americans invested great hope in the new president, Barack Obama, who had risen to prominence and then the presidency largely on his consistent stand against Bush's Iraq War—or the "stupid" war as Obama called it.
Obama promised the American people to end the war. Yet, when Obama took over the presidency, he mostly adopted the war policies of George W. Bush. For years, the American people waited for Barack Obama to fulfill his promise on Iraq.
Today, finally, Obama delivered.
The Iraq War is over.
The Iraq War costs however will be paid for a long time to come, by Americans and Iraqis alike.
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