There is no such thing as a good war. War means failure. And the war in Iraq confirms that we have failed miserably.
The way American politicians and military officers talk about the civilian death toll in Iraq bothers me dreadfully. They don't give the slightest hint of sorrow or guilt. They provide Iraqi body counts as if the dead were mannequins or rag dolls. In other words: they don't seem to care about the Iraqis; the only thing that means something to them are the deaths of American soldiers. The rest don't matter.
About 600,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the beginning of the March 2003 American-led invasion of the country, according to estimates by independent researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Nonetheless, President George W. Bush quickly dismissed the methodology of that study. In a recent press conference, he said: "I do not consider that a credible report."
In December, Bush estimated that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had died. Since then, however, he has refused to revise that number. Iraqi Body Count (www.iragbodycount.org)_ a group with its own body count based on the reports of journalists with reliable sources _ estimates that at least 43,850 Iraqi civilians have died.
We'll never know the exact number. We do know, however, that this war has devastated thousands of Iraqi families who had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or with the present anti-American insurgency.
Apart from the fatalities, casualties and the destruction of the oil infrastructure, another cost of the war is insecurity. This factor is immeasurable. But everything seems to signal that the war in Iraq, far from reducing the risks of terror attacks against the United States and its allies, has multiplied them.
The classified report (known as the National Intelligence Estimate on Terrorism) asserts that "The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."
There is more. The report, prepared by 16 American intelligence agencies (including the CIA and FBI), concludes that the terrorists or jihadists "are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion," and that "if this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."
A few days before the invasion of Iraq, French President Jacques Chirac warned that the American military operation would create "little bin Ladens" all over the world. He was right.
The deteriorating image of the United States is among the other high costs of the war. And it isn't only because the justification for going to war turned out to be false. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.
That conflict has called into question the traditional U.S. role as a defender of human rights. The abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have tarnished America's reputation.
And there is also the economic price. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $549 billion _ or $1,830 for every American citizen. If all the resources poured into the Iraq war had instead been committed to the capture of Osama bin Laden _ the real culprit responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks _ and to fight other terror groups around the world, would we be safer today? Most surely.
And if, in return for the war and its costs, we saw Iraq becoming a peaceful democracy and, as a domino effect, other Arab nations beginning to have elections, perhaps we would feel differently. But what we have is a country on the verge of civil war, in an ever more divided region that has no possibilities of welcoming the simplest democratic process and is in danger of new confrontations. Watch out for Iran!
The clearest failure of the war in Iraq can be seen on the streets of the capital. Nowadays, a walk round Baghdad is almost a death wish.
War in Iraq has been extremely costly for the United States _ in dollars, image, its growing vulnerability to terrorism, and in human lives. And the war will continue for a good while yet. The U.S. Army announced recently that it would maintain the existing number of troops in Iraq (140,000), at least until 2010.
No, no matter how hard Washington tries to sell us the notion that this war is something positive, there is no such thing as a good war.