Writing for the New Yorker, George Packer argues that “the war was a disaster for Iraq and the U.S. alike. It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris, a historic folly that took the American eye off Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while shattering Iraq into a million bloody pieces. When the last American troops departed a little over a year ago, there was no sense on this side of triumph or satisfaction—nothing but sadness and relief. Iraq, meanwhile, remains a dramatically violent country. Its politics are oriented toward Iran and the broader Shiite side of a looming regional war. After two trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and over a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, there is so little U.S. influence that we can’t get the government of Iraq to interdict Iranian weapons shipped across its territory to arm the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iraq has rejected the organ transplant and gone its own way. I imagine that there are far fewer American traces left in Baghdad than there were in Saigon after 1975.”
NPR
Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. The last U.S. troops didn't leave that country until the end of 2011.
But Iraq, which dominated much of the nation's political discourse over the past decade, already seems largely forgotten.
"The Iraq War casts a shadow, but not a very large one," says Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Iraq still matters in policymaking circles. Its lessons help explain why President Obama waves off calls for a military intervention in Syria.
"There does seem to be an Iraq syndrome, at least in the foreign policy establishment, in showing virtually no commitment for something that might morph into an Iraq or an Afghanistan," says William Wohlforth, a government professor at Dartmouth College.
But Iraq has not led to a wholesale restructuring of the U.S. military, as the Vietnam War did. And as controversial as it was at the time, Iraq did not trigger the sort of political and cultural convulsions that Vietnam did.
Vietnam remained a difficult subject for years, if not decades, after the fighting stopped, while Iraq has already just about disappeared from political discourse.
"When a bad war ends, the inclination is not to think about it and move on," says William Schneider, a public policy professor at George Mason University.
Iraq was a leading political issue throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, especially after the lightning attack and quick march to Baghdad gave way to a violent insurgency.
The course of the war went a long way toward explaining why Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in 2006.
"It's one of the reasons Obama won the Democratic nomination [in 2008]," Schneider says. "He opposed the war from the beginning."
But Iraq — and the ongoing war in Afghanistan, for that matter — barely rated mention in either the midterm elections of 2010 or the presidential campaign last year.
The political wound that was Iraq had stopped festering even before the U.S. presence there had ended, thanks to a decline in violence occasioned by an increase in the number of American troops — the surge — and other factors.
"This is not to minimize the costs that we paid in Iraq," says Rajan Menon, a political scientist at City College of New York. "But following Iraq is the financial crisis, and it displaced Iraq as the great trauma that befell America."
As difficult and long-lasting as Iraq was, it did not compare in casualty count with Vietnam. More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, compared with fewer than 5,000 in Iraq.
Also, there was a draft for Vietnam, meaning far more Americans went there — or feared they might — than was the case with the recurring tours of the all-volunteer force that served in Iraq.
"The fact that there was a draft during Vietnam meant that almost everyone in this country was affected by the war very directly," says Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama. "Everyone was in the draft, or figuring out how not to go."
The draft made Vietnam a much bigger deal on college campuses than Iraq ever was and sustained a more robust anti-war movement.
Crowds of people attempted to scale the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, on April 29, 1975, trying to get to the helicopter pickup zone just before the end of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam helped open rifts not only between generations, but also between the people and the government. Along with Watergate, it helped sour the nation on Washington and its political leaders.
"Vietnam created chaos inside the United States," says Kohn, the UNC historian. "American society was deeply affected by the experience of Vietnam, and not just the war, but its political and social contexts."
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Iraq, by contrast, was associated with a single president. And it doesn't seem to have been part of any grand strategy or larger geopolitical struggle.
Unlike the "domino theory," which held that if Vietnam fell to communism other countries would inevitably follow, there was no equivalent fallout from Iraq beyond its borders.
The Bush administration argued that Iraq was another front in the broader global war on terrorism, but there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had ties to al-Qaida or the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"It became very hard, especially once the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stuff failed to materialize, to convince large numbers of people that Iraq was vital to the national security of the United States," Menon says.
..."Very few are going to come forward and claim Iraq as a victory," Wohlforth says, "but it doesn't seem as unambiguous a defeat as Vietnam."...
Vietnam had a longstanding political resonance, as well. Controversy surrounding his service there was one of the major reasons Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, now secretary of state, was unable to unseat President Bush in 2004.
"For 20 years, one of the major themes was what did Candidate X do during the late 1960s, when they had the option to go to Vietnam or not to go," says Kalb, the author...Still, it's hard to imagine a presidential candidate or Cabinet nominee having to explain his or her position on the Iraq War 20 or 30 years from now.
Read more at NPR
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NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
The Iraq War: 10 Years Later, Where Do We Stand?
Traffic drives through Tahrir Square in central Baghdad on Wednesday. Ten years after the start of the war, bullet holes still mark buildings, and towers wrecked by U.S. missiles and tank shells have not been fully rebuilt.
By any count - and there have been many - the toll has been devastating. In blood, about 4,400 U.S. troops and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. And in treasure, combined costs of the war come to an astounding $2 trillion. A new report out of Brown University finds that includes future commitments like veteran care.
So where do we stand today?
Stephen Hadley was the national security adviser under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009, and part of the White House team that helped sell the war to the public.
Looking back, Hadley tells NPR's Jacki Lyden, everyone — not just the White House — was wrong in citing Saddam Hussein's alleged stock of weapons of mass destruction as a reason for the invasion.
"Republicans thought he had them, Democrats thought he had them, the Clinton administration thought he had them [and] the Bush administration thought he had them," Hadley says. "We were all wrong."
Hadley says the initial invasion was a success, but what followed took longer and cost an enormous amount in terms of both lives and money. He stands by the judgment, however, that Saddam was a threat to the U.S. and the region...." And if you think about what Iran is doing in terms of pursuing nuclear weapons, you can bet Saddam Hussein would not have been left behind."
Hadley also stands by an opinion he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2010 that the U.S. would "leave behind an Iraq that would be able to govern itself, defend itself, sustain itself and be an ally in the war on terror."
"This is a regime that is not ...invading its neighbors, is not pursuing weapons of mass destruction and is not brutalizing its people. Then the question was, could we leave a regime that could defend itself, govern itself, sustain itself and be an ally in the war on terror? I think it has. There are no American troops there today, and it does govern itself. Economically, it is doing better. It is functioning, and it is opposing terror and not supporting terror.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is there still sectarian violence? Absolutely. But part of the reason is the neighborhood, and particularly the war in Syria, is putting enormous pressure on Iraq today.
"I think this is a country that is taking responsibility for its security both internally and externally," he says.
The fear, he says, is that if the opposition is successful in toppling Bashar Assad in Syria, that sentiment might bleed over into Iraq and spark a sectarian war to topple Maliki. With the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the nation, he says, Iraq is not getting needed support.
"The United States is not playing the role it needs to play in terms of helping Iraq get through this difficult transition period," he says.
As for the future of the U.S. role in Iraq, the American presence has shifted from the military to the CIA, which is covertly helping Iraq build up its counterterrorism operations.
Regarding the human toll on both sides, Hadley admits that "clearly the situation got away from us in 2004, 2005 and 2006. And the cost of getting it back under control as a result of the surge decision was too high in terms of dollars, in terms of lives of Americans, in terms of lives of Iraqis.
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ERNESTO LONDONO: It's really striking to contemplate how invisible the American footprint has become here.
LYDEN: Ernesto Londono is a Washington Post Pentagon correspondent now in Baghdad covering the anniversary. About $60 billion in American taxpayer funds have gone toward the rebuilding of Iraq, but a recent inspector general's report to Congress says the result simply don't show it.
LONDONO: You look around at the neighborhoods where Americans invested a lot of money and there's really very little that is visible.
LYDEN: Londono was in Baghdad in 2007 at the peak of the sectarian violence. Today, he says, if you're one of the lucky few, the picture is better.
LONDONO: Some people are doing very well. You see a surprising amount of wealth out on the street. You see it in the cars people drive. You see it in the shops that have opened. You see it in the little shopping malls that you're starting to see in some of the more affluent parts of the city. Iraqis are more plugged in digitally than they've ever been obviously. This used to be a hugely repressed society that was essentially cut out from the world. And now, you know, Iraqis have one, two cellphones. Everybody's on Facebook.
LYDEN: But sectarian tension is still evident, especially at the political level.
LONDONO: You have a government dominated by Shias that many Sunnis accuse of being authoritarian, of using its security apparatus to marginalize and to crack down on them. At the street level, however, things have changed dramatically. I think at the end of the sectarian war here in 2008, there came a point where people realized that they were being set up by hard-line groups, by the militias, by the insurgency, and that they were sort of being foolishly pushed into this really brutal fight....