The bottom line includes a staggering death toll among troops and civilians, Pentagon spending at $6 billion a month and damage to U.S. credibility.
....Sectarian violence verges on civil war. More than 130,000 troops remain in Iraq. And the toll on Iraq and the United States is far beyond anything the administration prepared Americans for in the lead-up to the March 19, 2003, invasion.
Then there's the human toll:
According to Pentagon figures (as of March 15), 2,310 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the launch of the invasion. Of those, 1,808 were killed in combat and 502 died from accidents, illnesses or other causes.
Another 17,124 American troops have been wounded. Of those, 9,212 were returned to duty within 72 hours. The rest had more serious wounds, including about 400 who have lost an arm, leg, hand or foot.
The figures do not include American civilians killed or wounded in Iraq while working for the U.S. government, private businesses and non-governmental aid organizations.....Bush recently estimated the Iraqi dead at somewhere near 30,000.
And the fiscal cost:
Americans have spent $250 billion on military operations and reconstruction efforts in Iraq, a war that is currently costing the Pentagon roughly $6 billion a month, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
This spending does not include so-called fixed costs that are part of Pentagon spending -- such as pay for the troops -- but accounts for only the direct war costs, such as bonus pay for combat operations, as well as fuel, munitions and other war-related expenses.
The war's true price tag, however, will include expenses not included in this reckoning, particularly the long-term costs of providing lifetime health care to soldiers wounded in the war or suffering from mental health issues related to the conflict, recurring expenses certain to range in the billions of dollars per year. Nor do these costs include the interest on the additional debt incurred to finance the war.
Consider the cost to our image, and to our ability to deal with Iran and Korea.
"After the war in Iraq, the image of the United States plummeted in most countries and has only recovered in a few," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan opinion monitoring group in Washington.
Bush led the country to war on the claim that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was working to reconstitute earlier efforts to build a nuclear weapon. No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found, nor has evidence of a viable nuclear weapons program surfaced. Bush has said the intelligence he received in the lead-up to the war was faulty.
..."The intelligence debacle on Iraq has cost us dearly in our efforts to deal effectively with Iran and North Korea," said Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington research and advocacy group. "People simply don't believe us."
Update: In February, 2003, the month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, 6 million people around the world turned out to protest war in Iraq.
