Was the Iraq War Worth it?: A Soldier's Perspective (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | I want to preface this commentary by stating upfront that I am a former soldier and veteran of the 1991, (first) Persian Gulf war. Thus, I am not fundamentally opposed to the use of military force, particularly in opposition to abject tyranny and/or in direct defense of our nation -- the United States -- and its proven, steadfast allies. Having said this, let me be clear, I was opposed to this current, dubious incantation of the war on Iraq early on, and remain so after nine long years of irrevocable bloodshed and depletion of our nation's treasures -- both human and financial.

Don't get me wrong. Make no mistake about it; Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. I witnessed first-hand the results of Saddam's brutality against the Kurds in northern Iraq and against his own people. There's no question in my mind that the former dictator and ruler of the country deserved the short end of the very long rope that hanged him. The wages of that level of sin is, indeed, death (I say this from a moral perspective, not a religious perspective), and it's quite appropriate that Saddam paid this ultimate price. Thus is the fate of tyrants, and Saddam certainly fit the bill.

No, the question for me has never been one of whether Saddam, at some point, needed to be put down. In fact, my immediate, visceral response to the 9/11 attacks - aside from an enormous sensation of woundedness - was, "We gotta get the bastard." I'm sure it was also an early reaction of former President George W. Bush as well. However, the administration more than any -- with the exception, certainly, of Osama bin Laden -- knew Saddam and Iraq had, essentially, nothing to do with the 9/11 bombings. The intelligence was quite clear very early on that 9/11 was Al Qaeda and its leader, bin Laden's work - not Saddam's. The Administration knew it was bin Laden from the get-go, and where keenly aware of the fact that Bin Laden and Saddam were not on friendly terms.

It's this conflation of Hussein with and 9/11 that was spoon-fed to the American people as justification for the war. Everything else during the run up to the conflict, including WMD -- which, evidently, Iraq no longer had -- became, simply, pretense to masquerade the Bush administration's insatiable desire to get at Saddam.

Furthermore, even if one is capable of suspending reason, and accepts the premise that Saddam was somehow ultimately responsible for 9/11 -- the secondary question (and, perhaps, the greater one) is how the Bush administration failed so miserably at prosecuting this war. From initial confusion and disorder in the streets early on after the fall of Baghdad (the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, etc.); from Abu Ghraib to the beheadings to the failure of the administration to provide the appropriate armor to our brave soldier, the strategy and planning of this war was second-rate at best. Let me be clear, our troops did an outstanding job in country; however, to paraphrase the words of the chief architect of what, I believe, was ultimately a strategic fiasco -- former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- sometimes our men and women in uniform are forced to fight with the strategy they are given, not the strategy they may have wanted.

The model for the Iraq campaign, Shock and Awe, was flawed conceptually from the onset. It, in essence, was little more than an end run around the Iraqi army into Baghdad, leaving, literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers armed and able who simply melted back into their home villages and towns. The model, retrospectively, should, in fact, have been similar to President Obama's Libyan campaign. We could have avoided the commitment of such large numbers of American troops; a protracted war with nearly 4,500 Americans lost and 38,000-plus maimed or crippled; the loss of countless Iraqis, both combatants and non-combatants (we'll never know exactly how many or even who they were); the loss of American credibility throughout the world and the leaving of such a massive, offending footprint in the region, had we used the current administration's approach. We probably could have achieved the same results -- and perhaps a great deal more -- had we done so. Likely, in my opinion, without having put an American military boot on the ground.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oped/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20120110/cm_ac/10687163_was_the_iraq_war_worth_it_a_soldiers_perspective

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