Bush's war, five years on
The Iraq War turns five years-old on Wednesday, with no end in sight and a bloody trail of loss and hopelessness in its wake. It is old news by now, but worth repeating, that none of the Bush Administration's public justifications for the war ever panned out.
George W. Bush's war of choice has claimed the lives of 3,988 American soldiers and left 29,314 of them with often-grievous wounds. The death toll among Iraqi civilians from violence spawned by the war has been far higher: the documented number is between 82,000 and 89,000, according to Iraq Body Count. A study published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, used extrapolation techniques and pushed the civilian death count--including starvation and disease-related deaths--far higher, to 655,000.
The eventual cost to U.S. taxpayers of the Iraq War also varies depending on who you talk to. The Congressional Budget Office projected a worst case scenario of $1.7 trillion, but a new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz pushes the eventual cost by 2017 to a staggering $2.7 trillion. Either way, all of that is wasted money that could have done so much good if used in America to provide national health care, shore up Social Security, or make college education more affordable. But the President pissed it away down the rathole of Iraq.
If there is any justice in all this, it is that Bush has probably sent the Republican Party down the same rathole. Short of a coup, I don't see many scenarios in which a Democrat doesn't take over the White House in January 2009 with a filibuster-proof Senate and many more new liberal members of both chambers. After Democrat Bill Foster's upset victory for the seat held by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert for nearly 22 years, the DNC must be at least thinking about pouring money into "sacrificial lamb" candidacies in supposedly safe Republican districts around the country.