Iraqis may prove war was a mistake worth making

Our forefathers had to wait 12 years after the Declaration of Independence to have their first direct congressional elections. The Iraqis have now completed their second legislative elections in just seven years.

It would not have been possible without the unstinting sacrifices of the American military and the support of the citizens of the United States. But neither would it have been possible without the sheer cussedness of the Iraqis.

Iranian meddlers and al Qaeda terrorists tried to delegitimize the 2005 elections by suppressing participation through threats and violence, but almost 80 percent of the electorate turned out. By the time this year’s elections came around, Iranian-backed opposition leader Muqtada al-Sadr told his Shiite followers to go vote and not get left out of the new government.

There were more than two dozen Iraqis killed in Election Day attacks, but after the past seven years, it takes a lot to rattle these people.

Turnout estimates will take time and the ruling parliamentary coalition is still shaping up, but the signs are that Iraqis voted in large numbers and that the new government will have a broader political base than the current one — maybe no big deal by American standards, but quite a feat for the first Arab democracy.

America’s founders fought an eight-year war that killed 25,000 of their countrymen — 1 percent of the total population of our fledgling republic — in order to be free.

Iraq has seen 9,400 men in uniform killed since the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. That’s not even half of a 10th of a percent of the nation’s population of almost 24 million.

That’s because 4,379 American troops were killed and 31,693 more were wounded trying to rescue Iraq.

But it’s also because the civilian population of Iraq has absorbed so much of the blow. Estimating the number of Iraqi civilians killed by terrorists is difficult, but there is broad consensus that more than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed during the post-invasion insurgency.

American history has no parallel to that kind of civilian sacrifice.

Baghdad alone lost almost 30,000 of its 6.5 million civilian residents in the first three years of the allied occupation. Losing so many people so fast in a city the same size as the Dallas metro area means that every family paid part of the human price.

As for the financial price, we’ve footed the tab.

We have spent $700 billion on our Iraq democracy project — as much as the Bush-Obama bailout package.

We fought the entire Second World War and funded the Marshall Plan at a cost, in 2010 dollars, of about $3 trillion. So at least on a per-person-liberated basis, Iraq has been our most expensive nation-building project ever: about $30,000 per Iraqi.

We have spent more than $257 billion blowing up and rebuilding Afghanistan — about $22,000 per Afghan — and the administration will have to spend at least an additional $100 billion on the second Obama surge.

There are half as many Afghans as Iraqis, but they are spread out over a country that is 50 percent larger and has neither a middle class nor a history of central government. President Obama may yet take the title of most ambitious nation builder away from George W. Bush.

But for now, the Iraq project remains unparalleled.

An increasing number of Americans believe that our commitment to Iraq has been worth the effort. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in December found that 57 percent of Americans thought the war had been at least somewhat successful, up from 43 percent in July 2008.

As Karl Rove admits in his new book, the Bush administration relied on a number of false assumptions in invading Iraq — the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the passivity of the Iraqi people toward a Western regency, to name two.

The experience has been a painful primer on the practical limits of our powers, both militarily and as social worker to the world. Though the lessons seem lost on Obama, who is attempting forcible community organizing on all of central Asia, it’s been a humbling experience for our nation.

But if Americans come to think that the Iraq war was a mistake worth making, it will be because we believe that the Iraqis are a people worth saving.

Their toughness and stubborn refusal to give up on self-governance will go a long way in making that case.

Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].