Iraq We all know we haven’t accomplished our mission in Iraq. Instead, we have:

Lost nearly 2,000 American soldiers to Iraqi fighting. Another 14,000 have been wounded. Those numbers don’t even count the casualties you can’t see: Countless young people have been traumatized and will suffer mental illness because of their experiences in Iraq.

Strained our ground forces to the breaking point. The Bush administration launched the Iraq war with no plan for winning the peace. After more than two years of intense fighting, our military is close to broken. Our armed forces can’t meet their recruiting and retention goals because of the strains of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . In 2005, the Army missed its recruiting goals three months in a row, and the Marines missed theirs five months in a row for the first time in a decade. Our soldiers are still being sent to fight with faulty equipment and little or no armor. At least 20 percent of active Army soldiers have been deployed to Iraq more than once, and fully 72 percent of soldiers first deployed to Iraq report “low” or “very low” unit morale. The National Guard is stretched thin, and with units deployed in Iraq there are far fewer troops here at home to deal with Hurricane Katrina.

Spent $200 billion in taxpayers’ money on a war they said would pay for itself. In the lead-up to the war, members of the Bush administration repeatedly claimed that the war could be fought on the cheap and would require little to no financial sacrifice from average Americans. (This was one of the ways they rationalized their tax giveaway to the ultra-rich.) In 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the war’s chief architects, told Congress, “we’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction.” In fact, the costs of the war have already topped $200 billion and there’s no end in sight.

Fueled global terrorism and made America less safe. The president claimed that the war in Iraq would help us win the war on terror, but in fact the exact opposite result has occurred. The number of global terrorist attacks has tripled since the war began, topping 650 in 2004. The conflict in Iraq has created a training ground for the next generation of terrorists and a powerful recruiting tool for Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda has been “spurred on” by the Iraq war, and it now has 18,000 members in 60 countries around the world. Meanwhile, images of abuse at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons have squandered our moral authority and fueled anti-Americanism around the world.

Shattered our national unity. After 9/11, we came together as a nation. But Bush and conservatives in Congress politicized that tragedy. They used it to divide us and lead America into a misguided war.

Been led into war based on false evidence and reasons that are always changing. President Bush and his cabinet members repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that he was working with al Qaeda, and that he may have even been involved in 9/11. The evidence was shaky at the time, and now all these claims have been proven false. Have any of the people responsible been held accountable for misleading the American people? Of course not. Instead, the architects of the war – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their key subordinates – remain very much in power.

Now most Americans think the war was a mistake. To try and sell it anew, President Bush and his allies keep trotting out new reasons. Now they claim that we went to war to spread democracy and freedom. This may be a noble goal. But to achieve it you have to know how to use American power. Judging by the choices they’ve made, they don’t.

They chose to go to war with a weak alliance that today is falling apart. Now we have almost no international support, our troops are shouldering the vast majority of the war’s burden and our taxpayers its costs.

They chose to ignore people who told them they needed a plac to win the peace. Like the Army Chief of Staff at the time, General Eric Shinseki, who told them they’d need more troops to defend against a post-war insurgency. President Bush chose to listen instead to Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, men who had never served in the military let alone commanded troops into battle. Now we’re locked in a deadly battle with the very insurgency that the general predicted and the Chickenhawks dismissed.

They chose to ignore reality and to be dishonest with the American public about why we went to war. Now they’ve lost our support.

Meanwhile, our enemies are not resting. While our military is bogged down in Iraq , nuclear weapons remain unsecured in places like Russia , just waiting to fall into the hands of terrorists. Genocide has happened in Darfur . North Korea has nuclear weapons and is probably building more, while Iran is moving dangerously close to acquiring its own. Al Qaeda sympathizers bombed London , and al Qaeda itself has bombed Madrid and continues to target the United States , where faltering efforts at protecting our nation’s infrastructure have left targets like chemical plants dangerously vulnerable.

The truth is scary: We are less safe today because Bush invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no imminent threat to the United States and its allies. Now we’re stuck there with no end in sight, the world is not behind us and our enemies are growing stronger.

We may be the most powerful country in the world, but we need leaders who know how to use our power. We can do better.

 
Additional Resources
 

Organizations and websites

Check out the Center for American Progress’ own:

• John Podesta, who wrote a memo to President Bush summarizing where we really are and where we should be going.
  


• Gordon Adams, who outlines the eerie parallels with Vietnam

• Michael O’Hanlon produced the best, most recent summary of Iraq ’s vital stats, in article and op-chart form
  


• Susan Rice has written important pieces on pressing national security problems that are being short-shrifted because of Iraq, like:
  


• Genocide in Darfur
  


• and a nuclear North Korea

The Council on Foreign Relations, the center of the foreign policy establishment, is alsoa great resource. When you get published in CFR’s Foreign Affairs, you know you’ve hit the big time.

The most intelligent and up-to-date discussion of Iraq on the interweb happens in the America Abroad section of Joshua Michael Marshalls’ TPM Café. Another great new blog on international issues is Democracy Arsenal.

Here’s the BBC’s wrap of the report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies which documents how the war in Iraq has made al Qaeda stronger.

Representative Jan Schakowsky’s (D-IL) staff put together a long list of quotes of administration members saying the Iraq war would pay for itself.

And back in June 2003, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who too often finds himself alone in seeking accountability from the Bush administration, sent a long letter to Secretary of State Rice demanding answers and detailing the bad evidence she and other administration members used to take us to war.

Speaking of bad evidence, do you remember when…

…we learned that Saddam really, truly and officially didn’t have any WMD?

• For the very ambitious (or very bored), the complete report by Charles Duelfer describing how Iraq has no WMD
  


• For the less ambitious (or less bored), CNN’s wrap of the report
  

• Walter Pincus, the Washington Post’s seasoned veteran of foreign affairs, wraps the fateful June 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission
  

• The 500+ page report (yes those are authentic censor blackouts)
  


• The more accessible 30-page summary of conclusions
  

Books

The indispensable 9/11 Commission Report is the single best resource for learning what happened and why before, during and after September 11th.

James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of the Bush War Cabinet is a great background on the major architects of the Iraq war.

To find out everything you ever wanted to know about Osama and al Qaeda, read Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman takes a philosophical look at modern terrorism, and weaves a nuanced argument that neither makes excuses for terrorists nor simply writes them off as evil.

No other reporter in Washington gets the kind of access Bob Woodward does. He does it again with Plan of Attack, easily the best and most comprehensive look inside the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq.

Richard Clarke was the man who oversaw counterterrorism operations in the Bush administration (he worked in the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton administrations, too). His Against All Enemies is a chilling account of how mismanagement and inattention left us more vulnerable than we had to be to Osama and al Qaeda.