Bush's Legacy: War in Iraq, Consequences at Home
Signs of progress, but Bush's legacy likely to include costly mistakes.
Jan. 20, 2008 — -- As President Bush begins his last year in the White House, the security situation in Iraq moves in an unmistakably positive direction.
Violence is down across the board. There are fewer attacks, fewer Iraqis dying and fewer Americans getting killed.
U.S. commanders in Iraq have begun slowly reducing the number of American troops in the country. There are even some limited but tangible signs of political progress.
That's the good news. It's real. It's measurable.
For now, it looks as if Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy combined with the president's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq in 2007 has yielded some real results.
The success has also moved to Iraq, for the most part, off the front pages of the newspapers and made it a less central issue on the campaign trail — for now.
It's unclear, however, whether this progress will last as American troops begin to return home. And even if it does, historians may look harshly at the high costs of the war and the mistakes made along the way.
First, the costs:
Nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have died in Iraq. Nearly 30,000 have been injured. Through September 2007, the Iraq War cost taxpayers $378 billion and continues to cost nearly $10 billion a month.
There are also costs that can't be measured.
More than 1 million U.S. servicemen and women have served in Iraq, many of them several times. Their personal sacrifice is not measured in government statistics.
But their long deployments — soldiers currently serve 15 months at a time in Iraq — mean an untold number of missed holidays, missed birthdays and time away from family that takes an immeasurable toll. For those in the National Guard and the Reserve, time in Iraq has also meant time away from their jobs.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
Shortly before the war started, on Feb. 7, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked how long the war would last.
His answer: "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
Rumsfeld's prediction was echoed days before the invasion by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
The war, Cheney said, will go "relatively quickly, in weeks rather than months."
That was five years ago.
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