The death of Muammar Qaddafi offers a milestone in the Libyan revolution as the Libyan Transitional National Council must move on to the difficult task of holding national elections and NATO forces begin to wind down operations. But the Libyan and NATO victory doesn’t seem to be enough for congressional hawks who have long mocked the White House’s so-called “leading from behind” Libya strategy.

While U.S. participation in a successful NATO and regional coalition operation in Libya without putting American lives in danger would seem like an overall victory, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) all took to the airwaves to grudgingly admit that while the White House’s strategy appears to have worked, their untested plans for more U.S. airpower and a unilateral strategy in which U.S. commanders would control the air campaign, would have resulted in fewer Libyan deaths.

Mccain told the Today Show:

The fact is that we could have ended this conflict a lot earlier if we had used the full weight of U.S. air power instead of leading from behind and we wouldn’t have the 30,000 who are wounded and hundreds, if not thousands, who are killed.

Rubio told Fox News:

We have a lot of people dead and a lot of young men who, instead of entering the workforce and helping rebuild Libya, have to go into rehab and recovery for their war wounds. A lot of this could have been avoided had we gotten involved early and decisively.

And Graham told Fox News:

If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed.

Watch a compilation of their comments:

Of course, a large-scale bombing campaign, as they seem to be suggesting, would have taken a massive humanitarian toll as well. Perhaps more importantly, a U.S. driven campaign, as opposed to the role the U.S. and its allies played in offering air support for Libyan rebel forces, would have made Qaddafi’s defeat yet another U.S. led overthrow of an Arab leader instead of a popular revolt driven by Libyan rebel forces. While Rubio, McCain and Graham might have wanted to apply an Iraq-style strategy of unilateral U.S. military action, their assertions that lives would have been saved appears to be nothing more than politically motivated speculation.

The Obama administration’s announcement of a withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of the year offers the possibility of a definitive conclusion for the U.S. military’s involvement in Iraq. But while the return of all U.S. service men and women by Christmas is a cause for celebration, the costs of the war are only beginning to be fully understood. The “cakewalk” to Baghdad, as George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman infamously wrote in February, 2002, has been anything but. The Iraq War, and the faulty premise that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, has had a staggering humanitarian and economic cost.

Here are some relevant numbers:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

Today President Obama announced that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year, a policy that is in line with the agreement that President Bush signed with the Iraqis in 2008 and, keeping his campaign promise to end the war. While some Republicans are rushing to credit Bush, GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, however, sees it differently. Romney released a campaign statement today attacking Obama for leaving Iraq and blaming him for, essentially, not being able to change the Iraqis’ minds on keeping American troops in their country past 2011:

“President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women. The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government. The American people deserve to hear the recommendations that were made by our military commanders in Iraq.”

While it’s unclear what Romney means by failing “to secure an orderly transition in Iraq” (this process has been underway for years now), by asking to know what “our military commanders in Iraq” recommended, Romney doesn’t seem to understand that it was ultimately up to the Iraqis to decide whether U.S. troops stayed in Iraq past the 2011 deadline, not the U.S. military.

The Obama administration reportedly planned to keep upwards of 5,000 U.S. troops or “trainers” in Iraq past 2011 but the Iraqis refused to grant American soldiers immunity from Iraqi law.

Responding angrily to the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of this year, the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan writes that President Obama “has decided to abandon America’s interest in Iraq and damage our position in the Middle East”:

This retreat will have great costs for the United States. It squanders the gains made by both American and Iraqi military forces over the last four years, but, even more important, it squanders the enormous opportunity to forge an alliance with Iraq at a time when such an alliance would be of tremendous value to the United States. It dramatically increases the likelihood that the new and unstable Iraqi democratic experiment—already under attack from an authoritarian prime minister and a hostile Islamic Republic of Iran—will fail. The withdrawal of American forces now serving as peacekeepers along the Arab-Kurd seam greatly increases the likelihood of ethnic civil war. The withdrawal of American military protection from a state helpless to defend itself on its own effectively throws Iraq into the arms of Iran, however the Iraqis feel about the matter.

Interestingly, Kagan doesn’t mention that this “retreat” is being done in accordance with an agreement that the previous administration signed with the Iraqi government.

Even more interestingly, when that agreement was signed, Fred Kagan himself hailed it as a great U.S. success, telling radio host Hugh Hewitt:

The Iranians are desperate for Iraq not to align itself strategically with the United States, and they have been literally trying to bribe everybody they can bribe in Iraq, and running a fantastic information operations campaign in Iraq to make this an unpopular and hard thing to do. And the Iraqi government has done it anyway. And that is actually a great accomplishment for us, and it tells us a lot about where this Shia Iraqi government actually stands on whether it wants to be aligned with the United States, or whether it wants to be aligned with Iran.

So, just to be clear: Signing the agreement was a great success. Actually following it is a failure. Got it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As presidential hopeful Herman Cain has vaulted to the front of the Republican pack, a major achilles heel has emerged in the former pizza executive’s background: foreign policy.

Cain has earned widespread criticism not only for his lack of expertise in international affairs, but for also at times appearing uninterested in the subject. (Earlier this month, Cain blew off concerns about his lack of foreign policy chops, declaring it unimportant that he didn’t know who – in his words – “the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” is.)

Speaking at the Western Republican Leadership Conference on Wednesday, Cain dismissed critics who worry that his lack of foreign policy understanding make the former pizza executive unfit to be commander-in-chief. Cain noted that he has “consulted with foreign policy experts” before relaying the message they gave him: “Herman, all you need is character and common sense and intelligence and we’ve got plenty of people who can fill out the details and help you with putting together the strategy.”

CAIN: Foreign policy. When you rise up in the polls, you get this big target on your back. And so I have been criticized for not having extensive foreign policy experience. And the guy there now does? Richard, is this a double-standard or something that’s going on here? I have consulted with foreign policy experts. Let me tell you what they have told me. “Herman, all you need is character and common sense and intelligence and we’ve got plenty of people who can fill out the details and help you with putting together the strategy.” That’s what leaders do!

Watch it:

Cain’s insistence that a commander-in-chief can relegate foreign affairs to mere “details” that can be filled in by advisers as he simply relies on his “character and common sense and intelligence” is absurd. Managing the United States’ foreign policy is one of the single most important roles a president plays, yet Cain is at best still learning new information as his campaign progresses, at worst uninterested in the matter at all.

Critics could be forgiven for worrying that a similar approach 11 years ago by then-Gov. George W. Bush resulted in the disastrous foreign policy missteps of the 2000s.