President Barack Obama marked the end of the Iraq war today in a speech to U.S. troops in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He welcomed the troops home and hailed their “extraordinary achievement” in a war that, just a few years ago, appeared to be a quagmire. “I want to speak to you about the end of the war in Iraq,” Obama said. “The final work has been done.”

Watch a clip of the speech:

While the work did yield an “extraordinary achievement,” it also came at a significant cost in U.S. blood and treasure, as well as to the Iraqi people and their society. Yesterday, Center For American Progress analysts Matt Duss and Peter Juul released a briefing updating “the Iraq War Ledger” in “A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs” (PDF or online).

Duss and Juul tally the costs of the war in human casualties, financial burdens, and to U.S. strategic posture. The pure numbers are staggering. This chart, from the brief, weighs the heaviest of costs to Americans and Iraqis, that paid for in human lives:

But those numbers for civilian deaths don’t tell the full story for Iraqi human costs: at least 10,000 members of Iraqi security forces fighting alongside the U.S.-led coalition also lost their lives; 1.24 million people were internally displaced; and more than 1.6 million Iraqis became refugees from the war.

Then there was the financial cost to the U.S., both for fighting the war ($806 billion) and for caring for the more than 2 million U.S. soldiers who did so (projected to total between $422 and $717 billion). Those figures include treatment for an incomprehensible human psychological toll of more than 150,000 troops with post-traumatic stress and a suicide rate for veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan at more than three times the national average.

Lastly, the war created a burden on the U.S. and the international community by exacerbating other problems, such as “fueling sectarianism in the region,” “creat(ing) not only a rallying call for violent Islamic extremists but also an environment for them to develop, test, and perfect various tactics and techniques,” and hurting the U.S.’s international standing, among other issues.

“Iraq has made progress but still struggles with insecurity and deep political discord,” write Duss and Juul. “Still,” they continue

the end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future.

But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits.

Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman is developing a track record as an outspoken Iran hawk whenever questions about Iran’s nuclear program come up. Last month, he suggested that a war with Iran was inevitable, and earlier this week, he baselessly claimed that the Iranians have “already decided” that they want nuclear weapons.

But in an interview last night with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Huntsman staked out even more hawkish territory and committed to a ground invasion to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon:

BURNETT: Do you think at this point, unless we’re going to commit, and I’m curious whether you would commit to full on military conflict with Iran, that we have to accept that they will eventually be a nuclear power? It’s more important to figure out how to deal with that than to yell and scream about it happening when its inevitable anyway.

HUNTSMAN: Well, I think they’ve already made the decision to go nuclear. [...]

BURNETT: So, if push comes to shove and this is important, I’m not saying this is something you do tomorrow, but if push comes to shove, if what was between them and a nuclear weapon or there was an uncertainty, required troops invasion, you’d do it?

HUNTSMAN: I can’t live with the implications of not doing it. I can’t live with the thought of what a nuclear Iran brings to the region and what they said about Israel, which is our centerpiece alliance in the region. I can’t live — I can’t live with the world with a nuclear Iran.

So, then, you say, what do you do? And realistically, you got to have all options on the table. You got to be prepared to use all elements of national power.

Watch it:

While Jon Huntsman is confident that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon, and is prepared to commit to a ground invasion of Iran to prevent it, neither the United Nations nuclear agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), nor U.S. intelligence estimates have made that claim. Either Huntsman has access to information the IAEA and the White House aren’t acknowledging or he’s willing to go to war on a hunch.

Last week President Obama responded to his Republican critics who say he is the 21st century’s version of Neville Chamberlain. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” the President said during a news conference.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum regularly lobs the inane “appeasement” charge at Obama. “At every single turn the president has appeased those who would do us harm,” the former Pennsylvania senator said on Sunday. So naturally, Santorum probably isn’t convinced that Obama even had anything to do with killing bin Laden and he said so last night on CNN (as he has before), calling the president’s comment last week “pathetic”:

SANTORUM: Osama bin Laden was a continuation of President Bush’s policy. It had nothing to do with a contingency or a problem that came up on his watch. He simply followed through, which we have been trying to do for 10 years.

KING: Deserves no credit for that?

SANTORUM: Any more — no, the people who deserve credit for that were the military whose mission it was to find them. And the president doesn’t deserve credit for doing — he didn’t make a decision, if you will, as to go after bin Laden. That decision had been made 10 years ago.

Santorum eventually relented after host John King noted that Obama “gave the go-ahead” to raid bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. “I do give him credit for that,” Santorum said. Watch the clip:

President Bush himself tried to sneak this narrative by the press too but the reality is that Obama nabbed bin Laden in spite of the former president’s policies, not because of them.

The conservative claim that Bush is the one responsible for the bin Laden raid “couldn’t be further from the truth,” the National Journal’s Michael Hirsch wrote in May. “Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader…lies a profound discontinuity between administrations — a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists,” from Bush’s bombastic and overly expansive “war on terror,” to Obama’s “covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.”

“Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”