Former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo is most famous for his legal memoranda defending torture and virtually unlimited presidential power in the realm of national security. On the Iraq War’s 10th anniversary, however, Yoo has decided to defend another one of his former boss’ unlawful actions, going so far as to argue that Bush administration had made up for harm done to Iraqis by spending money on them.

Yoo, who once said “I was never certain whether the Iraq war made sense as a matter of strategy,” now maintains that “invading Iraq was the best option in light of the information we had then,” and claims that if it weren’t, those who oppose the decision should want to “restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq.” Forced by 200,000 deaths to confront the fact that an extraordinary number of Iraqis were killed, injured, or driven from their homes by our invasion, Yoo suggests that the United States made up for all that by giving the Iraqis money:

Even though the benefits outweighed the costs, that does not mean we simply leave Iraq once we depose the Husseins. The legal system in such situations might still require a benefiting party to compensate a harmed party. In other words, we allow one harm to occur in society because there is a greater good achieved — but then the legal system can intervene afterward to require sharing of the benefits between the plaintiff and defendant.

And isn’t that what we did in Iraq? We spent billions of dollars in Iraq as damages. We did so not because the war was wrong, but because it was right — and we shared the benefits of the war with the Iraqi people by transferring some of it in the form of reconstruction funds.

Yoo fails to note that much of the damage done to Iraqis was a consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to said reconstruction, which Iraq War veteran Jason Fritz calls “a tidal wave of arrogance and stupidity.”

Several other former Bush administration officials share Yoo’s perspective — former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, tweeted that “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

According to Yoo’s post, he is currently “finishing a book on war in the 21st century, where I make the case for preemptive and preventive war.” We’re anxiously awaiting its publication.

One of the most outspoken advocates for the war in Iraq said on NPR on Wednesday that asking whether the war was worth fighting is an “unreasonable question.”

During an interview with Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — NPR host Renee Montagne noted some of the war’s more grim results: hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead or wounded and asked Perle whether it was all worth it:

Q: There’s no question you were a great proponent of going into Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Ten years later, nearly 5,000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

PERLE: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t, a decade later, go back and say, “Well we shouldn’t have done that.”

Listen to the clip:

Perle has tried hard over the years to either justify the war or even wipe his fingerprints from it altogether. He once even tried to say he, and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had “no influence” on the decision and just yesterday, he said it didn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, the U.S. should have invaded anyway (he actually had previously said the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded if the U.S. new he had no WMD).

But as far as whether the war was worth it, CAP’s Matt Duss has a pretty good take: “The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a consider- able global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” he writes in the Iraq War Ledger, A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs, “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.”

“I’m waiting for the architects of those policies to get up and say it didn’t work, but it’s tough to expect that because they never articulated what the hell they were doing.” This is what conservative activist Grover Norquist told the Huffington Post in a piece published today on what the anniversary of the Iraq war means for the Republican Party and foreign policy (spoiler: it’s in disarray).

But Norquist hit on an important point. While a majority of Americans — and indeed the rest of the world — know and have recognized that the Iraq war was a complete debacle that never should have taken place, those who dreamed of taking down Saddam Hussein long before 9/11 and cooked up the intelligence to make it happen either refuse to find any fault in the overall decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or their role in it.

The Daily Beast reported yesterday that some of the Iraq war’s boosters are expressing “few regrets.” The American Enterprise Institute foreign and defense policy studies vice president Danielle Pletka laid all the bad stuff that happened in Iraq on Barack Obama: “Had President Obama chosen not to withdraw from Iraq, it would be a different picture there.” Sure, Ms. Pletka.

And today, the war’s top architects seized the 10-year anniversary to play some historical defense. Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary famous for painting a rosy picture about the war that bore no relation to reality, patted himself on the back for helping liberate Iraq:

10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013

How liberating is it for the tens of thousands of Iraqis, including civilians, who were killed as a result of the war? We also wonder if the millions of Iraqis who are now refugees or internally displaced feel liberated. And as NBC News notes today, Iraq “is considered one of the most corrupt in the world, and many of the improvements promised have not materialized. Sectarian tensions regularly explode into open violence.” Liberation, indeed.

Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — wrote in USA Today on Tuesday that it’s “senseless to argue” that because Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD that “the decision to remove him was wrong.” Actually, Perle himself made that argument In 2009, he saying, “we would not have invaded” if Saddam had no WMD. Nevertheless, Perle says “the decision to remove Saddam was right,” it’s just that “the decision to occupy Iraq was not.”

Read more

Ten years ago, “Operation: Shock and Awe” launched the war in Iraq. The next ten years would prove to be a calamity of unthinkable proportions, leading to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, trillions spent and billions wasted. ThinkProgress has cataloged the entirety in a single timeline, stretching from the early days of the war to the present. The following is just a small sampling:

MAY 1, 2003: Mission Accomplished

[M]y fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. [Bush, 5/1/03]

JULY 2, 2003: Bring ‘Em On

There are some who feel like — that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on. [Bush, 7/2/03]

APRIL 19, 2004: Bob Woodward reveals CIA Director George Tenet said there was a “slam dunk case” against Iraq

About two weeks before deciding to invade Iraq, President Bush was told by CIA Director George Tenet there was a “slam dunk case” that dictator Saddam Hussein had unconventional weapons, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. [CNN, 4/19/04]

APRIL 28, 2004: Images of torture at Abu Ghraib are revealed

JANUARY 12, 2005: WMD search in Iraq is declared over

U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN. [CNN, 1/12/05]

MAY 30, 2005: Dick Cheney: Insurgency in its “last throes”

I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency. [CNN Larry King Live, 5/30/05]

DECEMBER 18, 2005: Bush: “[M]uch of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.” [Bush, 12/18/05]

 

FEBRUARY 2, 2006: Rumsfeld doubts “long war” in Iraq

“Is Iraq going to be a long war?” Mr. Rumsfeld answered, “No, I don’t believe it is.” [Washington Times, 2/2/06]

NOVEMBER 1, 2006: Classified military briefing reports Iraq “edging toward chaos.”

A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict. … An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” [New York Times, 11/1/2006]

DECEMBER 19, 2006: The White House is “aggressively promoting” a plan to send “15,000 to 30,000 more troops” to Iraq “over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the Washington Post reports. [Washington Post, 12/19/2006]

FEBRUARY 2, 2007: National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq declares Iraq is worse than a civil war. The document states that the term civil war “accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict,” though it “does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict.” [Washington Post, 2/3/2007]

Read more

Neocon leader Bill Kristol is upset that Americans have soured on war. “Are the American people war weary? Yes, to some degree,” Kristol acknowledges in a new piece in the Weekly Standard, but, he adds, “Could there be a worse prescription for American foreign policy than giving in to popular war weariness? No.”

Kristol is commenting on the recent intra-GOP spat between Sen. Ron Paul (R-KY) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain referred to Paul as a “wacko bird” for his isolationist tendencies and his 13-hour filibuster critique of President Obama’s targeted killing program (McCain has since apologized), while Paul shot back last week at CPAC, saying McCain’s foreign policy wing of the GOP as “has grown stale and moss covered.”

Kristol jumped in to defend McCain, arguing that Republicans should try again to convince Americans that they shouldn’t be so bearish on war:

Now we’re weary again. And there are many politicians all too willing to seek power and popularity by encouraging weariness rather than point out its perils. [...]

The task of a serious opposition party is to rally the nation to its responsibilities and long-term interests. The task of GOP political leaders is to educate the public about the dangers of the world and to inspire people to rise above their weariness. The task of American conservatives is not to let an understandable Obama-weariness turn into weariness in fighting the nation’s enemies or in supporting our troops in the field.

Got that? The Republican Party must convince the American people that they must RISE ABOVE their collective skepticism about war solving America’s problems. But why? Because Kristol and Co. want to go to war with Iran. “It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force,” Kristol wrote in the Standard nearly two years ago. Last year his factually challenged pressure group called for an end to negotiations with Iran, saying in an ad campaign that “it’s time to act.” And what was the main reason Kristol opposed Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense? Hagel apparently was too skeptical about starting war with Iran.

But Americans don’t want to go to war with Iran — partly because of war weariness, but also because it’s not a very good idea. Kristol knows this, which is why he’s trying to recruit Republicans to his cause to help him convince us otherwise. Who does he have so far? From his new Standard piece:

[Rep. Tom] Cotton [R-AR] is 35 years old. He’s not stale or moss-covered. A combat veteran, he understands real war weariness. But he also understands it needs to be resisted and overcome. Above all, he understands, as did the GOP of old, the GOP of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, that while we may not be interested in war, our enemies remain interested in us.

Cotton was last seen suggesting that Iraq may have had something to do with 9/11. Perhaps then Kristol does know what he’s doing.

Ten years after the first American bombs fell on Baghdad, the United States is still paying the costs for the invasion of Iraq — monetarily, strategically, psychologically and morally. The decision to launch the war is sure to be re-debated ad nauseum over the coming days. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday that it’s “too soon to tell” whether the Iraq war was a success. Here’s just five reasons why he’s wrong:

1. The debt

At the start of the war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost around $50-60 billion in total. They were wrong by more than a factor of ten, sending the U.S.’ debt soaring, a condition that has yet to be rectified. According to a recent study, the war is set to have cost the U.S $2.2 trillion, though that number may reach up to $4 trillion thanks to interest payments on the loans taken out to finance the conflict. Of that staggering amount, at least $10 billion of it was completely wasted in rebuilding efforts.

2. The physical and psychological strain on U.S. troops.

The soldiers charged with fighting the war were stretched to their limits, put through multiple tours, with increasing length of time overseas as the war stretched on and shrinking downtime in between each. All-told, over 4,000 U.S. troops died during the country’s time in Iraq, with another 31,000 wounded in action. In the aftermath, the cost of providing medical care to veterans has doubled, adding to the difficulties faced by those who served. Up to 35 percent of Iraq War veterans will suffer from PTSD according to a 2009 study, while the suicide rate among veterans has jumped to 22 per day.

3. The forgotten war in Afghanistan.

Even worse, the war in Iraq caused the U.S. to take its eye off the ball in Afghanistan. Rather than following through, the Bush administration allowed the country to stagnate, prompting a Taliban resurgence beginning in 2004. As the West focused almost exclusively on Iraq, Taliban fighters imported tactics seen in Iraq to great effect, keeping the Afghan government weak and U.S.-led NATO forces on their heels. The result: the United States is still attempting to tamp down on Taliban momentum today.

4. The opportunity costs.

Aside from missed opportunities in Afghanistan, the Iraq War-effort was all-consuming, pulling resources from all other areas of U.S. defense policy. Relationships with key allies were allowed to grow stale and U.S. prestige around the world plummeted. Fighting in Iraq was realized to be a diversion from combating al Qaeda, drawing funding that could have gone towards a litany of other efforts to effectively counter terrorism.

5. The strengthening of Iran and al Qaeda.

The power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and the lack of adequate U.S. forces left room for U.S. adversaries to fill the void. Counter to what some still believe, Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq prior to 2003. Instead, it was only in the post-Saddam climate that they gained a foothold in the form of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The group continues to carry out attacks against civilians to this day, keeping the Iraqi government on edge.

In the end, it was not the United States that gained the most strategically from invading Iraq, but the Shiite-dominated Islamic Republic of Iran. In removing Saddam Hussein’s predominantly Sunni regime from power, the U.S. opened the door to a greater Iranian influence in the region. That influence has been seen playing out counter to U.S. interests in situations such as allowing Iranian planes bearing weapons for Syria to cross Iraqi airspace.

“The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a consider- able global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” CAP’s Matt Duss writes in the Iraq War Ledger, A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs, “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.”

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

In a bid to lend a patina of “bipartisanship” to its ideas, the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has made former Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) the co-chair of its newest foreign policy initiative. The move has been met with raised eyebrows, as progressives have not considered Joe Lieberman an authentic representative of their foreign policy positions for quite some time, if they ever did in the first place.

Lieberman will co-chair the new “American Internationalism Project” with former Senator John Kyl (R-AZ). As the project is intended to “rebuild and reshape a bipartisan consensus around American global leadership and engagement,” Lieberman’s participation is aimed at blunting the perception that anything coming out of AEI is a dogmatically Republican plan. AEI generally hews to a hardline neoconservative standard on foreign policy; its staff in the area includes former Bush Administration officials John Bolton, Richard Perle, and Marc Thiessen.

Lieberman’s dogged support for George W. Bush’s foreign policy played a critical role in his in 2006 Democratic primary defeat (he subsequently won as an independent). endorsed arch-hawk John McCain over Barack Obama for President in 2008 on grounds that McCain was “the strongest candidate on security of all the candidates running.” Indeed, Lieberman’s views are far closer to AEI’s than they are to the progressive mainstream, as a quick survey of his particular positions will show:

1. Iraq. Lieberman himself credits his vociferous support for the Iraq War for making him “persona non grata with the Democrats.” As recently as 2011, Lieberman defended his vote to invade Iraq, saying “I believe that the evidence is very clear that [Saddam] was developing weapons of mass destruction.” During the height of the war debate in 2007, Lieberman accused war critics of committing “a kind of harassment” and being “invested in a narrative of retreat and defeat.”

2. Torture. Lieberman voted against legislation banning waterboarding in 2008 on grounds that it wasn’t torture. Because the torture technique “has a mostly psychological impact on people,” Lieberman argued, “we ought to be able to use [it],” adding that President Obama’s decision to release the Bush torture memos “help[ed] our enemies.” Though he once signed a letter that included a clause condemning waterboarding, it is unclear how he reconciled that with his long record of support for the practice.

3. Iran. When asked point-blank if he was endorsing an attack on Iran during a 2007 interview, Lieberman said “I am… We’ve got to use our force and to me that would include taking military action.” More recently, he has said a strike on Iran is highly likely, and that, in its aftermath, we should “hope and pray that there will be a regime change.”

4. Israel. Though Israeli leaders have praised Obama’s policy towards their country (even awarding him a prestigious medal), Lieberman has been persistent critic of the President’s policy — from the right. Lieberman denied that settlements were “a major impediment to peace” and suggested that Obama’s foreign policy “has encouraged Israel’s enemies.”

And it’s not just national security policy – Lieberman has tacked to the right on a variety of domestic policy issues as well, ranging from tax cuts to health care to energy.