My colleagues Matt Duss, Peter Juul, and Brian Katulis have a memo out in which they try to tally up the full cost of Iraq—human, financial, and strategic—and discover that the price was very, very, very high.
I think this is important because I’ve developed a concern in the wake of the “surge” and the Obama administration’s embrace of counterinsurgency and General David Petraeus that some kind of cross-party conventional wisdom is going to emerge that Iraq was a tough fight with a couple of bad years, but ultimately a reasonable policy decision that worked out well enough. It wasn’t and it didn’t.
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