Earlier today, the United States Military officially declared an end to the Iraq War which began in 2003 under President George W. Bush and has lasted for nearly 9 years. For most Americans, the end of the war comes as a relief and is a small reminder of why the country voted for Barack Obama instead of John McCain during the last presidential election.

Since 1115.org went live for the first time in October 2003, there have been nearly 700 blog posts written on the subject of the Iraq War. The focus of these posts range from the ever-shifting justifications of why we went to war in the first place, to the original lamestream media that failed to ask the Bush Administration tough questions, and everything in between. A suggestion: Withdrawal Method.

In this post, however, as we can now definitively say that the Iraq War is over, I would like to tally up a sampling of some final facts, figures, and statistics about our 9 year engagement in Iraq. Unless indicated otherwise, the numbers cited come from the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, which is up to date for November 30, 2011.

Death Toll

U.S. Troops Killed: 4,486

U.S. Troops Wounded: 32,226

British Troops Killed: 179

Other Coalition Troops Killed: 137

Private Contractors Killed:  528

Iraqi Civilians Killed: 104,080 – 113,728    

(source: Iraq Body Count)

Journalists Killed: 150

Cost of War

Total Cost of Iraq War: $801.9 billion    

(source: Congressional Research Service)

Money Lost to Contractor Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: $31 to $60 billion

or $12 million per day    (note: combined for Iraq and Afghanistan – source: Commission on Wartime Contracting)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says an agreement could have been reached to keep more American troops in Iraq into next year.

Citing a trip he recently took to the country, McCain said on ABC’s “This Week”: “[The Iraqis] were ready to negotiate. The United States didn’t have a plan as to how many troops should remain behind. How could we expect the Iraqis to sit down and agree?”

And McCain said the issue of immunity for American troops could have been resolved.

“It could have been negotiated, I know because I was there at the time,” McCain said. “The question of immunity could have been resolved. The question of immunity is being used as an excuse.”

Leave it to a cranky old maverick to rationalize that the Iraqi’s request for justice and accountability when it comes to troop misconduct is an excuse and not a valid motive in itself. Anyway, his stance shouldn’t be too surprising, because he infamously said in 2008 that “it would be fine with me” if the United States stayed in Iraq for 100 years. I guess he won’t be so lucky as to get his wish.

The New York Times published an unflattering article yesterday on the practice of the government contracting out services to private companies. The article examined the findings of a study done by a nonprofit organization called the Project of Government Oversight, and found,

in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers.

No surprise here — We’ve just finished a decade of reckless and wasteful spending that has been symbolized by the no-bid cost-plus tax-free contracts of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, a congressional panel looked at the results of this practice and estimated that

the U.S. has wasted or misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan, or as much as one out of every four dollars spent on wartime contracting in the past decade.

Meanwhile, the very same Republicans who voted for this excess that led us into the deficit now act like they are the financially responsible ones and refuse to do anything to help the country recover.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that these statements apply equally to the first two years of the Obama administration.

If it hurts the economy to finance these huge war expenditures by borrowing, then why has Obama made exactly zero efforts to do anything about it? I don’t see how it’s a defense to say “But Bush started it!” Maybe, but Obama cheerfully continued it. As if there was no choice but to do so. And, of course, the whole point of that quote from his speech is that there was always a choice. There was a choice for Bush. And there was a choice for Obama. And Obama made the same choice as Bush. Even though he’s been criticizing Bush’s choice for the last three years.

I really think that Obama should have proposed a “Bush’s Wars” tax increase early in 2009. Perhaps a temporary increase, to be phased out as the wars wound down.

Clearly, the wars needed to be paid for. And there was no reason for Obama to take the political heat for this necessity. But it really shouldn’t have been too difficult — even for the hapless Democrats — to hang this fairly and squarely around Bush’s neck.

I’m not saying the Republicans — together with the elements of the Democratic Party who have proven time and again that they are easily intimidated by Republican rhetoric — would have actually allowed the tax increase to go through. But doesn’t Obama’s consistent rhetoric on the irresponsibility of funding these two wars by borrowing require that he should at least have tried?

And wouldn’t he have won politically even by losing?

President Obama‘s Oval Office address was impressive and perplexing. Politically, I liked the clever pivot to the domestic economy, but he left me utterly confused about the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we to continue to spend trillions supposedly building “democracy” in those nations or not? He still has not defined what success means. If we’re just getting the hell out of those countries, then say say so and do so. But as always, Obama seems to be trying to split the difference between the irreconcilable. That is perhaps his greatest strength — or weakness.

It might be a strength if he had actually managed to get anywhere trying to do this. (Not just a strength, actually, but a miracle.) But, of course, he hasn’t. Because that’s what the word “irreconcilable” means, after all.

Iraq’s top army officer has criticised as premature the planned US troop withdrawal by the end of next year.

Lt Gen Babaker Zebari warned that the Iraqi military might not be ready to take control for another decade.

The US says it is on target to end combat operations by the end of August and meet its deadline for removing all troops by the end of 2011.

It has 64,000 soldiers in Iraq. About 50,000 will remain until 2011 to train Iraqi forces and protect US interests.

Gen Zebari’s warning echoes the remark by Saddam Hussein‘s former Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz last week that the Americans were “leaving Iraq to the wolves”.

But the White House says President Barack Obama is satisfied with the progress made in Iraq, which will allow US troops to transfer security to local forces as planned.

Gen Zebari told a defence conference in Baghdad that the Iraqi army would not be able to ensure the country’s security until 2020 and that the US should keep its troops in Iraq until then.

“At this point, the withdrawal [of US forces] is going well, because they are still here, but the problem will start after 2011,” he said.

“The politicians must find other ways to fill the void after 2011… If I were asked about the withdrawal, I would say to politicians: the US army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020.”

Seven weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, a special elections court disqualified a winning parliamentary candidate, likely reversing the narrow defeat of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s coalition and possibly allowing him the first chance to form a new coalition government.

The court disqualified the candidate on charges he was a loyalist of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and left open the possibility or barring still more.

The court’s decisions, if upheld on appeal, would erase the two-seat victory by a largely secular coalition led by Ayad Allawi, a Shiite who served as an interim prime minister after the American overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

Like they say, if at first you don’t succeed…

What I find really puzzling is Iraqi election math. For instance, how does disqualifying one winning candidate erase a two-seat margin?

Then there’s this:

The court also disqualified 51 other losing candidates and the votes they received will be discarded, requiring a recalculation of the winners – and losers – across the ballot. Under Iraq’s tortuous and untested election laws, that could cost Mr. Allawi’s bloc a second seat, while awarding seats to Mr. Maliki or other parties, officials said.

I’m no expert on local eccentricities in democracy across the world, but I would venture a guess that there are very few democracies where disqualifying losing candidates can have the effect of reversing election results. Under what conceivable set of rules could disqualifying losing candidates (and the votes they received) require a recalculation of who’s the winner? If you disqualify a losing candidate and nullify his votes, doesn’t the vote count of the remaining candidates remain unchanged? Whoever won before is still the winner?

The funny thing is that neither the NYT nor Steven Lee Myers, who wrote the piece, find anything puzzling in the two passages I’ve quoted. They offer no explanation of any kind, for either statement. They don’t even seem to realize that any explanation is called for.

So, in all fairness, the statement “Isn’t democracy wonderful!” should be balanced by the statement “Isn’t journalism wonderful!”

(2)
I have not yet found a clear exposition anywhere, but my current hypothesis — based on much reading between the lines of articles written by wily journalists who know better than to give too much away lest they actually inform the public — is as follows:

• The Iraqi elections don’t seem to operate as a bunch of separate contests for individual seats.
• There seems to be some notion of taking the aggregate vote count of each party and allocating them seats based on the aggregate number of votes they received.
• The candidates of each party are ranked by the number of votes they received.
• Then, if a party is allocated ten seats, the first ten candidates on its list are deemed to be elected.
• So when a bunch of candidates are disqualified, and their votes nullified, the number of of seats allocated to a given party may or may not change.
• If it doesn’t change, but two of its candidates were disqualified, then the next two candidates on its list are deemed to be elected.

(Here’s the article I found that came closest to expressing some of this.)

I find it truly mindboggling that the NYT would publish the article they did without providing any kind of explanation at all of this unique and unfamiliar election system.

Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing until-now secret video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.

None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.

Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.

The military had successfully suppressed this video since 2007, and then Wikileaks had to come along and fuck up a perfectly good cover-up:

In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.

Anyone who follows official rhetoric with even half their mind knows that we have the finest military in the world. These must be the exceptions who prove the rule:

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.

A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”

Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.

And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”
[...]
Unveiling the video at the National Press Club on Monday morning, (Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks) said the helicopter crew approached its job as if it were a video game, not something involving human lives. Their desire was simply to kill,” he said. “Their desire was to get high scores on that computer game.”

For the record, this was the official initial obligatory cover-up:

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians (Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40). According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

But Bleichwehl is a rank amateur compared to Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich:

Washington Post reporter David Finkel described the incident — and the video — in great detail in his September 2009 book, “The Good Soldiers“. A summary can be found here.

Finkel also described a review session after Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, commander of the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment and his soldiers returned to base, which “concluded that everyone had acted appropriately.” (Kauzlarich was also involved in the Army’s Pat Tillman cover-up, and later told ESPN that the reluctance of Tillman’s parents to accept the military’s story that he was killed by enemy action, rather than friendly fire, was the unfortunate result of their lack of Christian faith.)

(Not to worry, I have it on good authority that Kauzlarich has it totally wrong. A lack of Christian faith only screws you in the afterlife, not over here.

Remember, Kauzlarich had access to the video when he concluded, no doubt due to his strong Christian faith, “that everyone had acted appropriately.” I don’t know why, but I get the very distinct feeling that his afterlife will turn out to be very different from what he fondly imagines.)

Like Dan Froomkin, who I’ve been quoting all along, I saved the best part for last:

Just last month, WikiLeaks posted the results of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation into none other than WikiLeaks itself. The report determined that WikiLeaks “represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.”

And the video shows us what the military considers the appropriate way to deal with people who don’t even constitute any kind of threat to the US Army, or any member thereof.

Last time we looked in on Gramps, he was befuddled about what it takes to repeal a bill. Or, to be fair to him, that may just have been a carefully calculated con (since the recipe essentially involved McCain telling Republicans that if they wanted healthcare reform to be repealed immediately, all they had to do was tuck some money under McCain’s pillow; the Repeal Fairy would take care of the rest).

But I don’t see how anyone can put any wait-he-may-still-have-some-marbles-left spin on this statement from a recent townhall meeting in Nashua, NH:

There’s a lot of other issues that I, we’d like to [inaudible], but I’d just wanted to say again because our veterans are here, that I’m happy to tell you that elections in Iraq went okay. Look, democracy is a hard thing, but it was a contested election and there’s no other country in the Middle East besides Israel where there’s a contested election. And the most importantly than that, now for three months, there has not been a single American servicemember killed or wounded in Iraq.

The number of Americans actually killed or wounded in Iraq in the last three months — as of March 13, when McCain made that statement — is 101 (12 dead, 89 wounded).

(Of course, by current Republican standards, McCain’s statement may well qualify as perfectly accurate — “Most importantly than that, your honor, it wasn’t a single American, it was a hundred and one” — but somehow I don’t see even McCain hiding behind the skirts of that argument.)

I am now convinced that we are eventually going to learn that John McCain has been suffering from a rare, degenerative brain disease for a while now.

Tony Blair’s claims that Iran now poses as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein‘s Iraq have been dismissed as a “piece of spin” by the British ambassador to Tehran.

Sir Richard Dalton was fiercely critical of Blair’s testimony at the Iraq inquiry yesterday, in which the former Prime Minister compared Iran’s nuclear proliferation to the perceived threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program before the war.

One way to look at this, of course, is that Tony Blair — who, by any objective standard, stands thoroughly disgraced by all the revelations about the way he blindly and single-mindedly took Britain to war in Iraq — is trying to argue that Saddam Hussein posed as big a threat in 2003 as Iran poses now.

Well, no sane person right now is advocating that the free world needs to invade Iran in order to neutralize the threat it poses (to world peace, or to the strategic interests of the U.S. or Britain).

So even by Tony Blair’s own argument, there was no call to invade Iraq in 2003.

On top of that, if we note that most people who are not card-carrying neo-cons firmly believe that Saddam Hussein posed even less of a threat in 2003 than Iran poses today — Iran, at least, does give the appearance of making progress towards a nuclear weapon (although the very public manner in which they are going about it raises its own questions) — the invasion of Iraq starts to look even more indefensible.

(2)
Tony Blair, of course, is now a Middle East peace envoy. Somebody thought it was a good idea to take this unrepentant warmonger, with a pathetic-desperate need to justify his hard-on for invading Iraq, and give him a platform for advocating what next needs doing in the Middle East.

By all appearances, Blair now has a hard-on for invading Iran:

Tony Blair has been accused of warmongering spin for claiming that western powers might be forced to invade Iran because it poses as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein.

Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Iran, accused Blair of trying to make confrontation with Iran an electoral issue after the former prime minister repeatedly singled out its Islamic regime as a global threat in his evidence to the Iraq war inquiry yesterday.

Blair said many of the arguments that led him to confront the “profoundly wicked, almost psychopathic” Saddam Hussein seven years ago now applied to the regime in Tehran.

“We face the same problem about Iran today,” he told the Chilcot inquiry.

Dalton, the UK ambassador to Iran from 2002 until 2006, said it was essential that all the political parties made clear in the run-up to the general election that there would be no repeat of Blair’s actions in respect of Iran.

“One result of Tony Blair’s intervention on Iran – he mentioned Iran 58 times – is to put the question of confronting Iran into play in the election,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

“We need to be much clearer, as voters, with our politicians and with our candidates that we expect a different behaviour and a greater integrity in our democracy next time.”

This hard-on has already lasted well over four hours. If the dude had any sense (or shame) he would retire from public life, and go see a doctor.

(If I were crafting a fitting epitaph for our Tony, I can see myself borrowing some of his own words. To wit, “profoundly wicked, almost psychopathic” would appear to fit like a glove. Though, I might, on reflection, change that last word to sociopathic.)

(3)
Any way you slice it, “Tony Blair, Middle East peace envoy” is an oxymoron.