Now that U.S. troops have left Iraq, Americans are taking stock of the staggering price of this nine-year war of choice, in blood (nearly 4,500 Americans dead, 33,000 wounded), in fractured relations worldwide and in monetary terms (nearly $1 trillion in direct spending; several times that when counting the fivefold increase in oil prices, the long-term cost of caring for veterans and wounded, and the replacement of weapons and equipment — a total that may top the cost of World War II).
An additional casualty is the loss of a mechanism for enforcing nonproliferation agreements, though how this might have changed the course of subsequent events — in Iran, for example — cannot be known.
The public may also never know exactly why or when the Bush administration made its tragically misguided decision to go to war. Former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill has said that unseating Saddam Hussein dominated a meeting with President George W. Bush 10 days after Bush's inauguration — eight months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among the many reasons posited — avenging an Iraqi attack on Bush's father, getting the United States' hands on Mideast oil, extending democracy across the region — only the charge that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction came close to selling the American people on war.