The longest and most contentious war in U.S. history ended this month with T.S Eliot's proverbial whimper. A dictator was removed, a regime transformed, democracy imposed. While the soldiers celebrated their departure, the response in the United States was muted. A conflict that started with "shock and awe" ended with a yawn. Now, Americans and Iraqis are toting up the cost and trying to decide whether it was worth the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
The second Iraq war was launched March 20, 2003, when U.S. President George W. Bush led a multinational coalition against Saddam Hussein, arguing that the Iraqi president was a menace to world peace because of his support for terrorists and his presumed desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Those weapons were never found and the link to terrorists — as least those who had attacked the U.S. — was weak.
Nonetheless, the Bush administration insisted that war was justified and it produced alternative rationales for invasion, such as planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East or ending the Baghdad regime's human rights abuses. In one of the more candid and telling comments, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called the WMD claim the lowest common denominator, "the one claim everyone could agree on."