Was Iraq war worth its cost to the US?

TEN years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Americans, Iraqis and others are asking whether the past decade of U.S. involvement in Iraq was worth it. Some respond with a resounding yes or no, expecting the force of their reply to be sufficient justification for their judgment. The frustrating reality is that it is still too early to form a definitive answer. Rather than leave this emotional question at that, it is worth identifying what we are in a position to evaluate and to make preliminary assessments of the relevant variables, which are still too fluid to judge definitively.

Let's begin by considering the factors we can reasonably appraise. First is that Hussein is no longer in power. Although a minority of Iraqis would embrace his return if it were on offer, most have greater hopes for a more meaningful life with him gone. Although violence continues, most Iraqis no longer have to worry about the arbitrary arrests, disappearances and killings that touched huge swaths of society under the Baath regime. Iraqis in the new security forces have died in significant numbers, but nothing on the scale of the hundreds of thousands who met their deaths as fodder for Hussein's ruthless wars. Concerns about Iraq's instability affecting the broader region remain, but the regime that invaded two of its neighbors in little more than a decade no longer rules to plot a third.

Second, Iraq has become a meaningful contributor to global oil markets. It now pumps more oil than any other member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries besides Saudi Arabia. Iraq is poised to contribute much more in the years ahead. This production has in part allowed the U.S. to pursue a sanctions-based strategy against Iran's nuclear program and could prove critical to meeting global demand at a reasonable price if the world economy improves in the months ahead.

Let's next consider factors that won't grow clearer with the passage of time, such as the counterfactual. Some may imagine that, in the absence of the invasion of Iraq, the Middle East today would look much as it did in 2002: mostly stagnant and repressed, but more or less stable. There are, however, reasons to doubt this scenario, particularly when we consider Iran. Were Hussein still in power, Iran would probably be more quiescent in the region. But Iran's nuclear ambitions would probably be even more intense than they are today. Hussein would have wriggled free from sanctions many years ago, reaped large windfalls from the high oil prices of the mid-2000s and, consistent with the findings of the Kay Report, continued the pursuit of the weapons that had eluded him by 2003. It is at least possible that Hussein would now have nuclear weapons. At best, Iran under the Islamic Republic and Iraq under Hussein would be locked in a race for a nuclear weapon, making the Gulf arguably the most dangerous region of the world.

Another factor about which we have scant new information is the opportunity costs of a decade of American attention and effort focused on Iraq and the political capital spent getting others to support U.S. endeavors there. These costs are hard to quantify, but certainly are significant. The U.S. might have paid more attention to the rise of China and shoring up its Asian allies, something to which it has turned belatedly. Or the U.S. might have concentrated more on its own hemisphere, helping it better integrate and meet its own energy needs.

One place where the outcome would probably not be different, however, is Afghanistan. Many suggest that the war in Iraq came at the expense of success in Afghanistan, although this claim doesn't stand up well under scrutiny. The considerable resources devoted to Iraq are unlikely to have been allocated to Afghanistan even in the absence of the Iraq War. This is particularly true when we look at the early years, when the dedication of greater resources might have prevented the security and governance vacuum that created fertile ground for the later reemergence of the Taliban. At the time, the U.S. expected to be fighting the war on terrorism in multiple engagements worldwide, which meant it couldn't afford extensive long-term commitments to any one theater. Last, let's consider two other variables, crucial to the final reckoning, but still in flux and therefore eluding judgment. First is the domestic outcome in Iraq, which remains volatile and fluid. Iraq has built a set of institutions on paper, and to some extent in practice, that could serve as the foundation of a modern, democratic state. Its constitution, while imperfect, is one of the most progressive in the region. Moreover, in the past several years, Iraqi leaders have largely managed a number of core disputes through the political process, not through armed opposition or violence.