guarding truck convoys, have been contracted out to private companies, whose
losses are omitted from official statistics. Iraqi deaths—far more numerous
than our own—also don’t figure in the totals. Yet the death toll forms our main
knowledge of a war’s cost, since most of us make no personal sacrifice.
Historically, the next event is the war the United States launched against Iraq
in March 2003. However, while chronological, our attack on Iraq was not
obviously logical. To be sure, the Bush administration initially claimed a
connection between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam Hussein. Two days after
we attacked, explaining why, President Bush gave three reasons: “to disarm
Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for
terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” Similarly, Vice President Dick Cheney
called Iraq “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under
assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” Even at the time, the
linkage claim made no sense. Iraq had no connection with the 9/11 attacks on
the United States; Osama bin Laden had nothing but contempt for Saddam
Hussein’s secular and brutal dictatorship; and Hussein, in turn, had no interest
in letting terrorists organize in his police state of a nation.^27
Nor did the “weapons of mass destruction” claim make sense, for Bush’s
aggressive diplomacy had persuaded Hussein to let UN weapons inspectors
back into Iraq the previous November, and they had found no evidence of such
weapons. Hussein’s government had also submitted a report the next month
describing (truthfully, it turned out) how Iraq had dismantled its WMD
programs in the 1990s. The inspectors begged Bush to let them finish their
inspections, but Bush ordered the UN out of Iraq so the invasion could
proceed. After our initial military victory, thorough search confirmed that no
weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. Information suppressed at the
time has since made clear that British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as
President Bush knew before the invasion that Iraq had no WMD, or should
have known.^28 Moreover, even if Iraq’s alleged WMD programs had made the
progress claimed by the Bush administration, they would still have lagged far
behind those of the other two nations Bush denounced as part of the “Axis of
Evil,” Iran and North Korea. Logically, then, we should have attacked those
countries first. Instead, we attacked Iraq—precisely because it was the
weakest target.^29 Among its other problems, our attack on Iraq thus encouraged
Iran and North Korea—along with any other nation wanting to forestall a
possible U.S. attack in the future—to get nuclear and other weapons of mass