Iraq War: The costs

Blogger and journalist Laura Rozen was confessing a few weeks ago that listening at length to some of the neoconservatives describe their vision for the world, she was becoming more sympathetic to their reasons for invading and occupying Iraq.

I think it's safe to say that she's now reached different conclusions:

What does it come down to? It's trying to remember what was the point of this whole exercise of invading Iraq, which had less to do with Al Qaeda than at least five other governments. To protect this country. To get rid of an admittedly very evil man who had aspired to possess weapons of mass destruction and invaded another big oil producing country twelve years ago. To show that the US was willing to take losses, to project American power into the heart of the Arab world. But isn't it clear that after a year of demonstrating how stretched thin and desperate we are in Iraq, that what we have wrought is so incredibly destructive for Americans, that the Iraq misadventure has demonstrated weakness, failure, incompetence, arrogance, and now -- this -- that, in the eyes of most in Iraq and I would bet most people in the Middle East, we are perceived as hardly any better and arguably worse than the power we overthrew in Baghdad? What was the point of this little exercise? Whatever it was, at some point, better sooner than later, one has to count one's losses and go home. This administration clearly doesn't know how to climb its way out of a paperbag. It doesn't have any fresh ideas for how to fix the situation in Iraq that doesn't have us reinstalling Saddam's Republican Guard or turning our own personnel into war criminals. Clearly we've got to change our regime. And put [Richard "Prince of Darkness"] Perle, [Ahmed] Chalabi [until very recently the neocons' favorite to run Iraq] and the others on trial. Simply having them lose their jobs will not reveal all they did to get us in this half century rare world class screw up.

Rozen, who covered the Balkans in the 1990s, is particularly disgusted at the revelations of torture and Abu Ghraib and the strong evidence that it was not an aberration at all but a much more systematic problem:

Moreover, doesn't the fact that nobody has lost their jobs, nobody has been fired, nobody has goneto prison, or worse, so far in this case, indicate that something is seriously wrong with the follow through by the US military in investigating these reports of abuse? Isn't there an air of condoning this sort of thing, until it becomes a PR problem? [or a career problem for someone like Sanchez?] Shouldn't we have expected more action in a military system with clear chains of command and photographs for g-d's sake and three internal military investigations conducted several months ago by now? And if we haven't seen any action until the 60 Minutes report, what does that indicate? A serious lack of will, it would seem to me. Should Rumsfeld be implicated for failing to condemn this?