The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [140]
What I could not support was “a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” And I said:
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.
The speech was well received; activists began circulating the text on the Internet, and I established a reputation for speaking my mind on hard issues—a reputation that would carry me through a tough Democratic primary. But I had no way of knowing at the time whether my assessment of the situation in Iraq was correct. When the invasion was finally launched and U.S. forces marched unimpeded through Baghdad, when I saw Saddam’s statue topple and watched the President stand atop the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a banner behind him proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” I began to suspect that I might have been wrong—and was relieved to see the low number of American casualties involved.
And now, three years later—as the number of American deaths passed two thousand and the number of wounded passed sixteen thousand; after $250 billion in direct spending and hundreds of billions more in future years to pay off the resulting debt and care for disabled veterans; after two Iraqi national elections, one Iraqi constitutional referendum, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths; after watching anti-American sentiment rise to record levels around the world and Afghanistan begin to slip back into chaos—I was flying into Baghdad as a member of the Senate, partially responsible for trying to figure out just what to do with this mess.
The landing at Baghdad International Airport turned out not to be so bad—although I was thankful that we couldn’t see out the windows as the C-130 bucked and banked and dipped its way down. Our escort officer from the State Department was there to greet us, along with an assortment of military personnel with rifles slung over their shoulders. After getting our security briefing, recording our blood types, and being fitted for helmets and Kevlar vests, we boarded two Black Hawk helicopters and headed for the Green Zone, flying low, passing over miles of mostly muddy, barren fields crisscrossed by narrow roads and punctuated by small groves of date trees and squat concrete shelters, many of them seemingly empty, some bulldozed down to their foundations. Eventually Baghdad came into view, a sand-colored metropolis set in a circular pattern, the Tigris River cutting a broad, murky swath down its center. Even from the air the city looked worn and battered, the traffic on the streets intermittent—although almost every rooftop was cluttered with satellite dishes, which along with cell phone service had been touted by U.S. officials as one of the successes of the reconstruction.
I would spend only a day and a half in Iraq, most of it in the Green Zone, a ten-mile-wide area of central Baghdad that had once been the heart of Saddam Hussein’s government but was now a U.S.-controlled compound, surrounded along its perimeter by blast walls and barbed wire. Reconstruction teams briefed us about the difficulty of maintaining electrical power and oil production in the face of insurgent sabotage;