5 years after the fall of Saddam

5 years after the fall of Saddam, Iraq still yearning for stability


Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of U.S. troops entering Baghdad; and the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war's toll down.


There are a million or more Iraqis living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and the pitiful toll of fear and deprivation on Iraqi streets.

Worst of all were the moments when war and its arguments were reduced from the remote, and political, to the intensely personal, and to that terrible sense, familiar to anybody who has experienced war, that nothing, or almost nothing, can justify its wounds.