• The following is from an editorial in the San Jose Mercury News:
The lessons of Iraq, 10 years on, are manifold and painful. But looking back on the debacle, there is one thing this nation should have learned above all: humility.
It's hard to imagine a more spectacular failure in judgment by our leaders a decade ago.
Billions of words have been written about this war, but few are more telling than those of the Costs of War Project, which set out to calculate the human and economic toll of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The consequences it details are astonishing.
The project estimates that, including interest, the Iraq war will cost taxpayers more than $3.9 trillion by 2053; the original Pentagon estimate was about $50 billion. Decades of health care for returning veterans will cost nearly $500 billion.
The number of dead Americans is nearing 8,000, including 4,488 service members and at least 3,400 U.S. contractors — people often left out of the casualty count.
More than 100,000 have been wounded. About 134,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the violence.
U.S. leaders got everything about the Iraq war wrong. Everything. And that must inform everything about this country's approach to conflict.
Interventionists urge President Barack Obama to launch air strikes against a brutal Syrian regime. Talk of war against Iran is rampant. Indeed, there is a moral case to be made in both cases. But that's not enough. Neither is the broad umbrella of protecting our national interests.
The murder of four American diplomats in Benghazi followed what had seemed like a fairly simple and hopeful victory by revolutionaries in Libya; no wonder we now hesitate to join a war in Syria.