Bret Stephens makes the case in the Wall Street Journal that the war in Iraq has resulted in victory for the United States, for the people of Iraq, and it was all worth the cost. Andrew Sullivan strongly disagrees: Saddam's "murderousness was emphatically not on the scale of the hundreds of thousands of fatalities and millions of refugees and countless victims of torture and ethnic cleansing in the post-invasion chaos for which the United States bears a great deal of responsibility. And we know Saddam would, moreover, have been a counter-weight to Iran, not in alliance with the Tehran mullahs, as a future Shiite government is likely to be. And the US is, to a great extent, still powerless to shape the future of a country still riven by sectarian conflict and suspicion, still unable to stand on its own feet, and still opaque to outsiders. And you have to add to the costs of the invasion the profound moral costs of the torture regime, exposed so indelibly at Abu Ghraib, the shift of resources away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the costs to the European alliance of the invasion, and to US credibility in intelligence, and up to $3 trillion in treasure. Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy your war?"
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