Questions about war in Iraq, Afghanistan

The war in Iraq has been declared over by President Obama, and now negotiations are being started to end the war in Afghanistan. This brings up several questions:

1. What was accomplished by invading Iraq? President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others used several reasons to justify the action starting with “disarming Iraq and Saddam Hussein of their (still to be found) weapons of mass destruction.” Next was “to capture and bring Saddam Hussein to justice” (accomplished within months of the invasion). As much as they tried to tie Iraq to the attack on the World Trade Center, most of the population realized that there was no connection.

2. How did we go off mission relative to avenging Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida for that attack? We seem to finally be focusing our attention on Afghanistan, the home of al-Qaida and where plans for that attack were hatched, but with goals that seemingly have little to do with bringing those terrorists to justice.

The answer to Question 1 seems to be that we wasted several thousand troops, injured and/or disabled many thousand more, slaughtered many thousand Iraqi civilians and destroyed much of that country's infrastructure. By most accounts we did that at a cost of $700 billion because of the 50,000 troops still deployed there and American civilian contractors restoring much of the infrastructure.

That we did invade Iraq seems to be the answer to Question 2.

Other questions: Had we concentrated on al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, rather than Iraq, would we have been successful? How long would it have taken? At what cost? What would be the condition of our economy today?

We seem no closer to capturing and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice than we were on Sept. 12, 2001.

David Lackowski

Wheeling