Book: Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now

From the Forward, Why We Wrote This Book:
"Events have proven that the U.S. government's decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003 was a calamitous mistake. So far more than 2,500 [as of the first printing of the book] young Americans have been killed; more than 16,000 have been wounded, half of them with disabilities that can never be repaired; and more than 40,000 have received severe psychological damage for which they, and we, will be paying for decades to come. As bad as these results of the war have been, they are just the beginning. The Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center has learned that perhaps one in every ten – about 50,000 – returning soldiers has suffered a concussion whose effects – memory loss, severe headaches, and confused thinking – will linger throughout his or her life. Exposure to depleted uranium is expected to add thousands of more patients, many of whom will develop cancer, to hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. No one knows how many Iraqi civilians the United States has killed. Estimates run from 30,000 to 100,000. Since Iraq has a total population of less than 10% of Americas, even the lowest estimate means that virtually every Iraqi has a relative, neighbor or friend whose eath he or she blames on us. A whole society has been criplled and may not recover for a generation or more... The material costs of the war will likely bankrupt our economy. They will ultimately reach about $2 trillion. That is about $8,000 for each man, woman and child in America. Even many of those who wanted us to attack Iraq, including some of our most senior military officers, now recognize that the war cannot be won. So the high costs have been for naught. The war has been a terrible and useless waste. Instead of recognizing this fact, however, some among the so-called neo-conservatives, are now in favor of what has been called the 'long war' against the 'universal enemy.' This is a recipe for disaster. It could bring upon us, our children and our grandchildren the nightmare described by George Orwell in his novel '1984.' Then we would not even know for what or against whom we are fighting, but in the course of fighting we would be in danger of losing the very things we are told we are fighting to preserve. Today we are truly looking into the abyss toward a hell on earth.

[excerpt from Afterword continued]:
"President Bush has said, 'You're either for us or against us.' The authors of this book are emphatically 'for us.' Both of us have spent years in the service of our nation. But we also emphatically believe that true patriotism is not, as Bush has suggested, blind acquiesence to a misguided policy. Rather, it imposes on citizens the requirement to seek with intelligence, knowledge and sound reasoning a clear view of reality. Public opinion polls tell us that Americans are trying to do so. This book aims to help. So much false information has been given out that the intelligent citizen is hard pressed to get a true picture of reality, so we begin with a summary ofhhow Americans were misled into this needless war. Then we turn to 'damage reports' on the effects of the war – on Americans, on Iraqis and on the U.S. position in world affairs..."
From the Afterword, The Lesson of Iraq: Are there any lesson to be learned from the American venture in Iraq? Thegreat German philosopher of history, Georg WEilhelm Friedrich Hegel doubted our capacity to find out. "Peoples and governments' he wrote, 'never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.' Writing about the Vietnam War, the neoconservative Ameican poolitical scientist Samuel P. Huntington suggested that policy-makers would do best to 'simply blot out of their mind any recollection of this one.' They di. So, in at least some ways, the Iraq war has been proof of George Santayana's admonition that, having not learned from history, we were domed to repeat it. We have repeated soe of the worst mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. The urgent question today is, will the Iraq war itself be similarily blotted out and repeated? The odds are with Hegel and Santayana.