Walking to Baghdad: 20 Years of War in Iraq (The Takeaway)

Operation Iraqi Freedom will draw to a close on September 1st, 2010. As American forces transition from combat operations into the stability operations of Operation New Dawn, we're thinking about the troops who will be coming home. Just this month, 13,000 troops will return home to the U.S. That's the equivalent of one 747 every day. By the end of next year, all 50,000 remaining troops will come home. We check in with a few veterans who have already made the transition back home. Naveed Ali Shah came home a month ago, after serving as a specialist in the Army. John Jones, former staff sergeant in the Marines, returned from Iraq almost five years ago. 

All week long, we've been focusing on Iraq, where American forces are drawing down this month. We've heard mixed opinions from Iraqis and analysts who say Iraq still lacks stability, infrastructure and a functioning government. Now, we turn to Kurdistan, where the view is altogether different from the rest of Iraq. For Kurds, the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 was largely positive. For decades Kurds had suffered repression and abuse under Saddam Hussein's regime. But what happens when the U.S. pulls out? "The Kurds have an old saying: 'no friends but the mountains,'" says Michael Gunter, a professor of political science at Tennessee Tech who has published several scholarly books on Kurdistan. "The U.S. is their only friend and they are at the mercy of the old enemies when the U.S. leaves." And Waria Salihi, and Iraqi Kurd who chairs El Amin Microfinance, an NGO involved in the reconstruction of Iraq, gives us a view of life on the ground in Kurdistan. He joins us from Kirkuk.

President Obama has announced his commitment to draw down American forces in Iraq after seven years of combat. There will be 90,000 fewer troops in Iraq by the end of next year. But will the costs – financial, human, emotional – come down as the troops come home? One of the foremost experts in the cost of this war, Linda Bilmes, says "we're only just beginning to know the full cost of this war." There are still many unknowns, from the cost of long term veterans' care to replacing damaged and depreciated equipment. There are also difficult questions: How should we assess future costs, such as the 90,000 troops who will leave Iraq but may end up stationed in neighboring Kuwait. Should that count in the cost of this war? Answers to these questions will take a long time to be sorted out, hindering discussions on how to assess if the war was worth it, financially or strategically. Should money even be considered in the same way as security?   We discuss all this with Bilmes, who is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and co-author, with Joseph Stiglitz, of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

As the U.S. prepares for a full drawdown of troops in Iraq, we check in with Lubna Naji, a recent graduate of Baghdad Medical School. She says she is less concerned with the withdrawal of troops from her country than the restoration of services like electricity and water supplies. Life there is "barely tolerable," she says. Although the security situation used to be worse before, every other aspect of life is has worsened. Lubna Naji shares her first-hand perspective as a young student in Baghdad.

At the beginning of his presidency, President Obama pledged to cease combat operations in Iraq by August 31st, 2010. As we near that deadline, Obama seems on track to keep his promise. By the end of this month, combat operations will cease, and only 50,000 support troops will remain in Iraq. By the end of 2011, the president says, they will all come home.    September 1st will represent a promise fulfilled for Obama. However,  the deadline is unfolding differently in Iraq. The leadership structure in Iraq is still uncertain, and violence in the streets remains commonplace. Roadside bombs, helicopter crashes, stray bullets and silenced guns claimed hundreds of Iraqi lives in July, making it one of the deadliest months since 2008. Is this a country ready for a handoff? We ask that question of Jane Arraf, a reporter in Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor, and Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Twenty years ago today, one of the Arab world's most powerful armies invaded its tiny neighbor to the south. Iraqi forces significantly outnumbered and overpowered Kuwait's military as they marched in, and within a short time had overthrown the government. Saddam Hussein declared that the nation of Kuwait no longer existed; Iraqi forces held the country for seven months, until U.S. and coalition forces liberated the occupied country in the first Gulf War. 20 years later, "war" and "Iraq" are still prominent in our vocabulary, and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait can be seen as the beginning of a 20-year American engagement in the Middle East. We look back at August 2nd, 1990, with Caryle Murphy, freelance reporter and contributor to GlobalPost and the Christian Science Monitor, who was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded; and Michael Gordon, military correspondent for The New York Times, and the author of "The Generals' War : The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf," and "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq."