Iraq has nothing to do with anyone being safe in America and if you don't understand that then there's really nothing I can say to you..
Close to 1 Trillion but we are not out yet: Notes and Sources: Cost of War Counter | National Priorities Project
Two problems. 1. It took Bush 6 years to realize that his generals, who he fired, were correct when they warned him that the Iraq invasion force was too small to control the country. Bush/Rumsfeld expected that a jeffersonian democracy would break out and we could just go home. When it all went south he allowed Rumsfeld to convince him to keep it small, which was a failure. He had to fire Rumsfeld and start listening to his generals and send enough troops to get the mission done. WAY too late. 2. The surge was Petraeus' plan along with buying off the Sunni tribal chiefs, which was the real turning point.
How is any of this our responsibility? Why don't we go off nation-building in all of the 40 or so totalitarian dictatorships in the world? Are we the world's free policeman? What kind of Republican are you, advocating borrowing such big money to do all this for Iraq when we have serious problems of our own? Bush did not stand before America and say "I want to sacrifice a Trillion dollars and 35,000 American casualties to invade and occupy Iran and turn it into a democracy, even though there isn't a democracy anywhere in the arab world, and they have nothing at all that we need. We're going to destroy it and rebuild it with our treasure and US lives even though Iraqis hate us and will just revert to some strongman when we leave." No, Bush stood before us and said we must conquer Iraq because they possessed WMD's which were a clear and present danger to the US. Which was a lie.
