Was Iraq War worth the cost? 75% of Americans say no

63% of Republicans didn’t think the war was worth the cost

As the insurgency in Iraq threatens the stability of the Shiite-led government there, only 18 percent of Americans think the Iraq War was worth the costs, according to a new poll.

The CBS/New York Times poll asked if the costs of the Iraq invasion, including monetary and loss of American lives, were worth it. A record 75 percent of those surveyed said that it wasn’t worth the costs, up from 67 percent in November 2011 (just before the final withdrawal of US troops) and 45 percent in August 2003, five months after the invasion began.

“Our 2003 invasion of Iraq should be a warning that military force sometimes transforms a genuine problem into something worse. The war claimed 4,500 American lives and, according to a mortality study published in a peer-reviewed American journal, 500,000 Iraqi lives,” Nicholas Kristoff wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert in public finance, tells me that her latest estimate is that the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war will be $4 trillion.”

The survey released Monday found that 63 percent of Republicans and 79 percent each of independents and Democrats didn’t think the war was worth the cost.

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