After nearly a decade of deployments, surges, and setbacks, after thousands of lives lost and over one trillion in taxpayers dollars spent, President Obama has announced that – in keeping with the timetable originally established by President Bush – all U.S. troops will withdraw from Iraq by the end of the year.  At a time when the economy is at the forefront of America’s attention and concerns about an over-stretched military are increasing, many will view the redeployment of our Iraqi military contingent as a good thing for the country.  Others undoubtedly will lambast the decision as a short-sighted abandonment of the mission in Iraq.

In order to evaluate the wisdom of a total troop withdrawal, several questions must be asked and answered.  A good place to start would be to revisit the rationale that was offered for our engagement and ask ourselves whether or not it was warranted in the first place.  The Bush administration built its case for war on the claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that he was engaged in dangerous relationships with radical Islamist terror groups, and that this combination of factors posed a grave threat to the security of the free world.

At the time that this case was advanced, both the Congress and the American people found these to be compelling reasons to move forward with combat operations in Iraq.  In the ensuing years, as the insurgency exploded, casualties rose, and the evidence of WMD waned, public and political support for the war tanked.  But then there was the Surge, which seemed to reverse our fortunes and offer hope that Iraq was not a lost cause after all.

Now, as our engagement draws to a close and we review the roller coaster ride that has been the last nine years in Iraq, what takeaways do we have that can inform our decision making the next time we are confronted with an apparent call to arms abroad?  What, precisely, have we accomplished?  Is America safer and more secure today than we were before the Iraqi intervention?  Have our efforts succeeded in establishing Iraq as an anchor for democracy in the notoriously repressive region?  Have we provided a framework for Sunnis and Shiites to resolve future conflicts without resorting to violence?  Do the Iraqi people appreciate America for its role in liberating them from the tyranny of Saddam?  Will the country descend into chaos without an American presence to maintain order and stability?  What return on America’s investment of blood, sweat, toil and tears did the war yield?

The American people deserve straight answers to these questions, but so far no politician has stepped up to offer a candid assessment.  Will Mr. Obama answer these questions?  Will the Republican aspirants for president offer anything more than sound bites in response to them?  Are they capable of addressing anything other than the economic issues of our time?  They better be, because the so-called War on Terror has not only drained our treasury, it has taken an enormous physical, mental, and emotional toll on the young warriors and their families who’ve born the brunt of this war.  For them, the price of our engagement has been far more than economic.

During military conflicts, the fog of war often obscures the combatants’ vision, but now that our troops are returning home, we must engage in a clear and sober assessment of whether our mission was really accomplished.  We don’t need photo ops of the President in a flight suit on the deck of a carrier with a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished,” we just need the cold hard truth.  Was it worth it – why or why not?

Do we have the courage to ask this question given all that has transpired?  More importantly, will our leaders answer it?

Pope Benedict [left] Rome [yesterday] for his historic pastoral trip to the Holy Land (May 8-15). The trip has six main purposes which may be summarized in a phrase: to build peace through speaking truth. We will publish a regular commentary on the events of the Pope’s trip.

The way for Israel to secure its future lies not through making war, but through building a just peace, the Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Baghdad, Iraq, Jean Benjamin Sleiman, told Inside the Vatican magazine on the eve of Pope’s departure for the Holy Land.

“This trip is very dear to Pope’s heart,” the archbishop said. “But it is also very important for Israel. The Pope in his addresses will layout the principles by which the Israelis and Palestinians in coming months and years can develop a lasting peace. The question is whether this message will be heard and acted upon. I think it is a historically dramatic occasion when one man will speak words which will, if they are listened to, change history.”

Sleiman, 63, a native of Lebanon, has been Latin-rite bishop of Baghdad for eight years, since 2001. He is considered one of the leading spokesman among Catholics in the Middle East for the continued presence of the Christian community of that part of the world. He spoke to Inside the Vatican (Photo below: Archbishop Sleiman with the author meeting in Washington D.C.) in Washington DC, where he was meeting with US Senators and Congressmen to discuss the life of the Christian community in Iraq and its prospects for a secure future.

The Archbishop is persuaded that, despite the difficulty facing the Christians of Iraq, there are profound reasons to stay there and, if they have left, to return.

“We have had a tremendous flight of Christians from Iraq,” he said. “This is what I told the Pope on my last visit with him.

“I explained that many of the young people who seek a better life in places like London and Paris and Stockholm end up losing their faith. Iraq society puts tremendous value on a close-knit family. When the young people leave Iraq and get off on their own, away from their parents and grandparents, they often lose their way.

“So from a pastoral perspective, I feel compelled as a bishop to encourage the Christians to stay in Iraq, even thought I understand their desire to seek a better life elsewhere. I know that the ‘better life’ for them would be to keep their faith.”

When the archbishop spoke of his talks with Pope Benedict, he became animated. “Pope Benedict is a holy man, a intelligent man, and a humble man,” he said. “He is kind and he listens attentively to those to whom he speaks.”

Sleiman was born in Lebanon, near Byblos. He is one of five children and grew up speaking French and Arabic (he also speaks excellent English and Italian).

He felt the first promptings of a religious vocation in the admiration  he felt for several of the priest who were his teachers. But later his vocation entered a deeper phase.

“I no longer simply wanted to imitate the life and character of the men I admired,” he said. “I wanted to commit myself totally to something higher — to the highest thing I could find. And that highest was the priesthood, conforming my life to the life of Christ.”

“The Muslims of the world are very confident that they will be the planet’s future,” he continued. “But I believe the future is in Christ. The Pope will proclaim this hope throughout his trip, to everyone in the Middle East, and to the whole world watching.”

Sleiman said he would have been in Jordan to greet the Pope upon his arrival, but the need to explain the  situation of the Christians in Iraq to U.S. officials was so urgent that he decided to take more than a week in the United States to make his case.

The man who discovered and promoted Sleiman for the position in Baghdad was the Italian Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, in 2001 the head of the Vatican’s Congregation of Oriental Churches, under Pope John Paul II. Silvestrini, a career Vatican diplomat who has since retired, visited Saddam Hussein personally to try to persuade him to come to a compromise with the Western powers before the 2003 war began.

Both Silverstrini and Pope John Paul II found in Sleiman a man with the diplomatic tact to work well in the explosive atmosphere of Baghdad and with the deep faith needed to be an effective pastor to the diverse Latin-rite community in the Iraqi capital (some 30,000 Poles, 6,000 Brazilians and many other nationalities).

No matter who is elected president, American forces will remain in Iraq for a considerable period of time. The serious points at issue have to do with troop numbers, deployments, missions, and the question of a permanent American base in Iraq; “End It Now” and similar bumper-sticker admonitions ill fit the real world of moral and political responsibility. America’s Mesopotamian expedition has been very costly in lives, treasure, and political good will. Domestically, however, the adult questions have to do with what we’ve learned about the exercise of American power in a world in which the art of statecraft remains a subtle and complex one.

So whether it’s President McCain or President Obama, the next commander-in-chief will have to see the war in Iraq through to a successful conclusion. The possibility of just that — a  stable Iraq, safe for pluralism, governed responsively and responsibly — has been enhanced by the counterinsurgency strategy implemented by General David Petraeus over the past 18 months. Unlike other major American institutions — the Congress, for example — the U.S. military has an impressive capacity to learn from its mistakes, and from the mistakes of the nation’s political leadership. That, in itself, is a positive lesson to be drawn from the past five difficult years.

But it’s not enough. The country remains divided on the nature of the threat that could no longer be ignored after 9/11. A common understanding of what we are fighting, and why, is essential in building and sustaining a bipartisan consensus that will allow presidents of both parties to conduct the war against global jihadism over the next several decades — and to do so through all the instruments of statecraft, of which armed force is only one. That struggle is, among many other things, a struggle in defense of religious freedom — a core Catholic concern in this or any other election year.

So here are some questions that Catholic voters might pose to the two principal presidential candidates:

1. How do you define the enemy in this new kind of war? What role does distorted religious conviction play in creating the dangers we face from terrorists?

2. Whatever you may have thought in 2003, how do you think Iraq “fits” within the global struggle against jihadism today? Do you think it possible that Iraq might become a kind of Middle Eastern Poland-the domino that sets in motion a long-term regional trend toward responsible and responsive government?

3. What can the United States do to ensure that those Christian Iraqis who have fled Iraq in recent years have the opportunity to return to a home that is safe for them? What should the U.S. be doing now to protect the remnants of Iraq’s once-vibrant Christian communities?

4. What specific steps will you take to enhance American intelligence capabilities, which have consistently failed us over the past decade? What training programs in the languages and cultures of the Islamic world will you implement in order to upgrade the capacities of both the CIA and the Department of State?

5. If the war against jihadism is, at bottom, a contest between two very different ideas of the just society, what will you do to enhance our national capacity to make the case for civility, tolerance, and religious freedom through our public diplomacy? Is broadcasting American pop culture into the Middle East the most effective way to illustrate our convictions about the good society? What should we be telling an Arab Islamic world, caught in a narrative of failure of its own making, about the goods that freedom brings? Or should we just drop the subject?

6. How will you guide the evolution of an American military that has become confident in its counter-insurgency capabilities and that now has a cadre of brilliant younger officers formed in the hard school of learning-from-our-mistakes in Iraq?

7. In the cases of Iran and North Korea, and indeed as a general principle, do you favor coupling U.S. anti-nuclear proliferation diplomacy to an American  pledge to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons?

8. What did you get wrong about Iraq?