Let’s start with the obvious waste. We know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives since the Bush administration invaded their country in March 2003, that almost two million may have fled to other countries, and that possibly millions more have been displaced from their homes in ethnic-cleansing campaigns. We also know that an estimated 4.5 million Iraqi children are now malnourished and that this is but “the tip of the iceberg” in a country where diets are generally deteriorating, while children are dying of preventable diseases in significant numbers; that the Iraqi economy is in ruins and its oil industry functioning at levels significantly below its worst moments in Saddam Hussein’s day–and that there is no end in sight for any of this.

We know that, while the new crew of American military officials in Baghdad are starting to tout the “successes” of the President’s “surge” plan, they actually fear a collapse of support at home within the next half-year, believe they lack the forces necessary to carry out their own plan, and doubt its ultimate success. What a tragic waste.

We know that while the U.S. military focuses on the Iraqi capital and al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, taking casualties in both places, fleeing Iraqi refugees are claiming that jihadis have largely taken over the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, and renamed it “the Islamic Emirate of Samarra” — a grim sign indeed. (Here’s just one refugee’s assessment: “that large areas of the farms around Samarra have been transformed into camps like those of Al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.”)

We know that, as the US military concentrates its limited forces and the minimal Iraqi units that fight with them, in a desperate battle to control the capital, for both Sunnis and Shia, the struggle simply spreads to less well-defended areas. We also know that the Sunni insurgents have been honing their tactics around Baghdad, their attacks growing deadlier on the ground and more accurate against the crucial helicopter support system which makes so much of the American occupation possible. Some of them have also begun to wield a new, potentially exceedingly deadly and indiscriminate weapon–trucks filled with chlorine gas, essentially homemade chemical weapons on wheels which can be blown up at any moment.

In other words, before the Bush administration is done two of its bogus prewar claims — that Saddam’s Iraq was linked to the Islamic extremists who launched the 9/11 attacks and that it had weapons of mass destruction — could indeed become realities. What a pathetic waste.

We know that, while Americans tend to talk about the “Iraq War,” with a few exceptions like the fierce battle with Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in Najaf in 2004, it has actually been a remarkably unsuccessful pacification campaign against a Sunni insurgency alone; that is, a war against less than 20% of the Iraqi population (even if every Sunni supports some insurgent faction). We know that billions and billions of dollars have gone down the rat-hole of Iraqi “reconstruction”–with multimillions more simply stolen or utterly unaccounted for by American financial overseers–and that what reconstruction has been done is generally substandard and overpriced in the extreme. What a waste of resources.

We know, on the other hand, that a series of vast military bases have been built in Iraq of a permanency that is hard to grasp from thousands of miles away and that the largest embassy in the history of the universe has been going up on schedule on an almost Vatican-sized plot of land in Baghdad’s highly fortified Green Zone to represent the United States to a government whose powers don’t extend far beyond that zone. Talk about waste!

We know that we stand at the edge of a possible war with Iran. It could come about thanks to a Bush administration decision to launch a massive air attack on that country’s nuclear facilities; or it could simply happen, thanks to ever more provocative U.S. acts and Iranian responses, leading to a conflict which would undoubtedly play havoc with the global energy supply, threaten a massive global recession or depression, and create untold dangers for the American military in Iraq, which might then have to face something closer to an 80% Iraqi insurgency. What a ridiculous waste.

[Part 2 of this series, “Wasting Our Soldiers’ Lives,” will appear Friday at The Notion.]