This will all undoubtedly play out in the crucible of the 2012 presidential campaign, where the foreign-policy gotcha question will be whether the candidates believe the war was “worth it.” Already, leaders of both parties are breaking out the “in vain” cliche, reassuring America that its soldiers did not die as such. Yes, the crusade to reimagine the Iraq War is on — and with it comes a demand for us to suspend our disbelief. In the real-time myth-making, we are being asked to view the invasion’s success through the prism of Saddam Hussein’s death and fragile Iraqi self-governance, as if those objectives, rather than phantom WMD and supposed imminent threats, were the stated mission justifying such a huge expenditure of blood and treasure.

Such hagiography and post-facto revision aside, the only empirical way to determine whether Iraq was “worth it” — and thus, have a clue as to whether future adventurist invasions are worth it — is to perform some kind of cost-benefit analysis.

This wouldn’t be all that difficult to do since our government is already fond of subjecting complex programs to such review. Indeed, federal agencies’ cost-benefit analyses are so meticulous — and merciless — that they actually put prices on American lives (for instance, the EPA uses $9 million per life while the FDA uses $7.9 million). That kind of reductionism is not a partisan issue — it’s a matter of transpartisan consensus in Washington, as presidents of both parties regularly install cost-benefit ideologues into top rule-making positions in government (for example, the White House’s powerful Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was headed by cost-benefit acolyte John Graham under President Bush, and is now headed by cost-benefit fetishist Cass Sunstein under President Obama).

Considering this, such retrospective scrutiny looking at past wars, or prospective scrutiny looking at future ones, would be a relatively simple proposition. Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, we have a basic sense of how many lives are lost and how much cash is spent in a given invasion. For those who insist those wars could result in big costs from terrorist retaliation, we now have a decade’s worth of terrorism statistics during our post-9/11 wars to judge those potential costs, too. Additionally, our intelligence experts can likely estimate how many terrorist attacks we may have thwarted because of such wars. And they can estimate the possible future costs in retaliation and anti-Americanism of drone strikes that, according to the Brookings Institution, kill 10 innocent civilians for every one alleged militant.

But as straightforward as such cost-benefit analyses of war would be, and as much as they might tell us about whether waging war is the right call, there’s a catch: While our government is quick to subject domestic and non-military priorities to dollars-and-cents scrutiny, that same government all but refuses to subject militarism to the same scrutiny. Indeed, the idea of actually trying to answer the simple “worth it” question about war through a cost-benefit analysis is now considered so radical — so unthinkable — in Washington, that President Bush’s chief economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, set off a major firestorm when he dared to even ponder a reporter’s hypothetical question about it.

Why the double standard between domestic programs and military affairs? Because like so many seemingly apolitical policy instruments in Washington today, cost-benefit analyses are primarily used as cudgels exclusively against middle-class programs, rather than employed as a dispassionate means of judging the worth of all initiatives. Put another way, cost-benefit analyses are selectively deployed against — or distorted to kill — programs that threaten powerful corporate interests, but they are often nowhere to be found when they might undermine those interests.

Two examples in 2011 highlight this reality.

One happened earlier this year, when Republicans blocked voluntary Federal Trade Commission guidelines to curb junk-food marketing aimed at kids. As recounted by the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, Missouri Republican Rep. Jo Ann Emerson — who has taken big campaign contributions from PepsiCo, the American Beverage Association and the National Restaurant Association — “inserted language into an appropriations bill that would prohibit the F.T.C. from submitting a final draft of the guidelines before completing a full cost-benefit analysis.” Emerson and her corporate allies obviously believe the cost-benefit analysis will kill the guidelines, because they know the government’s analyses are sufficiently tilted toward overestimating business costs and underestimating societal benefits.

Then came news of the Obama administration politicizing and distorting cost-benefit concerns in killing EPA smog rules. As the New York Times reported, in pushing to enact the rules, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson worked up “a 500-page package with a detailed cost-benefit analysis” showing that “as many as 7,200 deaths, 11,000 emergency room visits and 38,000 acute cases of asthma would be avoided each year.” But when she brought that analysis to former JPMorgan executive-turned-White House chief of staff Bill Daley, he “sens(ed) uproar from business” and then engaged in his own ad hoc cost-benefit scrutiny, “sharply question(ing) the costs and burdens” of the rule on industry. Eventually, he sided with the lobbyists at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who convinced him to ignore “the lung thing, the asthma thing and the kids’ health thing” and kill the rules because “your boss is up for re-election next year.”

In the food guidelines case, a cost-benefit analysis was used as an obstacle. In the smog case, an empirical cost-benefit analysis of pollution controls was first distorted and then supplanted by a political cost-benefit analysis, as White House aides decided that the potential costs to President Obama’s corporate fundraising outweighed the benefit of preventing two 9/11′s worth of casualties every year. Either way, the result was the same: The cost-benefit analysis, seemingly an impartial instrument of technocrats, was used as a potent political weapon.

No doubt, pointing such a powerful, program-killing weapon at the bloated Pentagon budget might sound great to those who oppose our military adventurism. And there’s no doubt America would benefit from — or at least be better informed by — a sober cost-benefit analysis of our current state of Permanent War. But that’s precisely why we don’t get such an analysis on military matters — because it might bring an end to the very adventures and wars that continue to generate such largess for the Military-Industrial Complex.

All the specifics were true. But what about Obama’s claim that the war has come to a end?

The truth is more complicated. It turns out the Obama administration is leaving behind a huge contingent from the State Department along with thousands of armed private contractors. The possibility for violence between Americans and Iraqis is very real.

To dig into the details, I spoke to Spencer Ackerman, who has been covering the issue closely for Wired’s Danger Room.

The administration is saying the war is over. Is the Defense Department leaving anyone behind? 

There’s going to be something called the Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq that exists after the troop pullout on Dec. 31. That’s going to be under the auspices of the U.S. embassy, so there’s not going to be a military command in Iraq. It’s going to be a pretty small, 150-person office that will do training — things like helping the Iraqi air force understand how to operate the F-16s we’re selling them. That’s a pretty typical relationship for countries who have bought American military hardware.

What about the State Department?

State is going to leave behind the largest embassy that it has on the planet. All told, there are going to be 18,000 people who work for this embassy. Very few of those will be diplomats. Others will be American civil service workers. A great number will be non-Iraqi contractors who do things like the laundry, mail services, cleaning, etc. Then there’s going to be a substantial component of armed private security contractors. Depending on whose numbers you believe, there will be 3,500 to 5,500 of them.

What is the mission of the State Department there? 

It will be different than a typical embassy in the sense that Iraq is still a more dangerous place than most places the U.S. operates. There are more fortresslike consulates around the country than is typical. The mission is in theory like any other State Department mission: You manage commercial ties; you deal with bilateral political issues as they arise; you try to get favorable security cooperation. In reality, it’s going to be way different than usual. Iraq is going to be a battleground — using that term colloquially — between the U.S. and Iran. A hugely important mission of the U.S. ambassador in Iraq will be to try to get Iraq’s foreign policy not to back Iran. Look at the recent Arab League vote to condemn the regime in Syria, for example. Iraq abstained from that vote because Iran was upset about the condemnation of one of its proxies. So the U.S. will try to weaken Iran’s diplomatic ties to Iraq.

On the mercenary — or armed private contractor — front, do we know who these people are going to be and what they’re going to be up to? 

One is a big security company that’s been in Iraq since 2005 called Triple Canopy. Another is called Global. Another is SOC Inc. Interestingly, the CEO of Blackwater — now renamed Academi — told me on Monday they’re going to get their license back; they lost it after the Nisour Square massacre. They don’t have a contract to do work in Iraq now, but they want to do it again. Beyond that, we know nearly nothing. The State Department has stonewalled even the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction from finding out basic information like what the rules of engagement for the contractors will be. How close can Iraqis get to U.S. diplomats before these guys can open fire? I don’t know the answer to that. Most members of Congress don’t know the answer to that. Pretty much no one who doesn’t work in the State Department knows the answer to that.

The contract is for diplomatic protection. You’re not supposed to see Triple Canopy employees, say, go out on raids. Fifty-six days before the U.S. withdrawal, the State Department also put out a contract for aviation support. That’s an indicator of how this is being put together on the fly. It’s also an indication that the State Department is contracting for missions as sensitive as Medevac or close air support.

Do you think we’re going to see spasms of violence between Americans and Iraqis post-Dec. 31?

I think it’s inevitable. Look at it from the perspective of an Iranian Quds Force operative. You know you want to frustrate the U.S. in Iraq; and you know that Iraqis are burning U.S. flags in celebration of the withdrawal. That’s a tremendous opportunity for Iran right there. Because if you also know that there are these armed contractors helping diplomats get from point A to point B, you win if you provoke them into violence. And it’s really easy to place an IED on a road or to open fire on a convoy. Then if there are Americans in Iraq opening fire on Iraqis — after the Iraqi leaders have said Americans are gone — that’s a major propaganda win for Iran. This is a really foreseeable disaster.

Another thing worth pointing out is that Leon Panetta has been saying recently that there are 1,000 Iraqis who are al-Qaida loyalists. If that’s true, Iraq is by far host to the largest al-Qaida presence in the world. It’s really hard to believe the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command won’t find a way to go after those people. And remember, as Mary Wheeler has pointed out, Congress has not rescinded the authorization for military force in Iraq.

So in your estimation, is the war actually over?

It’s going to shift into a more sotto voce form. It’s going to be a lot subtler. But it most certainly is continuing. Just because we don’t have a U.S. troop presence anymore or a formal U.S. chain of command anymore, does not mean that the war is over.

There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn’t really matter to Hitchens.)

And so we had the world’s self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell’s legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government’s war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.

Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he’s shilling for a the latest war.

And to be honest, his post-9/11 conception of an epoch-defining clash of civilizations between the secular West and the jihadists is more than slightly ridiculous. The secular West faces any number of graver existential threats — like unaccountable too-big-to-fail financial institutions and climate change, to name two that immediately come to mind — than that posed by the less-than 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population that subscribes to Salafist jihadism. Hitchens, the old Orwell worshiper, clearly just wanted a great big generational threat to tackle fearlessly, with polemics attacking the sclerotic establishment liberals who failed to see that the world was at the brink of disaster. He was looking for his own Spanish Civil War. That’s why he insisted on arguing that “Bin Ladenism” was equivalent to fascism.

On other fronts: His Clinton hatred was something more hysterical than reasonable (his book on the subject has the Lifetime Television Movie-worthy title “No One Left to Lie To”) and his grand campaign for atheism involved a good deal of silliness as well (Bertrand Russell did the case against God earlier and better). He had an unpleasantly boorish attitude toward women, best exemplified by his embarrassing “why women aren’t funny” bullshit. (Hitchens, it should be noted, enjoyed puns rather a lot.) And let’s not forget his immortal review of Wanda Sykes’ White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner: “The black dyke got it wrong.” Positively Butzian.

To the end he refused to admit he was “wrong” on the war, because his justifications for it shifted endlessly. The invasion was a humanitarian intervention “on the right side and for the right reasons” in a 2008 piece, in which he found the space to note that “the largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated,” but did not mention the war’s more than 100,000 casualties.

There was always something cartoonish about old “Hitch” the rakish intellectual character, puffing away on cigarettes and slurring bon mots in interviews, penning furious denunciations of hypocritical public figures while hosting salons and drunken parties at his Washington, D.C., apartment that some of the most powerful and prominent people in the world of politics and media attended. But his most monumental public crusade had devastating consequences that he never fully grappled with.

I don’t think photojournalist-turned-filmmaker Danfung Dennis includes that officer’s speech in his compassionate and unsettling documentary “Hell and Back Again” (winner of a Grand Jury Prize and a cinematography prize at Sundance) for some heavy-handed ironic effect, or to score political points. This isn’t that kind of movie. There have been several powerful war documentaries about the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (I’d put Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s “Restrepo” and Janus Metz’s “Armadillo” at the top of the list), but perhaps none with the intimate, human, tragic and sympathetic impact of “Hell and Back Again.”

Dennis was embedded with Harris’ company during some absolutely terrifying firefights, and you definitely see the war from a grunt’s-eye view. On Dennis’ first day, a corporal in Echo Company is fatally injured a few yards away from him, and in a later scene, an Afghan soldier’s weeping comrades retrieve his body from the battlefield, literally in pieces. But this film is only partly about the violence, chaos and trauma of war. Dennis later followed Nathan Harris back home, and recorded a remarkable portrait of an American marriage, and of how the ripple effects of warfare carry over into civilian life.

Depending on how you look at it, Nathan Harris was either lucky or unlucky. A combat-hardened, gung-ho Marine veteran who’d served several tours of duty in the Gulf region, Harris understood the risks. He came home alive and with all his limbs after getting shot up in a Taliban ambush, about two weeks before the end of his scheduled deployment. After several operations, many bottles of painkillers and a year or more of rehabilitation, it’s possible his shattered hip and leg will heal well enough to let him walk normally. But the guy we see back in North Carolina is a total mess: Moody and angry, frequently nauseated from pain and heavy doses of narcotics, waving loaded handguns around the house, possibly suffering from paranoid delusions. He says he finds an overcrowded parking lot at the mall more stressful than Afghanistan, where “everything is clear.”

In his more lucid and less threatening moments, Harris makes a fascinating protagonist, an intelligent, funny, slyly handsome fellow without much formal education who has learned what he knows about human beings and the world from the discipline and violence of warfare. He joined the Marines at 18, he says, because he “wanted to kill people,” and we get the impression he’s done his share of that. Clearly he now feels more misgivings about that, although he makes a forceful argument — lying on the sofa, with his injured leg in a therapy device — in favor of the war in Afghanistan. If it isn’t an argument I happen to agree with, you can’t claim that Harris hasn’t thought about it, or is just a brainwashed robot following orders.

Dennis’ other central character, at least on the home front, is Harris’ wife Ashley, a petite young woman with a two-tone blonde dye job who seems alternately baffled and terrified by this man she barely recognizes. If Ashley’s getting any kind of counseling or formal support, we don’t see it in the movie; the title, in fact, comes from a remark she makes during a conversation with a pharmacist at Walgreen’s while she’s refilling Nathan’s many prescriptions. Sometimes she looks at him and his eyes look soulless, he seems to contain nothing but rage, she tells the woman. They’ve been through hell and back, but they still love each other.

“Hell and Back Again” ingeniously intercuts scenes from the Afghan combat zone and scenes from the Harrises’ new life in North Carolina, and once again I don’t think Dennis is making some obvious point about the difference in material privilege or living conditions. Those factors are part of the story, certainly, but when we move from the walls of a Walgreen’s outside Winston-Salem to the walls of a mud compound outside Mosul, I think he’s emphasizing that those places are more closely connected than we think. Nathan Harris is quite right, in a way, to view the shopping mall as a war zone, even if it doesn’t look like one to those of us with less experience. This is a lyrical and humane film in the finest documentary tradition, which honors its subjects by telling their story with great dignity and painful clarity and leaving judgment to history.

“Hell and Back Again” is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens Oct. 14 in Los Angeles; Oct. 21 in San Francisco; Oct. 28 in Dallas; Nov. 4 in Philadelphia and San Diego; and Nov. 18 in Denver, Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Washington, D.C., with more cities and home-video release to follow.

“I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honor that they have earned.”

Obama is now poised to break that promise. Administration and military officials have talked about leaving anywhere between 3,000 and 17,000 U.S. troops in the country. There are currently 45,000 troops still in Iraq, according to the AP.

Obama’s original promise about withdrawing all troops was always a bit of a red herring. As the New York Times recently reported, all sorts of armed U.S. personnel and contractors will be staying in Iraq well beyond 2011, no matter how many uniformed military stay behind:

Even as the military reduces its troop strength in Iraq, the C.I.A. will continue to have a major presence in the country, as will security contractors working for the State Department.

And of course there is still the American mega-embassy in Baghdad:

In some ways, the debate over an American military presence is a rhetorical one. The administration has already drawn up plans for an extensive expansion of the American Embassy and its operations, bolstered by thousands of paramilitary security contractors. It has also created an Office of Security Cooperation that, like similar ones in countries like Egypt, would be staffed by civilians and military personnel overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq’s security forces.

For a man who built his political career and his candidacy for president on his opposition to the Iraq war, this seems like a significant shift. Here’s a flashback to candidate Obama in October 2007, promising to bring the troops home: