Geraldo Rivera: What Was It All About?

Returning to the Persian Gulf on the occasion of the last American troops being withdrawn from Iraq that, question crossed my mind.

With the blood of 4,400 GI's sunk into these endless desert sands, five times that number wounded, and $1 trillion of taxpayer's money spent, what this second Iraq War was all about is a question that should haunt everyone who made it happen, especially the Bush administration who ordered it and the media mavens like me who promoted it.

Having just landed in Kuwait City, we will drive up to Camp Virginia near the border to watch the last of our combat units crossing over from their bases in Iraq.

They will breath a sigh of relief upon arrival here in relatively plush, safe Kuwait.

This reinvigorated, oil-rich city soars now with elegant new skyscrapers towering above the dusty landscape. It has grown substantially since the first war with Iraq.

The skyline was shorter then, and the city beat up by Saddam Hussein's 1990-91 disastrous (for him) invasion.

During the Gulf War we knew the mission was to expel from Kuwait the invading Iraqi Army, said at the time to be the world's fourth largest.

What the arrogantly misguided Hussein shouted would be the "Mother of all Battles" ended in a pathetic, bloody whimper on the "Highway of Death," not far from this city where his retreating forces, slowed by the weight of their loot, were wiped out by allied air strikes.

Eight years, nine months after our magnificent aviators pounded Baghdad in a breathtaking display that shocked and awed the enemy, and our courageous soldiers and Marines charged across the sand berm that marked the Iraqi border, America is finally going home.

On the 20th anniversary year of that easy victory, the burning oil fields are all pumping again, the black gold fueling Kuwait's ascendancy.

But what of this second, far most costly and prolonged conflict?

In the beginning, March 2003, it was about finding Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, the infamous WMD's.

When we first got here, all GI's were required to walk around wearing bulky hazmat suits and gas masks that made them look like an army of space aliens.

There were actually several ineffective Scud missile attacks during our time here in Kuwait City.

The sirens wailed and masks were deployed, but the rockets armed only with conventional warheads exploded in an empty fast food restaurant at a nearby shopping mall.

Hussein's forces quickly collapsed in the face of our onslaught, but that proved the easy part of the war.

Eight years, nine months after our magnificent aviators pounded Baghdad in a breathtaking display that shocked and awed the enemy, and our courageous soldiers and Marines charged across the sand berm that marked the Iraqi border, America is finally going home.

There were no WMD's, but Hussein is dead. The majority of Iraqi Shiites are liberated. A fragile democracy is in place. And future generations will ponder what it was about and whether it was worth the awful price.

Geraldo Rivera is a senior columnist for Fox News Latino.

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