Friday was the seventh anniversary of the beginning of our misbegotten adventure in Iraq. It’s probably still too soon to properly situate March 19th, 2003 amongst the worst dates in American history, but it’s surely bucking for top tier status. For though the war may finally conclude at the end of next year, its effects will be with us for a very long time.
During the madness that was the 2004 presidential election, at the height of the baseless smearing of John Kerry, I read something by an old time Washington journalist. (The name and publication escape me at the moment.) Trying to put these decades old attacks into perspective, he wrote that the Baby Boomers were never going to let go of Vietnam. They would be clobbering each other over it all the way to the retirement home.
I think about that passage often, especially when talk turns to the Iraq War. The numbers of dead, especially on the American side, are a lot lower this time around. There’s no draft anymore, so the politicians of the future won’t have to explain how they escaped combat service. And yet the political fight that Bush the Younger began is still raging, and shows no signs of abating just because the war itself seems to be in its last throes.
That little more than confusion and panic happened in the Gulf of Tonkin on 4 August 1964 has never really penetrated into the popular consciousness. Will the same be true of the deliberate dishonesty that got us into Iraq? It is a question of life and death importance because how this war is remembered will have enormous effects on how we get into the next one.
As well documented and well established as the Iraq lies have been, Newsweek still ran a cover that read “Victory At Last” for the March 8th issue. In what kind of pre-March 19th mindset does that headline writer operate? How can anything that wasted so much money, caused so much destruction, killed (and ruined) so many people, for no reason ever be a good thing? When it comes to Iraq the only way the word “victory” can ever be honestly used (by an American) is directly following the word “Pyrrhic”.
And yet that delusional pre-March 19th mindset is widely prevalent. What’s worse, it is frighteningly similar to the “we could’ve won in Vietnam” mindset, which still had enough juice left to sink John Kerry thirty years after the war ended. Both operate within extremely narrow conceptions of war. They deny, outright and totally, that anything but the war itself has any value. The events leading up to the war, the reasons for going to war, even the costs associated with fighting the war, have no place in these arguments.
That is why any Iraq outcome that falls short of an anti-American theocracy will be hailed by idiots as “victory”. For them the unnecessary deaths don’t matter, the enormous sums of money wasted don’t matter, the damages done to our civic institutions don’t matter. The important thing is that there was no photo of a helicopter ferrying people off a rooftop. And since that’s all that matters to them, they will, almost inevitably, blunder us into another unnecessary war.
Lest you think I’m being paranoid about that, consider the extremely warlike nature of post-World War II America. We got directly involved in five major wars (Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq) from 1945-2003 plus nearly innumerable smaller conflicts. Not a single decade since the 1940s has passed without American troops dying in the hundreds or thousands. Andrew Bacevich, a man who knows something about the military and the sacrifices it sometimes requires, counts only three unambiguous wins in that time, all of them in our traditional stomping grounds in Latin America and the Caribbean. That is not a record of which to be proud.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the Iraq War (other than the obvious one: never trust a neo-conservative), it is that we ought to take military involvement much more seriously than we currently do. The people who remain proud, ignorant of our mixed war record, are the ones who are always eager to get involved in the next one (and make no mistake, there will be a next one). If a catastrophe like Iraq is to have any positive consequences, at the very least one should be to lessen the number of people chomping for another.
