America, fuck yeah! You wouldn’t know it to look at the news, but the United States of America won a war yesterday. With precious little fanfare and almost no press attention, it came out that our stupid effort to keep American troops in Iraq (via) had failed. For good and ill (overwhelmingly good), America will be retreating from the Mesopotamian death box come December of this year.
For those of us who’ve been opposing this war since the very beginning, this is the best possible news. The facts that our mercenaries will be remaining in country and that our embassy will be among the most extravagant this side of the Tang Dynasty are insignificant. American troops are leaving Iraq. American troops are leaving Iraq. American troops are leaving Iraq. American troops are leaving Iraq.
Caveats and all, it is borderline impossible to overstate the significance of this. We’ve been at full scale war in Iraq for more than eight years, and we’ve been kinda at war there for two decades. That insignificant swath of sand has been bleeding us for longer than many of our troops have been alive, but even the near total capture of the Obama Administration by the national security apparatus couldn’t stop our retreat. We are leaving, and we will be massively better off for it.
To be sure, the Terror Wars continue. We remain scrotum deep in Afghanistan and show no signs of wising up. We continue to militarize our airports, federal buildings and football games in the empty name of security. We’re still sending the military after harmless drug users and we keep jumping three feet in the air every time the Justice Department arrests one of its own patsies. But we will no longer be in Iraq, and that is progress.
The long term project of demilitarizing America remains mostly undone, but ending our involvement between the rivers was a necessary first step. It’ll take many years yet to get the us out of our other hobby wars, to get the police to stop arming themselves to the teeth, to break the paranoid industrial complex, and to restore the Fourth Amendment, but the Iraq War, the flashing neon sign of delusional right wing hubris, is finally going into history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies. Whatever else happens or may be said, that is an unambiguous good. America, fuck yeah.
