The stealthy, unannounced withdrawal of the last American troops in Iraq was done in the dark of night and witnessed, fittingly enough, only by one of our robot warriors, high in the sky. There were no sweets and flowers, no cheering crowds, no dramatic helicopter takeoffs. The expected sort of reactions have followed, too many to list of the “we won”, “it wasn’t worth it”, “Bush lied” and other genres that have become all too familiar over the last nine years.
In particular, Gary Kamiya wrote a better than average lament for the lost and demand that we honor them by not forgetting how the mess came about. He’s rightly pissed off that this incalculable failure – of American government, American institutions, of basic human decency – has been greeted here at home by overwhelming indifference leavened only by a disgraceful minimum of decorum. If anything, he puts too sunny a face on our dreamlike denial. He writes:
To truly honor those brave men and women in uniform – and, even more because there are more of them — the millions of Iraqis whose lives we destroyed, Americans need to look unflinchingly at this dreadful war.
They need to look at the ignorant, twisted and duplicitous men and women who started it, at the institutions that failed to stop it, and at their own complicity in it. Above all, they need to look at its terrible toll.
Nobody wants to think about Iraq. It was a mistake, and no one wants to dwell on mistakes. There are times when national forgetting is healthy. But this is not one of them. We need to remember.
What Kamiya ignores is that we can only fail to remember things that have stopped, and if there’s one legitimate excuse for America yawning as one of its most disastrous wars ever comes to a close, it is that the war is not truly over. Plenty of anti-war people have been calling the end a sham by noting that, despite the flag ceremonies, we still have a gargantuan embassy, enough mercenaries to conquer half of Africa, and a small contingent of “trainers”. (And that’s before you start talking about the openly floated possibility of a later expansion of military ties.) Those things are all true, but they are also little more than trimming. America still has a three course meal of shit yet to eat.
The real war, the Terror Wars, aren’t even close to over. The end of the Iraq War is a totemic milestone in the struggle to end the rest of them, but the road ahead is very long indeed. Despite our official withdrawal from the land between the rivers, the Terror Wars are still going strong in at least three major theaters: Afghanistan, the “homeland”, and wherever the CIA and the military are operating drones and special forces teams.
Those three wounds are still bleeding in ghastly ways. They are un-sewn gashes that cost billions, kill thousands, and, worst of all, poison the best aspects of America. In light of them, what needs to be remembered above everything else is that the Iraq War was never about Iraq, not as a country, a place, or a people. The Iraq War was about America.
Just as no grand strategy for Anbar or heroic action in Tikrit could have won or lost the Iraq War, no effort of the Army or Marines can pacify Afghanistan. Just as no amount of tortured prisoners could ever crack the insurgency, no brilliant intelligence coup can stop the shadowy parts of our government from launching raids and missiles in corners of the world that are worthless to everyone who doesn’t live there. Just as killing and capturing Hussein and his nearest and dearest couldn’t turn the tide in Baghdad, no master plot can ever be foiled that will let sanity return to airports or convince the government that spying on its own citizens is useless, immoral, and self defeating. Since there isn’t a real enemy to beat, there are only our fears and our reactions to the monsters we think are under the bed. The Terror Wars, in all their incarnations, are about America, American choices, and American fuck ups.
The Iraq War was mostly an American fever dream, a mass, national hallucination of hubris, glory and fear. For Iraq, the final echo of that dream can be seen in the empty comments flowing from high officials about how we’ve left Iraq with our heads held high . . . in the middle of the night without telling anyone. That war is over, and it seems unlikely any American Administration, Red or Blue, will muster the stupid to wade back in.
But for the three remaining components of the Terror Wars, that hallucination persists. Airport security and domestic surveillance continually reach new heights of expensive absurdity, and no one can give an answer as to why other than mumbling something about “threats”. Abroad, we’re still freedom bombing many parts of the world in the pursuit of various villains, essentially none of whom have ever demonstrated the ability to attack American civilian targets. And, of course, there’s Afghanistan, where we’re a good three or four years away from finally tucking our tail between our legs and departing, most likely in the dead of night just as we did in Iraq.
The great work of ending the war – all the Terror Wars – remains mostly undone and is no sure thing. Getting out of Iraq is only the beginning. And if no one is happy about it, if no one wants to talk about it or remember it . . . well, that’s to be expected. The fearful and deluded proponents of the Terror Wars saw themselves suffer a great defeat with the American withdrawal; they’re hardly in gregarious mood. The rest of us saw only progress in a task that is far from complete and that remains dauntingly difficult, all but the most circumscribed celebrations are unwarranted.
The blood and the bullets remain an abstraction for most of the American public, several removes from lives that have their own problems and pleasures. For them the Terror Wars are about degradations at the hands of police and security, about jingoistic political commercials and anxiety stoking news coverage, about taxes, bullshit, and internecine conflicts over everything from religion and race to football and politics. That is the real war, the fight for the American people’s faith in the Terror Wars, and it is in no risk of being forgotten.
