Sunday, September 05, 2010 6:44:52 PM
Freedom’s Just Another Word
Barry Blitt
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 4, 2010
AMONG the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama’s vacation was the anecdote of a Martha’s Vineyard bookseller handing him [ http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/obama-gets-franzen-novel-early-and-publishing-panic-ensues/ ] an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom.” The book has since rocketed up the Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Tanenhaus-t.html ] than those for Franzen’s last novel, “The Corrections.” But I doubt that the president, a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read “Freedom” yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that bloodless speech on Tuesday night.
What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html ] was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.
This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own.
That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction — one heretofore shared only by the BP oil spill — was hardly justified by his tepid pronouncements of progress (“credible elections that drew a strong turnout”) or his tidy homilies about the war’s impact. “Our unity at home was tested,” he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to 50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.
Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/polls-much-skepticism-about-iraq/ ], 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq’s “example of freedom [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/us/a-nation-at-war-iraq-s-neighbors-bush-s-aides-envision-new-influence-in-region.html ],” as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was supposed to help relieve.
For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans [ http://icasualties.org/Iraq/Nationality.aspx ] and some 100,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31legacy.html ] paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were wounded [ http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx ], and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation’s most valuable human capital, went into exile [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/iraqi_refugees/index.html ]. The war’s official cost to U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion [ http://costofwar.com/ ].
Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq [ http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/05/15/son_of_professor_opposed_to_war_is_killed_in_iraq/ ] in 2007 [and see http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=26761570 and the several preceding]. Writing in The New Republic [ http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/77356/obama-wants-us-forget-the-lessons-iraq (below)] after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded: “The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.”
Bacevich also wrote that “common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.” Americans’ common future demands it too. The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.
We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html ]. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.
Our attitude toward the war’s human cost was no less cavalier. We were all too content to let a volunteer army fight our battles out of sight and out of mind, on a fictional pretext yoked to a military strategy premised on a cakewalk. For too long we looked the other way as the coffins arrived in Dover off camera in the shroud of night, as the maimed endured inhumane treatment in military hospitals at home, and as the Iraqi refugees who aided Operation Iraqi Freedom at their own peril were denied the freedom to seek a safe haven in our country.
Both President Obama and Glenn Beck, in his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington last weekend, were fulsome in their praise of the troops, as well they should have been. But the disconnect between the civilian public, including the war’s die-hard advocates on the right, and those doing the fighting remains as large today as ever. As one Iraq war vet e-mailed to me after hearing Beck’s patriotic sermons: “What does gathering in D.C. do for the troops?” He was appalled at the self-regard of those who thought their jingoistic rally would help returning troops abandoned by the military’s “criminally poor mental health care” or save any soldier who was “two seconds away from getting his leg blown off by an I.E.D.”
The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds [ http://trueslant.com/michaelhastings/2009/06/16/media-why-supporting-the-iraq-war-was-the-smart-career-move/ ]. Many pundits, quite a few of them liberals [ http://www.slate.com/id/2093620/entry/2094000/ ], stoked the war fever as well. Some eventually acknowledged getting it wrong [ http://www.slate.com/id/2186757/ ], though in most cases they stopped short of apologizing for their failures of judgment and their abdication of journalistic skepticism about the government’s case for war.
Even now those think-tank types who kept seeing light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel [ http://www.brookings.edu/interviews/2003/0928iraq_ohanlon.aspx ] are ubiquitous on television and op-ed pages making similar stay-the-course prognostications about Afghanistan [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062504126.html ]. Their embarrassing track records may have temporarily vanished into the great American memory hole, but actions do have consequences, and there must be an accounting. America does have a soul, and, as Franzen so powerfully dramatizes in “Freedom,” when that soul is violated, we are paralyzed until we set it right.
And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama’s speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq’s leaders “move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative and accountable.” He might as well have been talking about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html ]
=====
Obama Wants Us To Forget the Lessons of Iraq
Andrew J. Bacevich
August 31, 2010 | 10:53 pm
The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. “Now, it is time to turn the page.” So advises the commander-in-chief at least. “[T]he bottom line is this,” President Obama remarked last Saturday, “the war is ending.” Alas, it’s not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page—something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do—common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.
For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let’s provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq’s unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.
Yet when Saddam subsequently turned on Kuwait, he overstepped. President George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, likened the Iraqi dictator to Hitler, and dispatched 500,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf. The plan was to give Saddam a good spanking, make sure all concerned knew who was boss, and go home.
Operation Desert Storm didn’t turn out that way. An ostensibly great victory gave way to even greater complications. Although, in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces did what they had been sent to do, Washington became seized with the notion merely turning back aggression wasn’t enough: In Baghdad, Bush’s nemesis survived and remained defiant. So what began as a war to liberate Kuwait morphed into an obsession with deposing Saddam himself. In the form of air strikes and missile attacks, feints and demonstrations, CIA plots and crushing sanctions, America’s war against Iraq persisted throughout the 1990s, finally reaching a climax with George W. Bush’s decision after September 11, 2001, to put Saddam ahead of Osama bin Laden in the line of evildoers requiring elimination.
The U.S.-led assault on Baghdad in 2003 finally finished the work left undone in 1991—so it appeared at least. Here was decisive victory, sealed by the capture of Saddam Hussein himself in December 2003. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced L. Paul Bremer, the beaming American viceroy to Baghdad, “we got him.”
Yet by the time Bremer spoke, it—Iraq—had gotten us. Saddam’s capture (and subsequent execution) signaled next to nothing. Round two of the Iraq war had commenced, the war against Saddam (1990–2003) giving way to the American Occupation (2003–2010). Round two began the War to Reinvent Iraq in America’s Image.
With officials such as Bremer in the vanguard, the United States set out to transform Iraq into a Persian Gulf “city upon a hill,” a beacon of Western-oriented liberal democracy enlightening and inspiring the rest of the Arab and Islamic world. When this effort met with resistance, American troops, accustomed to employing overwhelming force, responded with indiscriminate harshness. President Bush called the approach “kicking ass.” Heavy-handedness backfired, however, and succeeded only in plunging Iraq into chaos. One result, on the home front, was to produce a sharp backlash against what had become Bush’s War.
Unable to win, unwilling to accept defeat, the Bush administration sought to create conditions allowing for a graceful exit. Marketed for domestic political purposes as “a new way forward,” more commonly known as “the surge,” this modified approach was the strategic equivalent of a dog’s breakfast. President Bush steeled himself to expend more American blood and treasure while simultaneously lowering expectations about what U.S. forces might actually accomplish. New tactics designed to suppress the Iraqi insurgency won Bush’s approval; so too did the novel practice of bribing insurgents to put down their arms.
Yet as a consequence the daily violence that had made Iraq a hellhole subsided—although it did not disappear.
Meanwhile, once hallowed verities fell by the wayside. U.S. officials stopped promising that Saddam’s downfall would trigger a wave of liberalizing reforms throughout the Islamic world. Op-eds testifying to America’s enduring commitment to the rights of Iraqi women ceased to appear in the nation’s leading newspapers.
Respected American generals—by 2007, about the only figures retaining a shred of credibility on Iraq—disavowed the very possibility of victory. In military circles, to declare that “there is no military solution” became the very height of fashion.
By the time Barack Obama had ascended to the presidency, this second phase of the Iraq war—its purpose now inverted from occupation to extrication—was already well-advanced. Since taking office, Obama has kept faith with the process that his predecessor set in motion, building upon President Bush’s success. (When applied to Iraq, “success” has become a notably elastic term, easily accommodating bombs that detonate in Iraqi cities and insurgent assaults directed at Iraqi forces and government installations.)
Which brings us to the present. After seven-plus years, Operation Iraqi Freedom has concluded. Operation New Dawn, its name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid, now begins. (What ever happened to the practice of using terms like Torch or Overlord or Dragoon to describe military campaigns?) Although something like 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, their mission is not to fight, but simply to advise and assist their Iraqi counterparts. In another year, if all goes well, even this last remnant of an American military presence will disappear.
So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad’s fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.
Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. Round one of the Iraq war produced a great upheaval that round two served only to exacerbate. As the convoys of U.S. armored vehicles trundle south toward Kuwait and then home, they leave the stage set for round three.
Call this the War of Iraqi Self-Determination (2010–?). As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won’t be pretty.
One thing alone we can say with assurance:As far as Americans are concerned, Iraqis now own their war. “Like any sovereign, independent nation,” President Obama recently remarked, “Iraq is free to chart its own course.” The place may be a mess, but it’s their mess not ours. In this sense alone is the Iraq war “over.”
As U.S. forces have withdrawn, they have done so in an orderly fashion. In their own eyes, they remain unbeaten and unbeatable. As the troops pull out, the American people are already moving on: Even now, Afghans have displaced Iraqis as the beneficiaries of Washington’s care and ministrations. Oddly, even disturbingly, most of us—our memories short, our innocence intact—seem content with the outcome. The United States leaves Iraq having learned nothing.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War [ http://www.amazon.com/Washington-Rules-Americas-Permanent-American/dp/0805091416 ].
Copyright 2010 The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/77356/obama-wants-us-forget-the-lessons-iraq [with comments]
Barry Blitt
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 4, 2010
AMONG the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama’s vacation was the anecdote of a Martha’s Vineyard bookseller handing him [ http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/obama-gets-franzen-novel-early-and-publishing-panic-ensues/ ] an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom.” The book has since rocketed up the Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Tanenhaus-t.html ] than those for Franzen’s last novel, “The Corrections.” But I doubt that the president, a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read “Freedom” yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that bloodless speech on Tuesday night.
What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html ] was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.
This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own.
That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction — one heretofore shared only by the BP oil spill — was hardly justified by his tepid pronouncements of progress (“credible elections that drew a strong turnout”) or his tidy homilies about the war’s impact. “Our unity at home was tested,” he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to 50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.
Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/polls-much-skepticism-about-iraq/ ], 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq’s “example of freedom [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/us/a-nation-at-war-iraq-s-neighbors-bush-s-aides-envision-new-influence-in-region.html ],” as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was supposed to help relieve.
For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans [ http://icasualties.org/Iraq/Nationality.aspx ] and some 100,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31legacy.html ] paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were wounded [ http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx ], and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation’s most valuable human capital, went into exile [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/iraqi_refugees/index.html ]. The war’s official cost to U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion [ http://costofwar.com/ ].
Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq [ http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/05/15/son_of_professor_opposed_to_war_is_killed_in_iraq/ ] in 2007 [and see http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=26761570 and the several preceding]. Writing in The New Republic [ http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/77356/obama-wants-us-forget-the-lessons-iraq (below)] after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded: “The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.”
Bacevich also wrote that “common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.” Americans’ common future demands it too. The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.
We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html ]. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.
Our attitude toward the war’s human cost was no less cavalier. We were all too content to let a volunteer army fight our battles out of sight and out of mind, on a fictional pretext yoked to a military strategy premised on a cakewalk. For too long we looked the other way as the coffins arrived in Dover off camera in the shroud of night, as the maimed endured inhumane treatment in military hospitals at home, and as the Iraqi refugees who aided Operation Iraqi Freedom at their own peril were denied the freedom to seek a safe haven in our country.
Both President Obama and Glenn Beck, in his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington last weekend, were fulsome in their praise of the troops, as well they should have been. But the disconnect between the civilian public, including the war’s die-hard advocates on the right, and those doing the fighting remains as large today as ever. As one Iraq war vet e-mailed to me after hearing Beck’s patriotic sermons: “What does gathering in D.C. do for the troops?” He was appalled at the self-regard of those who thought their jingoistic rally would help returning troops abandoned by the military’s “criminally poor mental health care” or save any soldier who was “two seconds away from getting his leg blown off by an I.E.D.”
The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds [ http://trueslant.com/michaelhastings/2009/06/16/media-why-supporting-the-iraq-war-was-the-smart-career-move/ ]. Many pundits, quite a few of them liberals [ http://www.slate.com/id/2093620/entry/2094000/ ], stoked the war fever as well. Some eventually acknowledged getting it wrong [ http://www.slate.com/id/2186757/ ], though in most cases they stopped short of apologizing for their failures of judgment and their abdication of journalistic skepticism about the government’s case for war.
Even now those think-tank types who kept seeing light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel [ http://www.brookings.edu/interviews/2003/0928iraq_ohanlon.aspx ] are ubiquitous on television and op-ed pages making similar stay-the-course prognostications about Afghanistan [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062504126.html ]. Their embarrassing track records may have temporarily vanished into the great American memory hole, but actions do have consequences, and there must be an accounting. America does have a soul, and, as Franzen so powerfully dramatizes in “Freedom,” when that soul is violated, we are paralyzed until we set it right.
And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama’s speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq’s leaders “move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative and accountable.” He might as well have been talking about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html ]
=====
Obama Wants Us To Forget the Lessons of Iraq
Andrew J. Bacevich
August 31, 2010 | 10:53 pm
The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. “Now, it is time to turn the page.” So advises the commander-in-chief at least. “[T]he bottom line is this,” President Obama remarked last Saturday, “the war is ending.” Alas, it’s not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page—something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do—common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.
For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let’s provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq’s unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.
Yet when Saddam subsequently turned on Kuwait, he overstepped. President George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, likened the Iraqi dictator to Hitler, and dispatched 500,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf. The plan was to give Saddam a good spanking, make sure all concerned knew who was boss, and go home.
Operation Desert Storm didn’t turn out that way. An ostensibly great victory gave way to even greater complications. Although, in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces did what they had been sent to do, Washington became seized with the notion merely turning back aggression wasn’t enough: In Baghdad, Bush’s nemesis survived and remained defiant. So what began as a war to liberate Kuwait morphed into an obsession with deposing Saddam himself. In the form of air strikes and missile attacks, feints and demonstrations, CIA plots and crushing sanctions, America’s war against Iraq persisted throughout the 1990s, finally reaching a climax with George W. Bush’s decision after September 11, 2001, to put Saddam ahead of Osama bin Laden in the line of evildoers requiring elimination.
The U.S.-led assault on Baghdad in 2003 finally finished the work left undone in 1991—so it appeared at least. Here was decisive victory, sealed by the capture of Saddam Hussein himself in December 2003. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced L. Paul Bremer, the beaming American viceroy to Baghdad, “we got him.”
Yet by the time Bremer spoke, it—Iraq—had gotten us. Saddam’s capture (and subsequent execution) signaled next to nothing. Round two of the Iraq war had commenced, the war against Saddam (1990–2003) giving way to the American Occupation (2003–2010). Round two began the War to Reinvent Iraq in America’s Image.
With officials such as Bremer in the vanguard, the United States set out to transform Iraq into a Persian Gulf “city upon a hill,” a beacon of Western-oriented liberal democracy enlightening and inspiring the rest of the Arab and Islamic world. When this effort met with resistance, American troops, accustomed to employing overwhelming force, responded with indiscriminate harshness. President Bush called the approach “kicking ass.” Heavy-handedness backfired, however, and succeeded only in plunging Iraq into chaos. One result, on the home front, was to produce a sharp backlash against what had become Bush’s War.
Unable to win, unwilling to accept defeat, the Bush administration sought to create conditions allowing for a graceful exit. Marketed for domestic political purposes as “a new way forward,” more commonly known as “the surge,” this modified approach was the strategic equivalent of a dog’s breakfast. President Bush steeled himself to expend more American blood and treasure while simultaneously lowering expectations about what U.S. forces might actually accomplish. New tactics designed to suppress the Iraqi insurgency won Bush’s approval; so too did the novel practice of bribing insurgents to put down their arms.
Yet as a consequence the daily violence that had made Iraq a hellhole subsided—although it did not disappear.
Meanwhile, once hallowed verities fell by the wayside. U.S. officials stopped promising that Saddam’s downfall would trigger a wave of liberalizing reforms throughout the Islamic world. Op-eds testifying to America’s enduring commitment to the rights of Iraqi women ceased to appear in the nation’s leading newspapers.
Respected American generals—by 2007, about the only figures retaining a shred of credibility on Iraq—disavowed the very possibility of victory. In military circles, to declare that “there is no military solution” became the very height of fashion.
By the time Barack Obama had ascended to the presidency, this second phase of the Iraq war—its purpose now inverted from occupation to extrication—was already well-advanced. Since taking office, Obama has kept faith with the process that his predecessor set in motion, building upon President Bush’s success. (When applied to Iraq, “success” has become a notably elastic term, easily accommodating bombs that detonate in Iraqi cities and insurgent assaults directed at Iraqi forces and government installations.)
Which brings us to the present. After seven-plus years, Operation Iraqi Freedom has concluded. Operation New Dawn, its name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid, now begins. (What ever happened to the practice of using terms like Torch or Overlord or Dragoon to describe military campaigns?) Although something like 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, their mission is not to fight, but simply to advise and assist their Iraqi counterparts. In another year, if all goes well, even this last remnant of an American military presence will disappear.
So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad’s fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.
Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. Round one of the Iraq war produced a great upheaval that round two served only to exacerbate. As the convoys of U.S. armored vehicles trundle south toward Kuwait and then home, they leave the stage set for round three.
Call this the War of Iraqi Self-Determination (2010–?). As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won’t be pretty.
One thing alone we can say with assurance:As far as Americans are concerned, Iraqis now own their war. “Like any sovereign, independent nation,” President Obama recently remarked, “Iraq is free to chart its own course.” The place may be a mess, but it’s their mess not ours. In this sense alone is the Iraq war “over.”
As U.S. forces have withdrawn, they have done so in an orderly fashion. In their own eyes, they remain unbeaten and unbeatable. As the troops pull out, the American people are already moving on: Even now, Afghans have displaced Iraqis as the beneficiaries of Washington’s care and ministrations. Oddly, even disturbingly, most of us—our memories short, our innocence intact—seem content with the outcome. The United States leaves Iraq having learned nothing.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War [ http://www.amazon.com/Washington-Rules-Americas-Permanent-American/dp/0805091416 ].
Copyright 2010 The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/77356/obama-wants-us-forget-the-lessons-iraq [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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