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| The face of war |
Eight long years have passed since George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under the now infamous banner, “Mission Accomplished” and announced the end of combat operations in Iraq.
“In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
As Bush later conceded, the Mission Accomplished banner, and the speech itself, was a bit premature. Ground troops in fact were only beginning combat operations in Iraq.
The scar on the American conscience may never heal, the humanitarian violations on our foreign policy record may never be expunged, and the bloody quagmire that became the Iraq War will surely never be forgotten, but come Dec. 31, 2011, President Obama will oversee the complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, finally ending the nearly nine-year occupation of a country that, as it turned out, in fact didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction, didn’t have ties to al-Qaeda, and didn’t pose a threat to our national security.
“A few hours ago, I spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki,” Obama said. “I reaffirmed that the United States keeps its commitments. He spoke of the determination of the Iraqi people to forge their own future. We are in full agreement about how to move forward.
“So today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.”
Without missing a beat, the war mongers began crying foul.
Following Obama’s announcement, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said, “Today marks a harmful and sad setback for the United States in the world.”
“It is a consequential failure,” he continued, “of both the Obama Administration – which has been more focused on withdrawing from Iraq than succeeding in Iraq since it came into office – as well as the Iraqi government.
The Republican presidential frontrunners all agree.
According to the Washington Post, Mitt Romney called it an “astonishing failure” that risked all the gains made “through the blood and sacrifice” of our troops. Rick Perry accused Obama of putting “political expediency ahead of sound military and security judgment.” And Herman Cain said withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan was “a dumb thing to do.”
To be honest, I can sympathize.
I would not go so far as to demagogue the president’s withdrawal as evidence of what all the hawks were warning when Obama was elected – that he would employ a “cut and run” strategy in the Middle East – but I do feel some measure of guilt for being a citizen of a country that cherishes its patriotism, its freedom, its prosperity, but which stood idle as its government ordered the mass destruction of human lives, families and cities in a war that inevitably must end with abandonment.
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| Bringing democracy to Iraq |
At this point, it doesn’t matter why we invaded Iraq – whether because of oil or democracy or national security or the eradication of an evil dictator or whatever other ever-shifting excuse the occupation’s apologists want to use as a justification for the invasion. What matters is that we’ve leaving now, and the justification for our abandonment has nothing to do accomplishing a mission.
In a more fair world, the United States would wear the Iraq War like a Scarlet Letter, forever indebted, both financially and morally, to citizens of Iraq. We would send care packages to pen-pal families in Baghdad, the U.S. government would provide unlimited foreign aid, and no American worthy of calling him or herself a patriot would rest until we as a nation held true to our promise to deliver to the Iraq people the peace, prosperity and democracy that we claimed, at one point, gave us the justification for invading their country, overthrowing their government, profiting on their natural resources and destroying their homes.
But this is not a fair world, and our obligations to Iraq will not extend so far, will not require so much, and will not result in the eternal shame we so deserve.
We’re leaving, and we’re leaving because it is economically and politically necessary to do so, although it’s difficult to gauge whether economics or politics plays a greater role in the decision.
The cost of occupying Iraq is too high, the citizens of this country are tired of war, and the president of this country has a campaign promise to keep. The election is a year away.
While imperfect, unfair and morally questionable if not completely reprehensible, those justifications for abandonment are satisfactory to me.
They’re satisfactory because I do no believe we should pay for the sins of our fathers – or the dreams of our fathers, in the case of the neo-conservatives who spent decades preparing for an Iraq invasion.
They’re satisfactory because I do not believe it is possible to restore honor to our country or to Iraq when the war itself was never honorable.
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| Support Our Troops... |
If we stayed, if we continued to fight, if we maintained the course until the citizens of this country and the families of the nearly 4,500 U.S. service members who’ve died in Iraq could rest assured that their fellow Americans, their sons and daughters, their husbands, wives, brothers, sisters and friends didn’t die for nothing, then we would be in Iraq forever. At best, we would be prolonging the exact exit we’re planning now, and the costs of this war, measured in both U.S. and Iraqi lives, in both dollars and resources, would only escalate.
The truth is, there is more at stake in this decision than honor, pride, politics and economics.
George W. Bush was the first president to start a war without offsetting its costs with tax increases. Instead, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, and as the national debt doubled under his eight-year reign, the American people did as they were asked to do at the beginning of this “War on Terror” – they went shopping.
Had it been different, had the Republican-controlled Congress asked their Republican president for the trillion dollars in federal budget cuts they’re now demanding, as the minority party, of their Democratic president; had taxes been increased on all Americans in order to pay for our foreign occupations, as had been done during previous times of war; then perhaps Operation Iraqi Freedom would have ended the day Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.”
The Democratic-controlled Congress and the Democratic president had a choice to make. If they continued to spent trillions of dollars fighting faceless guerilla rebels in a county whose citizens now oppose the occupation of a democratic superpower as much as they opposed the dictatorship of a violent oppressor, then the spending cuts Republicans are suddenly demanding would have to come from somewhere else.
Having suddenly embraced the sort of fiscal discipline they lacked throughout the past decade, Republicans are adamantly against both tax increases and defense spending cuts, and domestic spending is that “somewhere else” – which was the point.
Republicans have accomplished their goal. The beast is being starved.
As a result, government officials have agreed to slash more than a trillion dollars from the federal budget, and as a consequence of the tax policies and military interventions of the past decade, those who rely on government assistance – the elderly, the unemployed, women, minorities, students, the working poor – will see their social safety net unravel under the guise of fiscal discipline.
That is not patriotic, not when millions of Americans are out of work, out of options, and out of any hope of a better future.
America will forever be shamed by the events of the Iraq War, but prosperity should never be outsourced at the expense of our own countrymen, let alone sacrificed on the alter of ideological warfare.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is long overdue, and though it is with a guilty conscience that I confess my support of the abandonment, it is time each country take responsibility for rebuilding itself.
As Obama said in the closing remarks of his speech, “(A)fter a decade of war, the nation that we need to build – and the nation that we will build – is our own; an America that sees its economic strength restored just as we’ve restored our leadership around the globe.”
