The beginning of the end
By June Bower
This week the U.S. ended its official occupation of Iraq. According to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq is now in charge of its own security and administering its own internal affairs.
Under a security agreement entered into by the Bush Administration, most U.S. combat troops have withdrawn from major Iraqi cities and will now be stationed primarily on large bases in rural areas. There are still concerns about the ability of Iraq’s military and police force to provide adequate security, but most Iraqis were ready for the Americans to leave.
Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, it’s been a long, hard six years. Hopefully, we are seeing the beginning of the end of a national nightmare.
Sadly, most Americans hardly think of Iraq today. The media seldom mentions casualties anymore, and reports of the U.S. withdrawal this week garnered a fraction of the coverage given to the death of Michael Jackson.
The war stopped being front-page news once Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his generals found a winning strategy to end the daily slaughter of our troops. However, for the families of the 4,323 U.S. military members who died, the war never fades far from their minds.
Tens of thousands of wounded soldiers are reminded every day of what they lost in this war. Some of the injuries are horrendous, especially those with head wounds, and for them, the war will never be over.
Many of the injuries to our troops are invisible. There are probably no accurate numbers for the victims of post-traumatic stress resulting from guerrilla warfare, a brutal kind of combat, and multiple deployments to Iraq.
I know every war has its casualties, but it’s easier to accept when the sacrifice is considered necessary. It’s not so easy to swallow when the violence our troops experienced was caused in part by the mistakes of their leaders.
The war in Iraq is generally described as a war of choice, and the majority of Americans now believe invading Iraq was a mistake. History will show much of the death and suffering of our troops was the result of poor planning and incompetence on the part of both civilian and military leaders.
Who knows what the financial cost has been to the American people? Under the Bush administration, the cost of the war was never a part of the general budget. Every dollar spent destroying and rebuilding Iraq, plus the cost of military operations and establishing the Green Zone and embassy, were hidden in supplemental authorizations.
We’ll probably never get an accurate count of the billions the war cost us, but we do know there was never any revenue generated for it. Instead of making sacrifices for the war effort, we Americans enjoyed tax cuts and went on a national spending spree.
We’re all paying for those mistakes today. We have families whose loved ones are gone forever. We have the wounded facing a life time of pain and anguish, and we have a national debt that will haunt us for decades.
History will not be kind. Our trigger-happy desk warriors who wanted to invade Iraq will not be vindicated. Our weak and foolish Congress will be remembered for being weak and foolish.
Our adventure-seeking media, who seldom questioned the wisdom of the invasion, were far too eager to join “in the fun” of racing to Baghdad, and gave the American public a false sense of the glory of battle. They were an embarrassment to their trade.
And the American public — too trusting and uninformed — were oh so willing to go for it as long as it didn’t require any sacrifice on our part. We were so afraid our patriotism would be questioned if we objected. The war hawks did a good job of convincing us that to be against the war was somehow being against the troops.
What nonsense!
It was because we love this country that war opponents hated to see America invade a sovereign nation and decide who its leaders were going to be. That’s just not the American way.
It was because we cared about the troops that we objected to them being sacrificed for a cause that was undefined, at best, and, at worst, may have had much more to do with economic interests than our national security.
Patriotism isn’t just being rah-rah and waving the flag and charging into battle. Patriotism is all about protecting our nation from its enemies. And sometimes those enemies are ego, greed, incompetence and too much testosterone.
