By BJ Bjornson
A flag ceremony marks an official end to the US military operations in Iraq. Well, so long as you ignore the 15,000 personnel still based in the world�s largest embassy and who knows how many mercenaries still running around the country.
Still, Charles Pierce notes that there is still an accounting to be made, even if such an accounting seems entirely unlikely.
On Wednesday, the president said that the Iraq War belongs to history. This, of course, is true. So, for that matter, does whatever he had for breakfast that morning. But history is not just all the stuff that happened in the past. It's why all that stuff happened in the past. It's who made all that stuff happen in the past. Until that accounting takes place, the war does not belong to history. Vietnam doesn't even fully "belong to history" yet. Our politics are still fought out over the fault lines created during that previous exercise in waste and treachery. I suspect � nay, I fear � that a great effort will be made among our political elites not to let that happen again here. Nobody will want to be "divisive." We will move forward. It will not be allowed to affect our current politics, except as a handy tool with which the war-hungry claque in our conservative foreign-policy elite can bang the president over the head a few times.
The Iraq War will "belong to history" in the sense that it will be buried there.
That will not pay all the bills. And until those bills are paid � until the proper people pay the proper recompense for what they did to this country, to that country, and to the world � the Iraq War is not over.
In this, I fear he is right. There will be no real accounting for the crimes that have taken place in Iraq, and most particularly for the crimes of those who led the US into the war there in the first place, no more than they will be held to account for any of their myriad other crimes.
Much like the elites in Wall Street are not going to be held to account for their roles in destroying the lives and wealth of millions, so long as you have your hands on the levers of power, no crime is too big to simply walk away from and tell everyone that they need �to look forward, not back�. The whole mess will get brushed aside and dumped down the memory hole as much as possible, much as it already has.
Little wonder such things keep happening.
I came of age during Vietnam. We now know that those in charge knew that the war was unwindable early on and 10s of thousands of America's finest died after they came to that conclusion - some of them friends and relatives. The only punishment was history and that will be the same in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's too bad we can't seem to learn from history.
ReplyDeleteBJ -- somewhat OT, but I didn't want to derail the Hitchens thread, I finally got around to trying to answer you and Doug M.. It's in a Crooked Timber comment thread on this very subject (the nominal end to the war in Iraq). Sorry it took so long -- it's been an insane semester, for reasons some of your commenters referenced obliquely last time around.
ReplyDeleteUnderscoring your sentiments read what Rami Khouri says in Lebanon's Daily Star. Take a moment to check out the whole thing. It's not long.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2011/Dec-14/156809-praise-tunisia-not-the-iraqi-nightmare.ashx#axzz1gif8LWNt
Somebody who has Obama�s ear should take him aside one day soon and let him know that in the Arab world, Iraq since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion has never been a model for anything other than perpetual chaos, fear, death and destruction. It is everything we want to avoid, and nothing we seek to emulate. Most Arabs � if not most human beings around the world � see the last nine years in Iraq as the epitome of neo-colonial Western invasions that deal with Arab societies as if they were modeling clay to be molded into images that are pleasing to simpletons and predators in London and Washington. Iraq is not a democratic model, it is a nightmare.
I suspect the president might be in agreement but is in no position to say so.