December was “first month since the beginning of the Iraq war in which there were no U.S. combat deaths, the U.S. military reported.” Three Americans died of non-combat causes.
As I highlighted earlier, counterinsurgencies rarely end cleanly and clearly, with a single moment identified as the day of victory. But they do end, and Iraq is ending now. That’s not to say the victory is one to be particularly happy with, that Iraq is a fully-functioning democracy without corruption, or that the potential for unraveling doesn’t exist. But it is to say that the United States has likely done as much as it could politically and militarily, given all the circumstances. Despite the result, I suspect that the memorials to Iraq, when they come, will be closer to the muted mourning of the Vietnam Wall than they will to the triumphalism of the World War II memorial. It seems unlikely that Iraq will ever be remembered as a “good war.”
20 comments
January 4, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Anderson
I will never forgive Bush and Cheney for misleading us into believing there were stockpiles of Angostura bitters in Iraq.
January 4, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Jeff King
The Iraq war won’t be over as long as the 14 or so permanent US military bases exist, along with a US “embassy” larger than the Vatican. Unless permanent occupation is indeed considered the desired victory.
January 4, 2010 at 4:25 pm
roger
It seems unlikely that Iraq will ever be remembered as a “good war.” – especially by the Iraqis.
January 4, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Ben Alpers
You know how to eliminate US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan? Bring all the troops home now.
War is over if you want it.
It seems unlikely that Iraq will ever be remembered as a “good war.”
Victor Davis Hanson already remembers it this way. Then again, he also recently declared that Curtis LeMay was “brilliant” and “courageous” with “DNA” that was “almost divinely engineered for America’s ordeal between 1930 and 1960.”
January 4, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Ahistoricality
At best, assuming an almost absurd run of good luck and good policy in the Middle and Near East, I think it might be remembered much as the Korean War is now.
Which opens up a whole other line of argument, I know, but ultimately, I think the Korean War was a non-failure, though it wasn’t widely viewed as a success.
January 4, 2010 at 7:53 pm
booferama
There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars trilogy. If you’d like to learn more about war, there’s lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool gory pictures.
January 4, 2010 at 7:55 pm
kevin
That’s an outstanding Simpsons reference, booferama. Take the rest of the day off.
January 5, 2010 at 12:33 am
Walt
Permanent occupation doesn’t count as victory? I have completely misunderstood history, then.
January 5, 2010 at 7:12 am
mealworm
Seriously, what? We’ve got bases all over Europe. We didn’t win there either? That doesn’t mean “victory” is a good thing, necessarily, but if one presumptively defines war as unwinnable, that’s not a very interesting discussion.
January 5, 2010 at 7:29 am
Charlieford
The language of “victory” fits very awkwardly with what Iraq has become. If we’re going to look at metrics, we should have one eye on how many Iraqis are dying violently even as we keep the other, inevitably, on how many Americans are dying there. Our bluster and hubris and idees fixes made an apocalyptic mess of that place and nothing we do now will erase that. We need a “national conversation” regarding what obligations are incurred under those circumstances. One could do worse than starting here:
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2008%20-%20Winter/full-iraq.html
January 5, 2010 at 8:00 am
silbey
Casualties for both Iraqi security forces and civilians seem to be down substantially as well:
http://www.icasualties.org/Iraq/index.aspx
You’re right to highlight the awkwardness of the language, but that’s more of a function of our assumptions of what “victory” should look like: grand surrender ceremonies on the deck of a battleship.
January 5, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Charlieford
Yeah, I know. I wasn’t criticizing your word-choice, just sayin’ we carry whole clouds of assumptions around in these drops of language. We need a big re-think on all that. FM 3-24′s observation that “the best response may be to do nothing” in certain circumstances doesn’t fit our inherited paradigms, and language perpetuates them. It’s like what Lakoff says about “death-tax”: once the word’s accepted the4 battle’s already decided.
January 5, 2010 at 12:42 pm
silbey
just sayin’ we carry whole clouds of assumptions around in these drops of language
Amen to that.
January 6, 2010 at 12:48 am
dave
If the nation that spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military can’t find a way to satisfactorily define the outcome of a conflict as ‘victory’, then it really needs to stop wasting its money.
January 6, 2010 at 5:55 am
Ben Alpers
In Star Wars: Episode 4 victory looks a lot like Triumph of the Will.
I hope this is helpful in solving our apparent problem!
January 6, 2010 at 10:21 am
Charlieford
Dave, no offense, but that seems a bit muddleheaded. One of the intentions behind military expenditures is deterrence. Without defending the magnitude or specific line items involved (do we really need thousands of nukes? is it really wise to be spending $50 million a year just to maintain them? really?!) those expenditures have, arguably, had their intended effects (not perfectly of course). But should successfully deterring a potential enemy be called a “victory”? If it shouldn’t, does that mean the expenditure was unnecessary?
January 7, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Steven
I wonder about the decision to term this a counterinsurgency. That’s obviously the US military’s preferred term for this conflict, but there are plenty of good reasons for challenging that rather than accepting it. This was an invasion followed by resistance followed by a civil war. Counterinsurgency was a part of that but far from the totality. Even with your qualifications, it seems premature to be declaring the civil war at an end. The pullout of US troops didn’t end the Vietnam War. I doubt it will end this war.
And “victory”? A partially redeemed fiasco seems to me to be the better description.
January 7, 2010 at 7:49 pm
Erik Lund
Buy from Amazon
If I’m going to add anything more it is pseudo-profundity, and..
Oh, what the heck. I’m getting that Afghanistan isn’t so much a country as the intersection of India, Iran and {Inner Eurasia}, and what is happening here is not civil war so much as a particularly robust political process. The question, then, is what we Allies are getting out of participation in that process, and the answer would appear to be that we are trying to postpone the Indian War of Reunification until it doesn’t happen, and that means that our attention has to be on Delhi, because Karachi can be bought.”
January 8, 2010 at 7:33 am
Barry
Charlieford: “Seriously, what? We’ve got bases all over Europe. We didn’t win there either? That doesn’t mean “victory” is a good thing, necessarily, but if one presumptively defines war as unwinnable, that’s not a very interesting discussion.”
Please note those bases were established *after* the war was indeed won. And despite the lies of Stanford Junior College Professor Condoleeza Rice, the only danger to US troops in Europe after the surrender was drunken jeep accidents.
January 8, 2010 at 11:46 am
Charlieford
Some kind of framework gremlins strike again …