I.
Late in the evening of this day in 2003, President George W. Bush announced “the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign” whose purpose was “to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and defend the world from grave danger.” It might be hard slogging, he said: “A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict.”
II.
Not much after this day in 2007, Mitch Benn sang “Happy Birthday War.”
Of course, “war” rhymes with “four”; now he’ll have to rhyme something with “five.”
III.
The cost of the war has come to almost 4,000 dead American servicemen, 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians and maybe $527 bn in direct expenses. Or maybe more; Stiglitz and Bilmes put the cost in the trillions of dollars and there are other ways to measure civilian deaths which get that number much higher, too.
IV.
It is difficult to compare the current situation to any previous in our history. To recapitulate:
(1) The administration began this war on false pretenses; this is known. We can, if we choose, armor ourself in uncertainty as to what extent they knew the pretenses were false, but that they were false, is no longer seriously debatable. We may if we like claim that wars often begin and are prosecuted amidst a degree of falsehood, and this is so. Wilson and his administration, for example, lied a fair bit about why we were fighting the Great War, and why we fought in Russia immediately afterward. I do believe that in this case the degree of divergence from reality, and the evident willfulness with which the US government achieved that degree, rather distinguishes this episode from the ordinary war in which truth falls at the first fusillade.
But before we get too bogged down there, let’s move back a step:
(2) The first phrase above was, “The administration began this war”. That in itself should be uncontroversially true and worth considering. (It seems, further, uncontroversially true that this was, because of (1), preventive rather than preemptive war.) Few other wars in American history qualify under that rubric. Some “interventions,” some “actions” count: but really, you have to talk to the Sioux, to the Spanish, to the Mexicans—and those with long memories—to go back to an era when the U.S. plainly and openly started proper wars.
(3) The administration began this war without a good plan for what would happen to give us a victory. This resembles a couple of other wars in American history, notably the Philippine War and the Vietnam War. The former war, one could say we won, as against the latter which, let’s be honest, we pretty much lost. It is hard to say that either was quite worth the cost. I refer here to Theodore Roosevelt’s succinct summations:
While I have never varied in my feeling that we had to hold the Philippines, I have varied very much in my feelings whether we were to be considered fortunate or unfortunate in having to hold them, and I most earnestly hope that the trend of events will as speedily as may be justify us in leaving them
and
I don’t see where they are of any value to us or where they are likely to be of any value.
It would be around another forty years or so before we did leave them. Which might prompt us to reflect on the wisdom of Mark Twain’s all-purpose observation when applied to imperial wars: “It is easier to stay out than get out.”
(4) At this point we appear to be in a phase of the war whose primary purpose is “the defense of the power influence and prestige of the United States in both stages irrespective of conditions”. It is not clear how this will end, let alone end well. The last time we were here (for those who did not click the link, I note the phrase is from Neil Sheehan’s summary of the Pentagon Papers) the Nixon administration reached out to the countries funneling arms and aid to our guerrilla enemies. We are not obviously now doing that. The Nixon administration also escalated the war while professing to wish to see it end. We are kind of now doing that. It is not having no effect at ending the war, but it is not having the desired magnitude of effect either.
I suppose the approximate equivalent might have been if, after the Mexican War, the U.S. had succumbed to the all-Mexico movement and then faced a guerrilla insurrection lasting years.
V.
John McCain wants “a greater military commitment.” He refers to our remaining in Iraq for a long time—a hundred, a thousand years—so long as US casualties stay down. Which is to say, he seems to envision something like the Philippine scenario. He doesn’t quite say how we get there from here.
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to draw down troops and internationalize the effort to stabilize Iraq. Obama points out that he correctly predicted from the start that the war would go badly.
VI.
My daughter dances ballet, fights with her brother, and is starting to read. She draws beautiful pictures and is learning to play the piano. Each day, it seems, she suddenly comes up with an extraordinary unprompted observation about the people she knows, what they do, and why. She has not been alive a single day when we have not been at war in Iraq.
17 comments
March 19, 2008 at 12:50 am
Ben Alpers
Excellent post, Eric!
Call me old-fashioned, but I continue to believe that no general statement about the Iraq War should be made without mentioning oil, which constitutes a peculiar and powerful interest that is somehow the cause of this war.
March 19, 2008 at 5:25 am
The Commander Guy
C-SPAN 3 has been running/streaming the 2002 aumf debates.
I caught some yesterday. If anyone needs a dose of depression, you can find some there.
March 19, 2008 at 7:30 am
John B.
oh yeah…that’s just what I need…a dose of depression.
here is what I would say about this “war”, and now occupation of Iraq:
sickening
immoral
awful
criminal
illegal
wasteful
terrible
March 19, 2008 at 7:35 am
Buster
Five rhymes with connive and deprive. I bet one could work with those words somehow to craft a line about the war in Iraq.
March 19, 2008 at 9:34 am
Rob_in_Hawaii
Eric, your observation that your daughter has lived all her life beneath the cloud of this latest war reminded me of scene in my own life many years ago.
It was 1965 and I was at the family dinner table. I was 13 and my brother 14, and by then the war in Vietnam had been going on for most of our lives. My mother remarked that LBJ’s latest escalation (today we’d call it a “surge”) was working. The war, she said optimistically, would soon be over. “Hah!” my father growled, “it’ll still be going on when these boys are old enough to fight.”
Startled, my brother and I looked at each other in a kind of horror. As it turned out, of course, my father was right. Although my brother and I managed to miss getting drafted (that’s another story), the war did go on. I grew up, got married, had two kids by the time the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.
Today, it’s another seemingly endless and pointless war we’re in. I have four grandkids now, and as you put it so well, they have “not been alive a single day when we have not been at war in Iraq.”
And so it goes.
March 19, 2008 at 9:57 am
eric
And so it goes.
God, I wish there were something more we could say than this, but now we do seem locked into a kind of infuriating passivity. It’s going to give the citizens who feel engaged but impotent some kind of civilian version of shell shock.
And Ben, nicely put.
March 19, 2008 at 10:23 am
Vance Maverick
Jive; dive; no one gets out of here alive.
And your final reflection (true for my daughter as well) reminds me of something I may have mentioned here before. On the playground, in fifth or sixth grade, one of my friends said triumphantly that the US had never lost a war. The year was 1975, meaning we had then lived all our ten or eleven years under the shadow of war — and that my friend didn’t grasp, as even I did, that we were losing it. Last I heard of him, he had joined the Air Force.
March 19, 2008 at 10:24 am
urbino
locked into a kind of infuriating passivity
A national Parkinson’s rigor, in other words.
Moving post, E.
March 19, 2008 at 11:04 am
The Constructivist
Combo of Mexico and Philippines works best for me. Manifest destiny used to justify both–although as Stephanson points out, different versions of manifest destiny–might be another way into grasping what’s new/different about our own versions today. Hey, do you all know Stephanson? He should come out with a new edition of that little book on manifest destiny! His 20th C chapter sucked and his predictions ended up being way off, but the earlier chapters are great!
And thanks for making me realize what you said at the end is true of both my daughters. I think I was visiting my in-laws-to-be in Japan when the invasion began….
March 19, 2008 at 11:55 am
eric
Hi, Constructivist. I know someone’s writing a new book on the Monroe Doctrine (the other foreign policy MD) but don’t know about a new “manifest destiny.”
And thanks, urbino.
March 19, 2008 at 12:28 pm
The Constructivist
Hmm, there was a literary studies book that’s on my to-read list that looks at the Monroe Doctrine and globalism in American lit. Now, what was it called? Ah, here’s an H-Net review:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=73641160694873
Would love to hear what (s)he thinks of it! Or if anyone who’s read it would care to share….
March 19, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Mitch Benn
Funnily enough…
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=30528025
March 19, 2008 at 3:52 pm
eric
Holy smokes! Is that really Mitch Benn? It certainly seems to be.
Blogging is probably the coolest thing ever. Thanks, Mitch! It’s a fine update.
March 19, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Pete
Eric, great post.
Constructivist, I too agree with the Mexican/Philippines connection. The “preservation of civilization” is a trope that seems to connect these periods (well, less in Mexico) to today. While it’s certainly less prevalent today, I think it still comes out in stuff like Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. On the other hand, maybe reading Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization recently has brought this to the fore of my thought.
March 20, 2008 at 5:10 am
What’s above the fold? 3/20/08 « The Edge of the American West
[…] by eric Sources: UC hopes to hire Mark Yudof, UT chancellor, as system-wide president; Bush on Iraq war: “The world is better, and the United States of America is safer” (Photo is peace […]
July 25, 2008 at 2:12 pm
The child that is born on the sabbath day…. « The Edge of the American West
[…] 25, 2008 in stuff by eric On this week’s edition of The Now Show, you can hear Mitch Benn (previously, and here) respond musically to the “Tyson Homosexual” incident. Sometimes gay, just […]
March 19, 2009 at 11:44 am
Add one. « The Edge of the American West
[…] Previously. […]