A New Chapter in American History

The U.S. war in Iraq ended last Thursday, but no one seemed to notice. No excited crowds appeared in Times Square. There were no parades, no marines kissing nurses. The formal retraction by the United States of almost all of its soldiers — the rest will come home Dec. 31, leaving behind some hundreds of “consultants” — caused as much impact in people’s lives as a dam rupturing in some distance country.

What occurred was that, during almost nine agonizing years of blood-soaked conflict in Iraq, the United States lived its life as if it were not engaged in war. It was a strange, surreal period. Almost 5,000 American soldiers were killed and, according to official estimates, more than 32,000 were wounded; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi fighters and civilians were killed or wounded. However, amazing reports of incredible carnage and atrocity got confused with the rise of reality shows on TV, the spread of idiocy on the Internet and the growing buffoonery of politics.

If the reader belonged to the happy majority of Americans whose sons, spouses, father or friends and beloveds were neither killed nor wounded in Iraq, he would have had no reason to feel involved in the war. I cannot think of another historical moment or another place in the world, where one segment of society was torn apart, while the other section lived as if nothing were happening. People were not indifferent: They were living a parallel existence.

The strange sensation that we were enjoying peace when we were really at war had much to do with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. When the United States invaded Iraq, almost two and a half years later, Americans felt that the worst of the violence had ended.

The Iraq invasion was not seen as the start of a prolonged war, but rather as a tying up of loose ends. People also felt that the real violence was in the future, with the possibility of a new attack on U.S. soil. What was happening in Iraq was a secondary show connected to the shocking past and an ominous future.

Attitudes about George W. Bush were also polarized. His supporters were optimistic in their vision of a complete victory, uncomplicated and happy. In their eyes, the Iraq conflict was a brief political action, necessary and almost painless: Iraq had run a red light and now would have to pay a fine. On the other hand, people who disapproved of Bush focused all their indignation on the 2000 election, which they believed he had stolen. For them, the war was Bush’s war. Perhaps for this reason, there were no demonstrations against the war similar to those of the Vietnam era. It was their war (Bush and his supporters). They would end it.

And, as the war became more futile — when it became clear that, in a fragmented situation not even the least victory was possible — the specialists and intellectuals who had asked for the war were disconcerted, and they changed the subject. They retrospectively evaluated their fatal judgments and wrote books and essays making new proclamations about the future. The lucrative contracts they had received for defending the war they now received for lamenting the war. Unlike lost lives, lost words can be rejected and substituted with others.

The blessing and curse of American life is that Americans don’t like to dwell on failures, and the Iraq War quickly ceased to occupy the attention of even historians.

This was a tragedy almost equal to the tragedy of the war itself. Just as the Peloponnesian wars ruined Athens, so the Iraq war some day will be considered the fatal directional change for the United States. More than the banking and real estate crises, the war in Iraq sank the American economy. Bush conducted the war without increasing taxes; he cut taxes. This was another surreal aspect of recent years. While one sector of the economy was burying $1 billion a day on an external conflict, the other sector was greedily rubbing its hands and asking for more and more money. The result was catastrophic.

Amazingly, one does not hear a single American politician, not even President Obama, blaming the war in Iraq for crippling the American economy. The temptation to enjoy a happy ending is too great. But, instead of an ending, last Thursday marked nearly nine years of a new chapter in American history, one that has just begun.