Quiet End to a Military Campaign

The United States is bringing its military engagement in Iraq to an end. Saddam is gone, but there can be no talk of triumph. More wars like this one are now improbable. The United States is flat-out broke.

Time Magazine published a special edition at the end of April 2003. It bore the triumphant title “21 Days to Baghdad.” With numerous photographs, the magazine documented the U.S. Army’s rapid victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces. They depicted American soldiers marching through sand storms and riding in tanks or helicopters and closed with the symbolic photo of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square in downtown Baghdad. At roughly the same time, landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was a fighter jet carrying George W. Bush, who announced, “Mission accomplished.”

The memory of how quick everyone was to celebrate the rapid fall of Baghdad results in a lot of head-scratching today. For some reason, no one at the time could believe that victory over Saddam — with all his weapons of mass destruction — could be achieved in just three weeks and with relatively few American losses. People rejoiced and celebrated because here was positive proof that even if a terrorist like Osama bin Laden could damage the nation on 9/11, the United States would remain a superpower. After all, Baghdad was conquered in just three weeks!

Now, as President Barack Obama welcomes the last of the U.S. combat troops home from Iraq and looks at the bottom line, the memories appear just plain absurd. 4,500 dead and 30,000 wounded American soldiers, most of them missing limbs. Others will carry their psychological wounds with them forever. At least 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. Every American child knows: George W. Bush’s mission wasn’t accomplished; Iraq is far from being the democracy the neoconservatives envisioned; Saddam’s removal did nothing to further the democratization of the region. And finally, the regime in Tehran wasn’t weakened. On the contrary, Iran has more influence than ever and is increasing its involvement in Iraq.

And the people that were liberated? Daily life is just as dangerous for them as before, water and electrical power are in short supply and arbitrary actions by the police, as well as the danger of terrorist attack, are still unspeakably burdensome. There may be one less dictator in the world, and that’s a good thing. And the U.S. was successful in tamping down the fires of civil war they helped to ignite, but the country the Americans are leaving behind isn’t the “stable nation” Obama described in his welcome home remarks at Fort Bragg. U.S. troops may have conquered Baghdad in three short weeks, but after eight years of occupying the country militarily, they still haven’t achieved victory.

Most Americans understand that. No one was expecting a total triumph. Even as the “New Strategy” of 2007 was successful in pacifying the country, the United States still hesitated to wage an all-out war in Iraq. Americans are war-weary. The Iraq war disappeared from the public spotlight as other problems came onstage: the crushing economic crisis; high unemployment; personal bankruptcies; the enormous national debt; the tea party movement.

That’s the only explanation why a day as longed-for as the end of the Iraq war went almost unnoticed in the United States. On the day Obama welcomed the troops home from Iraq, there was very little news coverage of the event. The American public is far more interested in the battle between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for the Republican nomination.

The Libyan engagement provided an insight as to just how America’s appetite for war has diminished. Washington did play a part in the negotiations leading up to military action in Libya, but only within the framework of NATO. Barack Obama’s strategy of “leading from behind” was very popular with the American people. It was clear that no one was keen on having another Iraq-like disaster. It seemed that the people had learned from their mistakes, that Americans knew they couldn’t win and that, from lessons learned in Vietnam as well as Iraq, they had no burning desire to send their young people into another war. This was not because of moral objections: The nation was simply too broke to finance another such undertaking. All of America knows that.

All of America? Not quite. There remains today a small embittered group of people who refuse to believe that fact. They’re called Republican presidential candidates. They criticize Obama for not only staying out of Libya, but also of betraying Iraq by withdrawing U.S. forces. One can dismiss their saber-rattling as election year posturing and console themselves with the fact that the United States is just too broke to give Time Magazine another reason to publish another special edition.