They struck the colors, they packed the gear, they boarded the planes. Behind them they leave the blood of four thousand, four hundred and eighty seven soldiers, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, and at least three times that figure in terms of debilitating wounds, lost jobs, and lost infrastructure.
The ceremony was subdued, as befitted something of a funeral.
Cenk Uygur played the tape of George Bush fumbling through a press conference after Abu Ghraib broke, one of the most important press conferences of his life. He pronounced "Ghraib" as if it had two syllables and once as if it had an 'm' in it. It made a mockery out of something that was a deadly error, a grotesque violation, to anybody with a brain and a conscience.
This war comes after the other times we screwed Iraqis over.
The first was supporting Saddam Hussein against Iran, where the population rebeled against the dictatorial Shah we propped up. We sold Hussein the weapons he used against his own people---then invaded on the premise of finding and taking back those weapons.
After the first Gulf War, George Bush the elder urged the Iraqis to rise up and rebel against Saddam. Fourteen of the eighteen provinces did so, and the US backed away. Saddam Hussein reacted by grabbing thousands of rebels and taking them out to the desert and executing them before the ditches their bodies were shoved into. Those mass graves that the US press trumpeted about in the early days of Gulf War II? Many of them were of a rather old vintage. They were filled by US neglect.
Following Desert Storm, during which the military massacred hundreds of fleeing Iraqis on Iraqi soil, Clinton put in place the blockade, which cut off aid to Iraq. A whole generation of Iraqi children were miscarried, stillborn, or malnourished to the extent that more than a decade later, I regularly interviewed young men I thought were children----but who were in their late teens or early twenties. Five feet tall and eighty pounds, these are the ones nobody thinks about till they can't take the rotten food, the lack of jobs, the lack of electricity, the gun fights, the desperation, the complete lack of future, and they pick up one of the only options they have to change things: an AK or a bomb. The only people who listen to these forgotten young men and women are the ones who tell theme their deaths will mean something, which they cannot believe of their miserable lives. We contributed to that misery.
And then, this war.
There were no WMDs. Conservative relatives of mine dismiss out of hand the idea that I have any special knowledge of this, because everyone knows that the appropriate way to view the world is to have an opinion and then never ever change it. Liberals alter their opinions with the facts, and the facts are these:
WMDs would have resulted in a huge increase in devastating casualities amongst US troops, not the least of which would be heat injuries, due to the weight and bulk of protective measures taken against them. I went there wearing a size small uniform. In three months of summer heat I lost so much weight that my pants fell off and I had to pull my belt end all the way around to the small of my back.
WMDs would have ended the war---and the deaths----in 2005.
Conservatives promoted a theory that the insurgents shipped them to Syria.
To keep them safe, you know, and maybe save them for a special occasion, as one does.
Insurgents do not act like the terrorists do in the movies or on TV. Neither do good interrogators. Jack Bauer is not a good role model. He's a war criminal and/or domestic terrorist who needs to be in jail.
Insurgents are a practical bunch. They do not tend to 'save' bombs; they know security increases on major holidays. Interestingly, it's people like Timothy McVeigh who chose the date of the Oklahoma City bombing to match up the massacre at Waco, which he had actually been present for. Insurgents in the Middle East tend to skew young male, under-educated, desperate, without options, lacking easy access to food, and with absolutely no options. Terrorists in America, at least the white guys, tend to have temper tantrums with guns. They kill bosses who fired them (for cause), wives who rejected them (after abuse) and strangers who had the bad luck to get in the way. This message is absorbed early; school shooters tend to universally white male, with the youngest shooters so far being eleven and twelve.
When we failed at Abu Ghraib, it was just the latest in a long string of not taking the Iraqis seriously, and they knew it long before the excuses started. The war was effectively over in 2004.
Talking to some of these insurgents was illuminating. There were some you could reach and some you couldn't. The ones you could would rise to their feet when I entered the room, refusing to abandon the courtesy that informs every aspect for many people in the Middle East. Maybe it was because I was a woman, or maybe they're just that polite. Either way, no matter how angry they were, that was a start. Give them a cup of coffee, tell them it was all a mistake, that we were in this together and trying to fix it, let them think I'm stupid---works for me. The ones who were very far gone would not rise, would smirk at you and lie boldly to your face, absolutely shut down and closed off.
The thing about Middle Eastern culture, to the extent that one can generalize, is that it's not getting them to talk that's the problem. It's shutting them up. Thus one winds up analyzing reams of material.
People want to talk. Even the coldest bomber has a weakness, a restore point before he began to think about bombing as the solution to his life's problems. The difference between the tactics of the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and those of insurgents indicate something about the regimes they faced, the hopes they had, and the options they felt they had. In Iraq and Afghanistan, well, one dictator was replaced by ill-trained and ill-informed forces who didn't even know that the perpendicular-to-the-ground hand signal they were using to indicate 'stop' meant 'come forward' in some Middle Eastern regions. How many people died at checkpoints thanks to panic and ignorance? Here, too, the US suffered from its war on gay soldiers, which deprived the US of translators who could have fixed some of the ignorance. Too few troops meant too much work for any individual soldiers, impossible numbers of miles to cover and guard, and no real chance of succeeding. The final death knell was the hiring of contractors like Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater.
The mercenary companies were filled with men who claimed specialized military experience, but did not resemble the real-life soldiers I worked with who actually did that job. Blackwater guys buzzed their hair short, lifted weights to gain enormous upper body bulk (but not usefulness), and strutted around in sunglasses and attitude. Special forces guys slopped around in wrinkled uniforms and uncut hair and sometimes beards, to enable them to fit in with the civilian population. Significantly, interacting with a malnourished population meant that big muscles would have made them stand out. And also, when you're special forces, you don't need huge muscles to put huge guys on the ground.
Blackwater and KBR rented special white armored SUVs to tool around in, sometimes just around Victory Main, costing millions of dollars per year in vehicles that would never be owned. It didn't take long for these vehicles to be marked as US by insurgents, who overcame the armor with well-placed rocket-propelled grenades to the wheel well or through a window.
The cost of any one of those vehicles' rents would have enabled Iraqi farmers to buy land, cars, seed, clothes, medicine, and food. I know because we gave out $2500 for tips that worked out, as opposed to the unsubstantiated rumors that everybody with a grudge dumped on us. Significantly, grudges were shaped to sound like US fantasies, whereas the truth tended to be far more boring. One guy took that sum and paid off the farm his family had been renting for generations, bought a car to use as a taxi, and put money away for his kids' college, for seed, and for the future.
His neighbors promptly turned him. Must be an insurgent, they said.
There as in the US, just handing out money to people who actually needed it seemed to stick in the Republican regime's craw, while giving it to cronies like KBR and Blackwater was seen as a sound business move. Something about not earning it or something. Giving the desperate a hand up was seen as rewarding nothing. The fact that they might inadvertently give money to a tiny number of enemies or the 'undeserving' is seen as too much risk to make giving aid to the many worthwhile. Of course, given their status as members of a faith that many conservative Christians regard as heathen, would-be beneficiaries did not have any hope at all. And Blackwater and KBR and Triple Canopy raked in the cash. The only people that suffered were the Iraqis, US Armed Forces, and their families.
Across the Middle East, people rose up against oppressors this year, who cracked down with tear gas and rubber bullets and and mass arrests. Oh, excuse me. That was in the US.
President Obama took part in air support for Libya, which resulted in not one American life lost, and one deposed dictator, in about one-tenth the time it took the US to lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For once we were on the side of the oppressed, and it felt good, partly because it made sense. How, exactly, does one forcibly impose democracy?
This successful demonstration of US support for the little guy aroused tremendous hostility within certain quarters in the US. Need I specify these?
All these wars around the globe do not disguise the fact that the real place the war is going on is within the United States, within the soul of this nation. The distractions are now over, in the case of Iraq, and winding down, in the case of Afghanistan. We have to be ready to face the next one, here on American soil. The weapons may be different, the battlefields our own courthouses and schools and clinics, the enemies our neighbors, but it's just as much a war as any fought with firearms and tanks.
Dumbledore said it best. "It takes great courage to fight one's enemies. It takes greater courage to fight one's friends."