The U.S. formally ended the Iraq War today. As The New York Times reports:
Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world […] For Americans, the ceremony on Thursday marked an uneasy moment of closure, with no clear sense of what has been won and lost.
Lasting nearly a decade and claiming close to five thousand American lives, the war became for many a Rorschach test of the U.S. role in the world. There are millions of people in the world whose first thought when asked to describe America is that we are a country that invades other countries, and Iraq is the premier example. The war was controversial from the start, a war of choice meant to deprive Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. When those weapons failed to be found, U.S. motives were further questioned (some said it was always about the oil) and the war was recast as an effort to promote democracy. Even as U.S. forces withdraw, the war remains controversial, with some expressing concerns about a precipitous withdrawal and others defending the withdrawal as prudent.
I suspect that the war was never really about weapons of mass destruction, oil or democracy. It was about Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. It was about Hussein trying to assassinate George H.W. Bush and the former president’s son deciding that simply would not stand. Hussein had good reason to expect a covert attempt to remove him from power as soon as George W. was inaugurated (after all, the Iraq Liberation Act was passed by Congress during the Clinton Administration), though he probably never imagined such an overt attempt as a massive land invasion. The 9/11 attack created a “permissive environment” in which the exercise of American power in the context of removing a dictator-behaving-badly was well within the bounds of the “new normal,” but I’m not sure it would have mattered. Bush would likely have found a way to remove Saddam from power one way or another. One could make the case that the attempt by a foreign government to assassinate a sitting or former American president constitutes an act of war. Sadly, that case was never made, at least, not in public.
Historians will debate the causes of the war for many years to come. What can’t be debated is the outstanding performance of the U.S. military. The all-volunteer force demonstrated once again that our soldiers will answer the call to duty, even when it means serving in far-off lands. The greatest mistakes of the war (sending too few troops and disbanding the Iraqi army) were made by civilian administrators, while military leaders found innovative ways of working with Iraqi tribal and sectarian leaders (the Awakening Councils) and imbedding troops in local communities, strategies that went a long way toward stabilizing Iraq. As our troops return home we can be justifiably proud of their service and sacrifice. They removed a dictator from power and gave Iraq a democratic government – now let’s see if they can keep it.
And finally, let’s return to that idea of Iraq as a Rorschach test of the U.S. role in the world. Yes, the U.S. invaded another country without having first been attacked. Yes, we removed the leader from power and then carelessly crushed all the social institutions that could have provided order, setting the stage for a violent sectarian and tribal bloodletting. That is all true. But we also worked over years, sacrificing lives and treasure, to rebuild what had been destroyed. If a Rorschach test can reveal many different perspectives then my hope is that history will note the negative while focusing on the positive and conclude that the U.S. ultimately did more good than harm and set Iraq on a path to being a prosperous and free country.
Photo Credit: MSNBC
