Five Years On

Over the past couple of weeks, I have debated with myself as to whether I would write a post about the Iraq War today, the fifth anniversary of the invasion.  This conflict started a few weeks ago when my blog friend Kim at mouse medicine wrote about something called the Blogswarm and encouraged her blogging readers to join in.  The Blogswarm is basically an online protest of the invasion, which is an idea that I support.  However, I’m also not much of a joiner, so that sympathy quickly came in conflict with my natural aloofness, which can sometimes mimic a mass of cold Canadian air interacting with a muggy warm front from the Caribbean.  Or not.  It depends.

So I wasn’t certain that I was going to blog about the war today at all.  It would have been just as easy to blog about St. Joseph’s Day (a Catholic feast day celebrated by Italians in a kind of marinara-tinged response to St. Patrick’s Day)  or that time that something happened to me and I felt either good, bad, or indifferent about it.  The Iraq War was certain to get loads of attention from all quarters of the political spectrum on this day, and my tiny little voice would neither add nor detract from the din in any noticeable way.  But then someone forced my hand, and it was, of course, George W. Bush.

 Mr. Bush gave a speech yesterday about the conflict that seemed to be riddled with lies and exaggerations.  What mostly caught my eye was the claim that the infamous Surge of recent months has been a success.  Now, I understand how this claim is justified.  The idea is that violent attacks have been less frequent in these months and that this reduction in violence is attributable to the Surge.

And that is probably true.  There have been fewer attacks because of the increase in American troops.  However, the question becomes, is this true success?  Of course, that depends on the measure that one takes for success.  And I would say this:  The Surge cannot be deemed a success until it is no longer necessary.  As long as large numbers of American troops are needed to keep the levels of violence down to only the murderous minimum–and still functioning at a level of horror most of us can only conjecture at–there can be no talk of success.   As long as the Iraqi government continues to misfire and sputter like an ill-tuned engine, there can be no success.  As long as the innocent continue to die, as long as the people are forced to live without clean water, as long as a civil society is notable only by its absence, we will have no success.

The Surge is buying Mr. Bush time, time to skate through the remaining months of his term.  He will leave office with hands soggy with the blood of others.  He will leave office having given the Iraqi people the gifts of chaos and suffering and will refuse to understand that there is no freedom in a life drenched in hunger and fear.  He will leave office smug and self-satisfied, and the people of Iraq will continue to suffer.

Today is a solemn day and not a time for boasting of success.  It is a time to for contemplation and examination.  It is a day on which all responsible people need to ask themselves, “How can we best make of the debacle in Iraq a success?”