When United States forces leave Iraq in defeat, whether it be next year or five years from now, there will be the usual excuses for our country's moral failure. Some people will say, "Well, that just goes to show that you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. The Iraqis didn't want the gift of fredom, and so the whole debacle was really their fault." Others will look for scapegoats within the United States and blame those of us who opposed the war for its unsatisfactory outcome. The "Who lost China?" trope from the early 1950s will resurface along with the post Viet Nam lament of, "They wouldn't let us finish the job." The "who" and "they" will remain vague, but the insinuation will be that the honest, simple folk of America were once again betrayed by the Left. Blaming the Iraqis or blaming the Left will be widely embraced because doing so comes with a dispensation. Those who locate blame outside themselves do not have to entertain the possibility that they have been the authors of their own misfortune. They do not have to confront what has been done in their name and who they have become as a result of it.
First, in the weeks leading up to the US attack James Baker described Iraq as a "discretionary war." As such, the Iraq War lacks a valid justification and corrupts those who fight it, support it, or temporize with respect to it.
This evening I came across a chilling homemade video on the Guardian website. No blood is spilled, but the video is full of procedural cruelty. A group of soldiers are on patrol in an Iraqi village and somebody is pointing a camera out the back of the vehicle. Children begin running after the Americans, and an impromptu footrace begins when a soldier holds up a bottle of water.
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One by one the runners drop away until only a single boy is racing for the prize. The soliers laugh and toss the plastic bottle onto the street where it is snapped up by passersby before the boy can get to it. The soldiers laugh some more.
The video made me think of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s early 20th century talk to his Baptist Bible study group:
The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest....The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.
But like any organizer in the Colorado coal fields of 1913 could tell you, those with the power to impose a Social Darwinist game are not obliged to play by its rules. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The video is disturbing on two levels. It's painful to watch what happens to the Iraqi kid, and it's unsettling to watch a Humvee load of American kids, themselves maybe a generation away from the coal fields and foundry floors, behaving like a bunch of mini-kingpins pruning their own dozen American Beauties. Unaware of their own history, working class young people replicate the central trauma of the American Guilded Age--and laugh.
Because of who we are as a society, our troops brought a little bit of the unacknowledged trauma of the workplace to the Iraqi desert. Victim becomes perpetrator. So much for that.
Second, since no good reason could be found to justify the Iraq War to the American people, those who supported it had no choice but to lie and to demonize those of us who told the truth. And the lies, torture, and war profiteering continued. Shame on them. But let's not forget the silent majority--up to 70% of the population at one point--who tacitly approved of the lies and defamation or chose not to inform their own consciences. Self-imposed ignorance does not exculpate. Followers are responsible for their following.
So what I am trying to say is this: the Iraq War stems from a moral failure on the part of the majority of US leadership class and the majority of Americans who approved of it. Since it was undertaken under false pretenses and in willful ignorance, the Iraq War lacks a solid justification. Lacking a clear purpose and bereft of any conception of what counts as success (or even completion), US soldiers kill and die on a daily basis for an absurdity, and they too are cheapened by their involvement.
The longer the war goes on, the more meaningless it will be. Pseudo-patriots will tell us that the US will lose face if it gets out of Iraq now, but they will not acknowledge that their nationalistic vanity is being underwritten by other peoples' suffering and death. It's time for honesty, self-confrontation, and humility in the public sphere. The payoff will be small: some people brave enough to confront themselves will stop being war-abetting bastards. Yet something tells me that even this is too much to expect from our population of self-terrorizing yes-men. Ten years from now, after the memory of the disaster has faded from the public memory, the armchair warriors be going around explaining why it was people like me who caused them to lose the war.
And so the parents' sins are visited upon their children to the seventh generation.