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I Wish
In the spring of 2003 I joined a political discussion bulletin board whose main topic was the war in Iraq, and whose members were overwhelmingly conservative and pro-war. The board had a blunt tone and a no-holds-barred discussion style that appealed to me - and even though I knew that holding a minority view was liable to earn me a verbal hammering, I entered the discussions freely, and offered up arguments to support my view that the Iraq invasion had been ill-advised and that the insurgent population would prove more difficult to vanquish than Saddam Hussein’s government had been. Of course I encountered the exact reaction you can imagine from my opponents: why was I being such a naysayer, the insurgency was nothing but propaganda, the Iraqis were happy to be “liberated” from their former government and would eagerly form a cohesive, united government to take its place… we’d be out of there within a year.
A couple more months went by; the insurgency picked up steam and Washington started admitting that further troop deployments might be in the offing. Don’t worry, the war supporters insisted, once Saddam and his sons had been apprehended the insurgency would die out, since they were behind the whole thing and were merely recruiting agitators from outside of the country to stir the pot to weaken the “new” Iraq, so that when we left, they’d be ripe for picking and retaking once again. Those American journalists and contractors who were being kidnapped and beheaded by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and his motley crew of Al Qaeda goons were aberrations or unfortunate collateral damage; eggs broken in the big, essential omelet of Saddam’s overthrow.
So right around this time, Saddam’s sons, the sadistic psychopath Uday and his coldly calculating brother Qusay, were both shot and killed. NOW we’d see the end at the light of the tunnel, the Bush boosters said. With those two vanquished, Al Zarqawi and his very tiny minority band of bumbling insurgents, who had no support at all from the people of Iraq and who were nothing but an advance guard of Saddam loyalists, would quickly follow suit.
Summer turned to winter and right around Christmas of that year, Saddam Hussein was caught. By whom is still muttered over in some dispute; many claim that the official story, that he was cornered by US soldiers in a filthy hidey-hole outside of Baghdad, was a work, and that he was actually turned in by the man who owned the farm where the hidey-hole was, and that he was drugged and groomed for perfect photo-op presentation to quiet the growing number of war critics.
I could go on for a while with more examples like these; ostensible milestones along our long and tangled road in Iraq that were supposed to herald the turning of the tide in our favor. And let’s face it; we all know how it’s turned out. From the deaths of Uday and Qusay, to the capture and trial of Saddam, to the election of a Parliament to the assassination of Al Zarqawi; the insurgency has only continued to grow, the casualties among both Iraqi civilians and US military personnel have continued to mount, and any end in sight to our occupation of Iraq is no longer on the horizon. Our margin of respect among the rest of the world - both from its leaders and its citizens - has eroded, billions more have been spent, and domestic programs have taken the brunt of the constant budget raids necessitated by the dragging on of this war. Let’s not even get into Abu Gharaib, or Fallujah, or any of those other buzzwords of the grim reality of how badly our grip on Iraq has slipped. It’s of no consequence to the fact that we cannot leave without seriously jeopardizing our foreign-policy survival. We’ve gotten ourselves good and stuck, and all I have left to say is this:
I wish to Christ those conservatives had been right.
I wish that all of the pessimism that this war inspired in me from the beginning HAD been nothing but my usual liberal grumbling. I wish that you’d been right about the whole thing and that Iraq was now a shining, smiling testament to the great success of Bush Inc’s War on Terror®™. I wish that supporting the troops truly did mean supporting the mission, rather than grimly keeping my fingers crossed that we can go a day or two without losing another American soldier, or seeing a lurid videotape of some contractor or other getting his head lopped off. I wish that all the presidential bullshit had been bonafide stone cold truth.
Eating a little crow would’ve been a small price to pay to avoid having my kid grow up, as I did, thinking that having your country at war in some shitty hunk of real estate halfway around that globe is a normal state of being. I’m sick as shit of hearing “the war” and automatically knowing what the phrase refers to; namely a military action in which we declared victory over three years ago, but still, strangely enough, surreally continue to fight. I’m outraged that the military action we should be giving all of our resources and concentration – the one in Afghanistan, remember that one? – has been giving short shrift for what has proven to be a hopeless vanity project that George W. Bush has taken from a personal vendetta to a public money- and blood drain.
I wish I could say that, yes, it’s all been worth it. I wish I could say that Bush was right with that “staying the course” bullshit and that we’d scored a decisive victory and worldwide respect. But more than that, I wish that you guys would just admit that you were wrong, that you now know what the rest of the world knows, that you can see it and wish that things had gone differently as much as I do.
Because it really seems like you don’t.
