"The Iraq Monument" (200-fucking-4)
V-I Day
My foreign policy credentials are not as impressive as those of some of the architects of the Iraq War: Paul Wolfowitz, for example, was Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University; at the same institution, as an undergraduate, I majored in The Writing Seminars and took classes like “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” and drank a lot of National Bohemian. However, it may be worth pointing out that Dr. Wolfowitz adamantly advocated invading Iraq, whereas I thought it might be a bad idea.
It’s possible that Wolfowitz could’ve learned something in The Writing Seminars. One thing I learned from watching so many Kubrick movies is that nothing ever goes according to plan. Even the most elegant and foolproof of designs, which our invasion of Iraq was not, is befouled by “human error”--passion, madness, ignorance and stupidity--or the cosmic inevitability of bad luck. I believe this same lesson is taught in the officers’ corps, encapsulated by Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke’s dictum that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” But then not many of the planners of the Iraq invasion served in the military, either, come to recall.
I know it’s tacky and poor sportsmanship, on such a somber occasion, to say, “I told you so.” But it might be worth pausing, for once in our history, to look back and find out who turns out to have known what they were talking about and who, by contrast, was misleading through their teeth. (“Misled” was a euphemism much in vogue ca. 2002, since apparently there were potentially libelous ramifications to implying that our misleaders were just plain lying to us and knew it.) Interestingly, just about every politician, general, think-tank pundit and newspaper editor in America was disastrously, criminally wrong about Iraq, while the sorts of people who think that giant puppets and drum circles are effective instruments of political reform were right.
Of course, I can’t pretend that my hippie peacenik friends and I knew that invading Iraq would be a squalid disaster—at least not with the same degree of certainty that our opponents knew it would be an unqualified triumph. But then, we weren’t privy to the same highly classified misinformation and fabricated evidence to which the Bush administration had access. We can just tell when we’re being lied to—at least when we’re being lied to badly, with contempt. The four or five different flimsy casus belli the Bush administration ran up the flagpole aroused our doubts, as did their apparent indifference to which of them we chose to believe. Hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans and I glumly assembled, held up signs, and halfheartedly chanted to protest the buildup to war in 2002, in rallies that shut down the streets of midtown Manhattan and completely encircled the White House in D.C. George Bush waved off that segment of the electorate as a “focus group” and proceeded with his countdown.
I worry that history will call Iraq a mistake, or a blunder. This would be a grave injustice. It was entirely avoidable, which makes it something more like a crime, or an atrocity. Almost five thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. And I know it’s vaguely treasonous of me to count the deaths of our enemies, but a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet in 2007 estimated almost 700,000 Iraqi deaths since the war began. I haven’t seen that figure in print much for some reason so I’d like to repeat it: seven hundred thousand. The families and friends of those people will loathe the United States for the rest of their lives. George Bush’s two wars and tax cuts pushed the American empire irrevocably over the brink into its terminal decline. It’s a meaner, uglier country than it was just ten years ago. I can remember a time when the idea of a “debate” over torture would’ve seemed as obscene as a debate over pros and cons of rape or child molestation. Soldiers in camouflage stand idly around in New York subway stations holding machine guns as if we were in some embattled third-world police state. Our hysterical reaction to 9/11 exposed us as a craven and vicious people who made our fear into national policy without a debate.
Historians will doubtless argue over the reasons for our invasion of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, Iraq’s oil reserves, the neocon fantasy of establishing a secular democracy in the Middle East through force, the oil, a heavily-armed Oedipal psychodrama played out by George Bush, or, some may even claim, oil. I suspect all these reasons and others were factors in the Bush administration’s determination to go to war. But the reason why we let them do it—and I implicate myself here along with all the gullible docile gung-ho yahoos who’ll reliably support any war the government wants to start, because after all painting clever signs and showing up at a few rallies isn’t exactly a hunger strike or self-immolation—goes much deeper, into places most of us don’t much like to look.
I saw 9/11 happen on TV, like most Americans, and I reacted the same way a lot of my compatriots did: by going berserk. I wanted to see those responsible nuked, their squalid little theocratic sandtrap turned into a vast flat rink of Trinitite that would glow faintly at night for the next thirty thousand years to remind the world that the Americans, as a people, were not to be trifled with. It wasn’t until I went to New York City, a week later, that I realized how grotesquely inappropriate my reaction was. New Yorkers--for whom the event had been real, not televisual--were shocked and traumatized and sad, but no one was clamoring for blood. It was the people back out in America, for whom it was not a real-life tragedy but the terrible and spectacular first act in an action movie, who were thirsty for some third-act, feel-good payback.
I’m afraid I’m not buying “confusion” or “misleading information” or “the heat of the moment” as anyone’s excuses for advocating the war in Iraq. I believe that we, as a nation, collectively decided, without admitting it to ourselves, that someone, somewhere in the world, had to die in payment for 9/11, and deep down we really didn’t care who it was or whether they had anything to do with it so long as they lived in the Middle East and worshipped Allah had brown skin. We thought killing thousands of strangers on the other side of the planet might somehow assuage our anger and our fear, in the same way that someone who’s been mugged might buy a gun to feed his fantasies of protection and revenge. It was a human sacrifice, an act of black preventative magic, a blood feud on a far vaster scale and with higher-tech hardware but essentially no different than the kinds of tribal honor killings that we affect to despise. In almost all of Kubrick’s films, Man is unmasked as a killer ape, screaming and bludgeoning someone to death in ecstasy.
For the third and last time: seven hundred thousand people have died in Iraq since we invaded. (I’m not even counting Afghanistan.) That’s two hundred and thirty times as many people as died on 9/11. Picture, if it’ll help, the World Trade Center towers collapsing in slow motion, one hundred and fifteen times. Since it has been ten years now, maybe we’ve all finally calmed down enough to ask: Are we even yet? Do we feel better now? Was it worth it?
