The Unbearable Lightness of War

Gary Kamiya writes:

Thursday, the Pentagon declared the Iraq War officially over. No one noticed. One of the memorable slogans of the Vietnam era was “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Today, the question should be: What if they ended a war and nobody cared?

With the possible exception of the Korean War, never in U.S. history has a major war concluded with so little fanfare. Every schoolchild knows that the Revolutionary War ended at Yorktown, when Gen. Cornwallis’ troops surrendered to George Washington’s Continental Army as a British band famously played “The World Turned Upside Down.” The encounter at Appomattox Court House between an immaculate Robert E. Lee and a mud-spattered Ulysses S. Grant has entered American legend. V-E and V-J Days, commemorating the end of World War II, set off the most joyous, raucous and heartfelt celebrations in U.S. history. Even our defeats are marked in memory: The end of the Vietnam War will forever be associated with the image of desperate South Vietnamese clinging to the last helicopter as it lifted off from the American Embassy in Saigon.

But the Iraq War is different. Except for the families of the troops still serving there, Americans tuned it out long ago. Nobody gives a damn about the Iraq War. To admit this, however, would violate a cornerstone of American mythology: our need to believe that we take our wars seriously. So, the opening sentence of a Dec. 15 New York Times story titled “Obama Observes End of Iraq War” refers to Iraq as “a war now indelibly imprinted on the national psyche.” The phrase is lofty and elegiac. Unfortunately, it is completely false. Iraq has never been imprinted on the national psyche at all, let alone “indelibly.” It is ending as it began: with the country half asleep.

Just as it is the newspaper of record’s quasi-official role to make such hollow claims, so it is the official duty of America’s leaders. Hence the red-white-and-blue speech President Obama gave to returning war veterans at Fort Bragg. First, Obama made an obligatory attempt to infuse the end of the war with gravitas: “Now, we knew this day would come. We’ve known it for some time. But still, there is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long.” Then, because it is not permissible for a president to acknowledge that wars are sometimes follies that end ignominiously, Obama went on to make the obligatory assertion that America won the Iraq War: “[E]verything that American troops have done in Iraq — all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering — all of it has led to this moment of success.”

Finally, having conferred this empty stamp of rhetorical approval, Obama whitewashed the motivations that actually led the Bush administration to start the war. In one of the most disgraceful sentences of his presidency, he said, “That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right.” If Obama had gone on to add, “They hate us for our freedom,” his impersonation of George W. Bush would have been complete.

Obama was right to assert that the end of the war is a profound moment, and to implicitly call for Americans to reflect on it. But the formulaic patriotic phrases he spouted will not inspire the kind of reflection that is needed. They are meaningless sound bites, the equivalent of the genuflections to “our brave men and women in uniform” made by announcers at football games. To truly honor those brave men and women in uniform – and, even more because there are more of them — the millions of Iraqis whose lives we destroyed, Americans need to look unflinchingly at this dreadful war. They need to look at the ignorant, twisted and duplicitous men and women who started it, at the institutions that failed to stop it, and at their own complicity in it. Above all, they need to look at its terrible toll.

Nobody wants to think about Iraq. It was a mistake, and no one wants to dwell on mistakes. There are times when national forgetting is healthy. But this is not one of them. We need to remember. We need to remember that this war was launched under false pretenses by an administration that used fake evidence to push it through. Americans need to remember their own understandable fear after 9/11, and how they allowed cunning and manipulative ideologues to exploit it. We need to remember that the institutions that should have resisted the war – Congress and the media – completely failed to do so. Drugged by post-9/11 patriotism and groupthink, America’s representatives and their journalists abandoned their posts at the crucial hour.

We need to remember that the war was ruinously expensive. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has spent $823 billion through fiscal year 2013. Other analysts have estimated that its total cost, including veterans’ benefits and healthcare, will be $3 trillion. We need to remember that the war was a total failure. According to the respected Center for Strategic and International Studies: “[T]he US invasion now seems to be a de facto grand strategic failure in terms of its costs in dollars and blood, its post-conflict strategic outcome, and the value the US could have obtained from different uses of its political, military, and economic resources.” The war destabilized the Middle East, led to widespread hatred of the U.S., and increased the threat of terrorism. Its real winner was Iran.

Above all, Americans need to remember that the Iraq War was a war. A war that shattered an entire country. A war that resulted in the death of between 150,000 and 400,000 Iraqis, left 600,000 orphans and 1.3 million internally displaced persons. Almost 4,500 Americans died, and thousands more were so seriously wounded that their lives will never be the same. Americans need to remember that war is the worst thing in the world. War is hell. War is this blood-spattered little girl screaming because her parents have just been shot dead by mistake at a checkpoint. War represents the complete defeat of the human spirit. Wars must never be fought unless absolutely necessary. Never. Never.

We need to remember this. For America’s wars have become weightless. They are fought by other people’s children, or by mercenaries, or by functionaries sitting inside mountains pushing buttons that launch missiles. They are no longer real. The way the Iraq War is ending, not with a bang but a barely audible whimper, is the way we make war now. The line between war and peace has disappeared. We are in a permanent state of quasi-war.

This is spiritually deadening. It is also dangerous. The unbearable lightness of war allows ideologues and fools to kill casually in our national name, without anyone paying attention. Since Iraq never happened, another Iraq is possible. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. On Memorial Day in 2007, I wrote that the best way to honor the men and women who had fallen in Iraq was to bring their comrades home. They are, at last, mercifully, home. And the best way to honor them is to make sure that neither their children, nor those of any other American’s, is ever sent off to fight and die in a needless war.

By The By

Ed Miliband is not who the Blairite media wanted, so never mind opinion polls, even actual votes for a party led by him do not count.

Labour's fifth by-election win in succession since Ed Miliband became Leader. An 8.5 per cent swing from the Conservatives to Labour.

But none of that counts, because, rather poignantly today, he is The Wrong Brother.

Don't Get Hitched

There is a Good Left, and there is a Bad Left. There is a Good Right, and there is a Bad Right. Both Hitchens brothers started out on the Bad Left, but Christopher moved to the Bad Right, whereas Peter moved to the Good Right.

Several years ago, I told Peter to his face that he had really become a sort of Old Labour. He did not deny it, he has since moved even further in that direction, and he has more or less said so in print, both in The Broken Compass (reissued as The Cameron Delusion), and in numerous newspaper columns and blog posts. He sees the Labour Party of Ed Miliband and Maurice Glasman as potentially the vehicle for patriotism and social conservatism, if it can only rid itself once and for all of the Blairite poison that is now the only thing remaining in the Conservative Party. He is right.

Whereas Christopher, as he told Anne McElvoy in the interview replayed in part on today's World At One, stopped being a Socialist but never stopped being a Marxist. He continued to hold that "the materialist conception of history is valid". He merely changed the ending so that victory belonged to the bourgeoisie, and thus to the most bourgeois of countries, to which, thus conceived, he duly transferred his allegiance, like the Canadian David Frum and the Australian Danielle Pletka, not to say Rupert Murdoch.

Their wildly ahistorical version of the American Republic simply took over where the Soviet Union had left off, spreading the dictatorship of the victorious class throughout the world, including by force of arms, while the vanguard elites in other countries owed allegiance to Washington, as once to Moscow, rather than to their own respective countries. But Hitchens, among others, was really a Trotskyist, so the entryism and the permanent revolution also remained.

Peter Hitchens's column, which reaches an otherwise untouched section of opinion and which contributes very considerably to the Mail on Sunday's market lead, probably cost the Conservative Party a hung Parliament in 2005, and as certainly as we can ever know cost that party an overall majority in 2010. What did Christopher Hitchens ever do that had anything remotely approaching that sort of influence?

Vive La France!

It is we who now depend on France for our survival. La France éternelle, the land of Charles Martel, in which his heirs are valiantly engaged in a demographic war, not only against the rise of a semi-feral underclass which is in any case nothing on that in the “Anglo-Saxon” countries that have ceased to will the means to a properly functioning bourgeoisie and proletariat, but also against the Islamic expansionism that dismembered France as recently as 1962, when she was mutilated by the loss, not of three colonies, but of three départements, integral parts of the French State and nation.

That was the perspective from which, in and through the person of a decorated veteran of the Algerian War, she opposed the greatest catastrophe since 1962 for what was originally Christendom on three continents, covering every inch of the Mediterranean’s shores. For what remained of that, 1962 was the greatest catastrophe since 1948 (itself the greatest since 1923), and 2003 seems set to have been the greatest until a similar intervention in Syria.

That will doubtless also be resisted, even if not by Sarkozy, then certainly by la France éternelle, the conscious, literal rebirth of which will have tremendous consequences in, for example, the United Nations Security Council, where they can expect the support of Russia and will also deserve that of the United Kingdom and of the United States.

Never forget that talk of what would originally have been a Second Western Alliance, but against Islamic rather than Communist expansion, has been a commonplace of French political discourse ever since the 1950s. And never forget that Mitterrand gave a job to Poujade, in whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist traditions met, who had endorsed him and who did so again.

Welcome Their Hatred

In the words of Marina Lewycka a few months ago:

These same rating agencies, who back in 2006 were happily awarding triple-A ratings to 105% mortgages for half-employed carpet-fitters and insolvent poets, are now telling us how to run the country, saying if we misbehave then Greece, Spain or even Britain will get downgraded. What I can't understand is: why do we take any notice of them at all?

Where's the politician today who'd say what President Franklin D Roosevelt said in 1936: "We know now that government by organised money is just as dangerous as government by organised mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred."

Just another branch of the money markets, the ratings gangsters cheerfully ignore the basket case condition of the British economy because Cameron, Clegg, Osborne, Lansley, Gove and the rest are fully signed up to flogging off our public assets and services to the other branches of the same New York mob, a policy to which they have been committed, at no small monetary gain to themselves, throughout their adult lives.

The markets staged a coup in Britain in May 2010, and they are not about to have their puppet Prime Minister, with his all of one quarter of the eligible vote, brought down by the facts before he has done what they installed him to do.

What's that? These agencies buy our debt? No one made them do that. They are supposed to be the experts. And it is time for them to admit that they are simply biased in favour of the United States, cheerfully wrecking anywhere else that takes their fancy as surely as certain of their compatriots cheerfully bomb anywhere else that takes their fancy.

The British, Australian, less commonly Canadian, and other lackeys and wannabes of either are as far beneath contempt as are those of the other, and are very largely the same people, today unable to contain their glee as England's oldest ally, which gave us the use of the Azores during the Falklands War, is sent to the wall in order to preserve the pretended top dog status of the actually Chinese-owned land of Ronald Reagan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the land that refused us the use of any base (so that we had to go cap in hand to Pinochet), and which refused to sell us a single AIM-9M, but which provided Argentina with boots and kit, and also trained the Argentinian Army.

The French had sold Argentina exocet missiles, just as Thatcher had been about to flog Argentina at a knock-down price the very ships that were now needed. But the French banned further sales, and provided the codes to disarm the missiles. Nothing remotely comparable was done by the land of Fitch, Moody's, and Standard & Poor's; the land of Noraid. Welcome their hatred, indeed.

Conviction Politicians

Chirac, tellingly given no prison sentence for having dared to maintain a municipal political machine several decades ago.

But Blair, still convicted of nothing despite having blithely admitted on television that he always knew there to have been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Don't Rate Them

Who are these people? Like Sarkozy or loathe him, and I am firmly in the latter camp, he is at least removable by an electorate.