The process of forgetting ‘Bush’s war’ has already begun, says Andrew J. Bacevich. But if President Obama fails to learn from that disaster, he’ll pay the price in Afghanistan
What is it about the war in Iraq that induces officials to lie, dissemble, prevaricate, and otherwise exert themselves to dodge the truth? Now even Barack Obama, who prior to becoming President accurately denounced Iraq as a ‘dumb war’, has joined the crowd.
A much publicised speech on 2 August to the Disabled Veterans of America became President Obama’s own ‘mission accomplished’ moment, albeit this time without the triumphal banner and, blessedly, without America’s commander-in-chief decked out as a flyboy. ‘As a candidate for President,’ Mr Obama reminded his listeners, ‘I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end.’ Fulfilment of that pledge now beckons. ‘And that is exactly what we are doing,’ he continued, ‘as promised, on schedule.’
The President took great care to avoid using the ‘V-word’. His remarks contained no references to victory or winning or, in the vernacular preferred by George W. Bush, kicking ass. Obama also passed over in silence the various fictions and fabrications advanced for going to war in the first place. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Never found. Substantive links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’eda? Nope. The Anglo-American invasion triggering a wave of democratisation sweeping the Islamic world? Not happening. The road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad? You’ve got to be kidding. Yet none of these matters diminishes Obama’s conviction that the light at the tunnel’s end is now burning brightly.
This is sheer malarkey. What the artfully chosen phrase ‘responsible end’ actually signifies is that the United States is abandoning its effort to determine the future of Iraq through the concerted use of hard power. After seven years of arduous effort, Uncle Sam’s fighting forces are calling it quits. Iraq will become someone else’s problem.
Meanwhile, the Iraq war — the turmoil touched off when US and British forces invaded back in March 2003 — has by no means concluded. It will not ‘end’ on 31 August 2010 — the date when combat operations will officially cease — no matter how earnestly the Obama administration might pretend otherwise.
US combat operations might be shutting down, but the war surely continues. In Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, insurgents still operate with relative impunity. Bombs routinely detonate. Assassins gun down Iraqi officials. Deadly attacks on security forces persist, indeed, are becoming more frequent as the US military presence diminishes. The promised political reconciliation that was to endow Iraq with an effective and legitimate government has not materialised. Meanwhile, the beleaguered Iraqi political apparatus teeters somewhere between mere paralysis and outright collapse.
With the West’s media searchlight now having shifted to Afghanistan, the gory details of daily life in Iraq now attract passing notice at best. Hearing of some bloody incident in a mosque, marketplace, or government ministry, we shake our heads, shrug our shoulders, or avert our eyes, while carefully avoiding the question of what it all might mean. Even when reported, these developments remain unexplained and largely inexplicable.
The United States is moving on. The process of forgetting Iraq has begun and, indeed, is already well advanced. The rediscovery of Afghanistan, the erstwhile ‘neglected war’, now vaulted to the front rank of importance as Obama’s War, facilitates this process. Obama’s 2 August pronouncement merely acknowledges and ratifies this reality, which very much reflects the will of Americans only too ready to put Iraq in the nation’s rear-view mirror.
Yet consigning Iraq to the been-there, done-that category, to join other unhappy events such as Vietnam, brings consequences to which Americans would do well to attend. Among other things, forgetting lets Washington off the hook. That, in turn, almost guarantees the recurrence of yet more screw-ups in the years to come — perhaps sooner rather than later.
As an enterprise intended to eliminate violent anti-Western jihadism, the protracted military occupation of Afghanistan makes no more sense than the protracted military occupation of Iraq did. Pacifying Afghanistan, even if possible, will not appreciably reduce the jihadist threat, which after all is not centred in or dependent upon Afghanistan. If anything, prolonging the Western military presence in Afghanistan exacerbates that threat, contributing to the destabilisation of neighbouring Pakistan and fuelling animosity elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Still, by escalating the Afghanistan war, Obama is accomplishing one thing: he decisively ends the debate regarding accountability for Iraq. There will be none. The people of Great Britain had their Chilcot inquiry. Shamefully, the people of the United States will have nothing comparable. Culprits will escape (some to enrich themselves writing self-exculpatory memoirs). Worse, lessons will remain unlearned, with the tidy ending conjured up by President Obama’s speechwriters making it unnecessary to probe too deeply into all that Washington messed up along the way, or even to ascertain why and how the United States opted for war in the first place.
The spectacle is an extraordinary one: Obama in effect sprinkling lime over the corpse that is Iraq and covering it over with dirt. Thus does a Democratic administration obscure the misjudgments and missteps (in the eyes of some, the crimes and misdemeanours) of its Republican predecessor.
Only one lesson has emerged from Bush’s war to affect the conduct of Obama’s war and that lesson is one the President may soon come to regret. According to this tidbit of wisdom, the chief responsibility confronting any wartime president is to identify, elevate, and then defer to a very smart general.
For Bush in Iraq, that general, identified after several other contenders fell by the wayside, was David Petraeus. In Afghanistan, Obama relieved one commander, General David McKiernan, for evincing little of Petraeus’s savvy and political adroitness. He next tried General Stanley McChrystal, said to possess all of Petraeus’s sterling qualities, albeit with a touch of monkish asceticism. But McChrystal too failed to deliver the goods. Rather than adhering to a vow of silence, the monk also talked too much, eventually all but volunteering to be fired. So Obama has now filled the role of Petraeus with Petraeus.
The appointment has delighted the ever-dwindling number of Americans — Senator John McCain and a handful of neoconservative diehards — who view Iraq as a successful venture, give Petraeus a lion’s share of the credit, and are keen to fight on in Afghanistan regardless of the costs. Not without reason, they view their favourite general as a kindred spirit. Yet for the White House, Petraeus’s arrival in Kabul creates this problem: the President is now left with a field commander that he cannot afford to fire and may not fully be able to control.
Another presidential election approaches. The voters who elected Obama care less about old promises regarding Bush’s war than about more recent ones regarding Obama’s war, namely the commander-in-chief’s ironclad commitment to start withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan by July 2011. All indications suggest that Petraeus opposes any such pull-out. In the months to come, we will see whether Obama himself holds firm, or whether he actually has forgotten just how ‘dumb’ the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan really are.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book Wash ington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War is just out.