By: Lionel Hitchens
The Iraq War officially ended 12/15/2011, and with the end of the War in Afghanistan on the horizon as the military projects pulling out 1/3 of its troops by the end of 2012. It will more than likely be a decade since either war’s inception before America is entirely out of either country, and still their looms the potential of conflicts with Libya and, most recently, Iran. For many Iraqi citizens, because of the potential of the US’s invasion of Iran, which is a bordering country of Iraq, the threat of continual, unjustified military occupation seems inevitable, especially when considering that for the past twenty years they’ve dealt with a brutal, autocratic dictator that killed thousands, if not millions, of his own people, and then a foreign, and Western, military strike against its people.
Beyond the many ethical questions still unanswered about the Iraq War, there is a similar confusion of what happens now that there was when America began to withdraw from Vietnam almost forty some odd years ago. The question of what America has accomplished obviously becomes the mantra of many commentators when considering our initial reasoning was to find, and destroy, any and all weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq’s government’s possession. With the 2003 invasion producing very quickly the realization that there were no WMDs, before or afterward, America polarized into two camps, pro-war and anti-war.
With a good majority of citizens back in the beginning of the Iraq War retaining the still unhealed and fresh scars of the 9/11 attacks in their collective memory banks, combined with little understanding of the Middle East surpass a glossed-over recognition of their existence on this Earth, it isn’t hard to understand how America was convinced that the continual occupation and invasion of Iraq sounded like a good idea when our initial reasoning flopped. For, not knowing much about the sectarian disputes or geographical differences, it seemed highly plausible that bin Laden and other key members of Al-Qaeda could be hidden somewhere in Iraq and that Iraq’s government was indirectly supporting them by hiding their whereabouts, though such an assumption has been disproven for most.
It quickly became a political and rhetorical justification for global democracy—or at least Middle Eastern democracy, with Iraq as the proverbial guinea pigs. But when considering that democracy is, by definition, a government of and by the people that occupy the country, it’s hard to understand how a military occupation and control of a country could be anything but a hostile takeover and new-millennial form of colonization, much less a democracy. The longer the war went on, though, and the more American soldiers that came back in body bags, the less appealing the idea of establishing a Middle Eastern democracy sounded.
And while many have stated that oil was the reason we stayed, it seems hard to believe that any government could keep such an ulterior, greedy motivation under wraps. It seems like the most highly probable core reason the Iraq War lasted so long, despite former President Bush’s 2003 speech title ‘Mission Accomplished’, was to maintain some form of control.
But who knows. This war, as one military friend of mine said, was more so an ideological war than anything else. The exact teleological reasoning behind it seem so diluted from its original purpose that I don’t anyone could say exactly what happened with any certainty. In more ways than naught, the Iraq War was like the Vietnam Conflict in that it was started out of ideological propaganda stewed up as a stratagem to energize the polemic feelings of a nation and to effectively define an “enemy” in a post-9/11 political atmosphere, and then justified as some great and charitable gift of democracy the West was giving to the Middle East one country at a time.
It’s not hard to see why most of Iraq’s citizens did not like America’s presence within their country: because our purposes and goals seemed contrived and duplicitous when considering their country’s history with the West in general. This is further solidified by the recent Florida Family Association’s war on the show ‘All-American Muslism’ on TLC. The show’s purpose was simply to demonstrate that there were Muslims that were very much like any other average American citizens, and that, essentially, there is a population of Muslims that could reconcile their belief system with living in the West. Florida Family Association members were cited as not liking the fact that the show didn’t portray Muslims as angry, violent jihadists that wanted to destroy America, and that this would promote tolerance among America’s increasingly ignorant Islamophobic community.
There will probably still be residual scars left over from the lack of resolution in the Iraq War, but I believe that it is best not to think of this war as either necessary or unnecessary and thus polarize America even further, especially since the war already happened, but to examine its strengths and weaknesses so that we can further improve as a country that will inevitably, whether you like it or not, go back to war in the future.
