As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq,television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home. We won! he yelled. Its over! America,we brought democracy to Iraq!
Which naturally raises an intriguing and provocative question: Did we win?
But dont look for sailors kissing nurses in Times Square or ticker-tape parades in the streets of Washington. Dont look for Obama or most other elected leaders to use terms like victory to describe what happened in Iraq. Whatever progress has been achieved has come at great sacrifice and seems fragile and incomplete at best. Rather than winning,Obama describes his goal as responsibly ending this war. Making a final evaluation,of course,would be premature. Even after Tuesday,when Obama will declare the end of Americas combat mission,there will still be nearly 50,000 troops to advise and assist the Iraqis and conduct counterterrorism operations before pulling out at the end of 2011. A string of attacks last week demonstrated that radicals can still do damage.
Still,the American role in the war has been subsiding for some time,with soldiers based mainly outside the cities for the last year and encountering less and less direct combat as Iraqi forces take the lead. As of Friday,46 members of the American military had died in Iraq in 2010 a fraction of the 904 who died at the peak in 2007.
James M. Dubik,a retired army three-star general who led the training of Iraqi troops,said the keys now were building governance and economics. And for those who have suffered deep loss,like the relatives of the 4,400 Americans or the many more Iraqis who died,the notion of victory or defeat can feel remote. Well,first of all,my family lost in a big way,said Cindy Sheehan,who became perhaps the nations most prominent anti-war activist after her son died in Iraq. In her view,the only winners have been Halliburton,KBR,CACI,Xe,Unocal,BP,Standard Oil,Boeing and other corporations that profited from the war. People here in the US who dont know that they lost have lost big time,she said.
The debate underscores the changing nature of war. The United States claimed victory in most of the wars it has fought from the American Revolution through World War II. The Korean War essentially ended in a stalemate,with American-led troops repelling North Korean invaders but then being pushed back to the pre-war border. Vietnam is widely seen as a defeat after Americans withdrew and the South fell to the North. The first Gulf War succeeded in pushing Iraq out of Kuwait.
But many Americans remain unsure about the current war in Iraq. In a CBS poll last week,59 per cent said the United States did not do the right thing going to war in Iraq in the first place and 72 per cent said the war was not worth the loss of life and other costs to the country,the highest percentage since the invasion in March 2003.
The larger geopolitical repercussions of the war are still playing out. It drained American credibility around the world,particularly after the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction proved false and after the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison. Many argue that Iran grew stronger as a result of the war,allowing it to extend its influence to Iraq,where the Shiites,not the Sunnis,now dominate political life. And while violence is down,it is not gone. The difference is that the administration deems it below a threshold where it can be managed by the Iraqis without posing a threat to the Iraqi state.
One of those who from the beginning saw clearly what would come in Iraq was Col. Alan Baldwin,the chief Marine intelligence officer in Iraq during the invasion. A few days before the war began,he sat down with a few reporters and,off the record,predicted that the American invasion would lead to what he called a rolling civil war. Looking back to his prediction seven years ago,he said: We opened a Pandoras box. Lots of bad things were flying out of there. But good things are there now too. Its amazing we had the patience to be where we are today.
