This week President Obama, in keeping a 2008 campaign promise, declared the war in Iraq to be over. The last American soldier deployed to that sad country will be home for Christmas. The administration has stated that Iraq's time to become a working republic, to take responsibility for its own security has, at last, arrived. The Iraqis agree, most of whom were certain that we would never leave and that our purpose in being there was really to get at their oil. They must be stunned and perhaps more than a little apprehensive at the same time. But no matter: our boys and girls are coming home at last after the longest military engagement in American history.
More than a million service people were deployed to Iraq in nine years of war there. Of that million plus, more than 40,000 US casualties were suffered, of which 10% were fatal. This of course doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were injured or killed in that same period of time. (The English medical journal The Lancet estimates that more than 600,000 Iraqis died war related deaths, including from sickness, malnutrition, lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, and direct and indirect military and terrorists' actions.
Coming home, but to what?
I am overjoyed that the President has ended this war. And so, apparently, is 78% of the entire American public. A Congress which should be celebrating the end of this madness instead calls the President who ended the thing a traitor. Naïve. Weak. "We should leave at least 30,000 troops in Iraq," bloviate opposition members of Congress (and the former vice President who started the whole thing); members who gave absolutely nothing to the cause. The current traveling circus, one of whom will be the Republican nominee for the 2012 presidential elections, continually tries to make lemons from lemonade in this matter, so as to gain the votes of the stupid wing of their party. One wonders if they would have the federal government pay for a parade down Broadway for the troops without a corresponding cut in some hated government program. It is no wonder that fewer than 10% of the public view Congress with anything other than absolute disdain.
I am overjoyed that, as a senior citizen, I can welcome home soldiers, sailors and airmen who did everything they were asked to do during those terrible nine years, and I will tell any of them I ever meet “Well done!” but I truly wonder at what kind of country they will discover. What kind of country those who have served and already returned home are experiencing as they attempt to return to civilian life. Will they find jobs? Will they find financial security for themselves and their families? Will they find - at last – peace? After the ticker tape parades – what?
Our soldiers come home to a nation in turmoil. They come home to a nation whose people never were asked to make the personal sacrifice historically required to engage in war. There were no bond drives as in World War II, there were no income tax surcharges, as during Vietnam, to pay the multi-trillion dollar bill this war will cost us over time. There was no pressing of young citizens into the military through the draft.
Indeed, we conducted this war on a credit card. As we spent billions of dollars a day to either (a) take Saddam Hussein down or (b) bring democracy to the Middle East or (c ) fight terrorism, we were told to go shopping; to go out and buy something. And we did. In spades. And we paid for whatever we bought with borrowed money, too. And while all this was going on, the middle class which arose after the greatest war this nation ever fought was destroyed as the monied class was given enormous tax breaks; as multinational corporations, banks, and Wall St. traders were paid to rape and pillage the American economy. And like a distance runner collapsing after a marathon, the American people are now spent out.
This is what our troops return to. They return to a nation perhaps unable to govern itself anymore. They return to a society whose intelligentsia wonders if the great 200-year experiment with freedom, self-government and prosperity might have been a pipe dream whose bubble would someday burst with the inevitability of a sunset; whose people know nothing of shared ideals, of making common purpose, and doing things which have no direct personal benefit.
And many of those troops will wonder if their sacrifice - and the sacrifices of their fallen comrades - were worth it. They are not the sons and daughters of investment bankers and hedge fund speculators. They are people of common means and who come home with an ideal of what and who we are. And over time they will match their ideals with the reality of living in 21st century America.
Will their parents get it right?
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Marilyn Sands
TimingLogic
Robert J. Elisberg
Laura Wilkerson
Fay Paxton
TheBadScot
Salon.com
Comments
Lezlie
It just stuns me everyone is so blase about this and even celebratory on murdering people for the oil underneath their feet. What kind of country are we, indeed!
the fact that america left, finally, should not be a source of satisfaction: being there at all was a crime, and staying was only possible if a steady drip of american casualties would not hinder re-elections.
Correction Obama’s campaign promise was to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of 2009. The date today is 12/15/2011. He also never told the electorate of his plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan and never sought approval from Congress to start dropping bombs in Libya.
LydiethA:
We removed a brutal dictator, who used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. The country is now a Democracy without the intention of growing its empire by attacking its peaceful neighbors. We also showed the world that we will shoot to kill, the best deterrent of all in preventing another 9/11 type of attack.
No one on the Left is honest about Saddam.
And I'm with Harry's Ghost. I am deeply ashamed of what we have done. We stand by and say things like "collateral damage" over people's husbands, wives, and children--real people with real families and real pain. We can't begin to imagine what we have wrought on other people's families half a world away.
Good to have your voice back, Fly. We have to catch up soon.
comprehensive warmachine links
I wonder how much Halliburton made there over this time period?
The homecoming will be a cold awaking,yet I hope for them to readjust in a way that enables them to find back into society of which they have always been part.It won't be easy.Good luck to them all.
Rated
The purpose of armies is to conduct war and in the case of the USA, to follow orders from the civilian commander-in-chief. War is - still - hell. Innocents get killed and maimed. Some soldiers behave like barbarians no matter whose army they're members of. (Think: Abu Graib and Mi Lai)
@Johnny Fever - You are wrong on your facts. Obama promised to draw down the war within 16 months of taking office. By August of 2010 the last combat brigades had left Iraq, leaving 50,000 troops as "transitional troops."
Obama described what those remaining troops will be doing in a speech on Aug. 2, 2010: "As agreed to with the Iraqi government, we will maintain a transitional force until we remove all our troops from Iraq *by the end of next year," he said.* "And during this period, our forces will have a focused mission -- supporting and training Iraqi forces, partnering with Iraqis in counterterrorism missions, and protecting our civilian and military efforts. These are dangerous tasks. There are still those with bombs and bullets who will try to stop Iraq"s progress. And the hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq. But make no mistake: Our commitment in Iraq is changing -- from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats."
Promise kept.
I concede: Obama’s campaign promise was to be out of Iraq in 16 months; today’s date is 12/15/2011. He also failed to mention in the campaign his intention to escalate the fight in Afghanistan. He also started a war with Libya, if you consider dropping bombs on another country an act of war. I’m not surprised the crowd visiting this site likes Obama, but to say he honored his campaign promise is false and he shouldn’t get the support of the anti-war crowd either.
Oh by the way, you better hope Iran doesn’t fill the power vacuum the United States is leaving behind. If all that blood and treasure is lost because Obama pulled out too hastily in order to appease his base…that’s not going to look very good.
You wrote: "Oh by the way, you better hope Iran doesn’t fill the power vacuum the United States is leaving behind."
The 1500 years of history and, more importantly, the history of the last 30 years suggest exactly the opposite, namely that there is no love lost between Persians and Arabs. Iraq and Iran have already gone at it once with a staggering loss of life to both sides. We gringos tend think think that because they share a common religion (Shia'a Islam) that they will be great buddies in the years to come. But the Iranians are not Arabs. They may try to influence policy in Iraq but then so will everyone else, including fellow Arabs in the region.
No. They now have a country with which to do what they want.
Frankly, the Iranians are the "odd men out," surrounded on all sides by people who are not culturally like themselves. They are more like to fight with each other than make love.
I made no such claim that Iraq would be “buddies” with Iran. I simply stated that without our support there is a chance that a powerful country like Iran, would more easily/forcibly gain control over Iraq, and potentially dismantle the Democracy we fought so hard to install. I’ll leave it up to Obama to explain to the mother’s of the dead soldiers that their son died so that Obama could feed red meat to his liberal base.
We didn't need that war, and Saddam was never a threat. Anyone still buying the WMD line is a sucker's sucker.
Don is a righteous guy, but as to our interests being defended or protected, I can see a time when that sort of ground control hegemony made sense, and a time when it made less, but some sense, as we were protecting American corporate interests. What I see with Iraq is a lot of tax-as-debt waste and death to advantage a handful of transnational, dis-American wealth interests that want to make money coming and going, to their and China's mutual benefit. We could have bought the oil cheaper than going to war over it, and would have actually gotten the oil.
War -- socialize costs, privatize gains.
American interest? Where?
I understand the idea behind your question here. I'm not sure, however, those returning home will be overly surprised by what they find. Most of them have probably heard about conditions here at home.
It's also important to note that the deadline of leaving Iraq this month of this year was and agreement signed by Bush BEFORE Obama became president.
On November 17, 2008, after months of negotiations, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Iraq Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari signed two documents: (1) the Strategic Framework
Agreement for a Relationship of Friendship and Cooperation between the United States and the Republic of Iraq, and (2) the Agreement Between the United States of America and Republic of
Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq. The second agreement is commonly referred to as the SOFA between the United States and Iraq and is incorporated by reference into the larger strategic agreement. PDF
It's interesting that some want to credit Obama, while others who are Bush supporters want to blame Obama for "leaving too soon". WTF???
I think there is another, perhaps more important, question that must be asked: “How many will actually be returning?”
Obama is bumping up troop presence in the Mid-East and with that being the case, it seems likely that many will only be reassigned to different Mid-East locations rather than “coming home”. The celebration seems to me to be self-delusional, as if we are not going to be fighting a war that encompasses far more than Iraq. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, ...I see no reason for celebration, aside from those few soldiers who actually will return to their families.
It is generally conceded that obama inherited two wars, but they have now morphed into overt and covert wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, (Kenya, Uganda Burundi), Libya, Syria, Iraq, Colombia, Mexico, Honduras, and Iran.
I have You as a favorite FlyLoper, but I think You're overlooking some significant facts (and generally agree with Your posts), and by the way, with the contractors still there, the Vatican sized largely CIA staffed "embassy," and the ongoing violence, this war is hardly over.
Thanks for your comments. I'm neither defending nor advocating for American foreign policy.
The purpose of my piece was to contrast the America that exists - as we stop *uniformed* military participation in combat (to concede your point about contractors possibly remaining there) and the America of two or three generations ago as those soldiers came home.
We are a different people than our fathers and (for you youngsters) grandfathers.
I always enjoy the comments. agree/or not. no delete.
You don't seem like an insecure human who would delete.
I loved your BIO. I picked up a book by Jonathan Shay.
He's a MD, Ph.D - The forward is by Max Cleland.
`
Title: Odysseus in America - Combat Trauma and -
The Trials of of Homecoming. Post war adjustment -
`
I was an employee in the federal Vet Center Program.
Listening to horrible war stories was a painful role.
A woman ask me one day`"How are you doing?"
I remember her compassion was genuine. Care.
I began to Speak after a pause. Tears flowed.
I did what my Father said often ref:,`WW2.
"It's enough to make a grown man cry."
She helped me cry. I wept like a baby.