The Column

Five Years and Counting

The Iraq war grinds on and on

I've always found it fascinating how entwined the personal becomes with the political.

This struck me the other day when I was watching some network playing the highlight reel for the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld declaring how easy the war would be, how it would pay for itself, how it wouldn't last longer than six months, how we'd be greeted as liberators, etc.—juxtaposed with footage of Iraq from the ground: The mangled aftermath of car bombs, bodies on stretchers and under sheets, American troops looking hot and tired under a brutal desert sun.

Then they showed footage—from way back in 2004—of four American contract workers who had been murdered by a mob, their bodies dragged through the streets, slung up over the girder of a bridge, and burned. It was one of the earlier portents of the style of shocking violence that would become the day-to-day norm in Iraq.

This incident was important to me for my own selfish reasons. When I first read about it, I was sitting in a dining hall at Miami University surrounded by a group of friends, eating some kind of delicious laxative-laced dining hall food, and stealing glances at the girl sitting next to me, who I was secretly, sickly in love with at the time. I remember this moment well: The two of us studying the New York Times' picture of the four charred, indecipherable black masses. I admit the slowly churning dread I felt at this picture was scrubbed away completely when she looked up and I met her lovely, troubled eyes with mine. Ah, to be young and in love and concerned that an ill-conceived military intervention has opened a spiraling vortex of unfathomable violence and human misery.

Yes, the personal has a way of blending with the political, of reminding you of all your old defeats and very intermittent victories. Four years later, I can't even fathom how long ago all of that seems—burned bodies and unrequited love and all the rest of that seemingly minor bullshit. It feels like a different lifetime, and these days when I think about that moment with that girl—mostly when I'm feeling a lot of self-pity and listening to too much Ryan Adams—it's hard not to also think about how my entire adult life can now be measured by this war.

Don't get me wrong. I bare no scars from Iraq. I have all my legs and arms. I didn't have to go fight because I am middle-class and privileged enough that I was safe from paying for the sins of another generation's dumbest creatures. And yet sometimes I can't believe how old I feel—perhaps a result of watching a body count of kids who could've been my neighbors tick by two or three at a time until the number of dead was a nice, even 4,000.

There's no doubt that before the Iraq war is over, it will be the longest conflict in U.S. history. Even given the best-case scenario that the next president begins withdrawals within two months of arriving in the office, it will still take over a year to remove troops and that would be at a dangerously fast clip. Even then, we would be lucky to be out by the spring or summer of 2010. Our old record of seven years spent slogging shit purposelessly in Southeast Asia looks like it's going down.

Even with an Obama or Clinton presidency, this optimistic estimate is unlikely. The depressing reality is that none of the remaining presidential candidates—indeed no one on the planet—has a good solution to this mess. I fear John McCain because he is one of these Bushian fantasyland nimrods who think it's a swell idea to bleed more American lives and treasure into that pit so that some day an angry Shiite strongman can oppress Iraqis instead of Saddam. McCain is of the frightening simplistic mindset that radical Islam is this monolithic evil force that must be confronted in the Great Struggle of our lifetimes (except in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and any other country that gives us oil; also, no using gay people to fight it—plus, we can't raise taxes to pay for it because that would be letting Islamo-fascism win, as it turns out Islam-fascists gather fortitude when rich people have to pay the capital gains tax).

I just hope Democrats don't expect anything good from a Clinton or Obama administration either. George W. Bush has painted us not only into a corner, but up onto a wall. Despite the hilariously self-congratulatory reports of the administration and our mostly-gutless media, the surge has been a solution to Iraq like aspirin is a solution to rectal cancer.

The surge was less responsible for the blessed decrease in violence than some other tactics: Most effectively, the army has been paying insurgents not to attack us. Other causations unrelated to the troop surge include al-Qaeda overplaying its hand against the Sunni groups that were formerly part of the insurgency, the unexplained, perplexing ceasefire declared by all-around shitbag Moqtada al-Sadr, and the near absolute ethnic cleansing of most Baghdad neighborhoods.

In effect, "progress" has become walking down a street in Baghdad and NOT finding ten decapitated bodies swathed in flies. Meanwhile, "victory" remains without any coherent definition.

The success of the surge troubles me because while it hasn't solved any of the underlying issues, it has given the American public and politicians further stomach for this endless blood-drenched nightmare. As my boy Jon Stewart put it, the U.S. military is now acting like a walking demilitarized zone, and both the Sunnis and Shiites have no reason to not start killing each other again the second all of these marriages of convenience end.

All the old problems still exist, yet in the minds of Americans, the surge has put Iraq on the "backburner" compared to the economy. Now, this is not to undervalue the dire straights of our economic situation at the moment, but I think I'd rather lose my house to foreclosure than be vaporized by a truck bomb while shopping for shoes. I'd rather lose my car-blogging job and have the 2008 Mercedes R-Class go without comment than have my feet blown off by an IED.

So what's the eventual solution in Iraq? Here's the best-case scenario as near as I can figure it: A Democratic president spurns the rewards of Iraqi oil and promises lucrative contracts to China, France, the UK, and whoever else needs them in order to secure a multi-national UN force to come take over the security of a heavily balkanized Iraq. A summit of Middle Eastern powers forces us to make some rather awful consolations to some nasty motherfuckers in Syria and Iran but helps close the borders. The U.S. is forced to keep between 60-80,000 troops as a part of the U.N. force for the next five to seven years, drawing that number down over time. Our debt continues to soar and our economy weakens further. The Middle East is never quite transformed, and eventually, as our attention turns to Afghanistan ("Oh, right, that's still going on") and Pakistan, we realize we have become inextricably tied for the rest of the century to the most dangerous, unpredictable region in the world, and even though my grandchildren won't have to go fight there, probably the grandchildren of the guy who works security in my office will.

Which is just fine, if you're president Bush, who told a group of soldiers in Afghanistan: "I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."

Christ, do I mourn that man. I mourn his dim, incurious mind and his craven little coward's heart. I don't think anyone will ever be treated to a sentiment more shallow.

So five years on and 4,000 U.S. soldiers down, we are all still as married to this debacle as we ever were, bound to it by bad fate and poisoned chains. And no matter how you try to look at it—in months, in years, in lives, in lost body parts, in the way a girl's eyes looked at a particular moment in your stranded memory—it doesn't really matter which metric you choose. You'll find the numbers have all gone sour anyway.