It’s been a decade since the start of a war that never should have happened, and we are still waiting for some accountability. More than 4,400 Americans killed – more than the number killed on Sept. 11 2001 by 19 individuals from countries other than Iraq. (Mostly from Saudi, but you get the point.) Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands for Iraqi deaths related to the conflict – Les Roberts’ Iraq Study Group had it well north of 600,000 back in 2006, and that was adjusting for concentrated areas of losses like Fallujah. That puts us in Milosovic territory for sure, and more like Suharto-land. The Serbian leader was brought to justice; not so much Indonesia’s dictator. The difference between those two cases have less to do with the magnitude of the crimes, more to do with the magnitude of their geopolitical allies.
That’s why I have long been a skeptic of the International Criminal Court. I have said this before, shouted it on the podcast, and I will say it again here: until they haul someone from a powerful country to The Hague, the effort will be a meaningless exercise. Iraq is an excellent test case. Given the number of deaths, given the destruction of a society, given the craven nature of the attack and the fact that it was an aggressive war – the most serious category of crime – our leaders should have been indicted at the very least. Nothing. Freaking. Useless.
Not only are the architects of the disastrous Iraq war not being held accountable, they are in fact skating from television program to television program, attempting to rewrite Iraq into a screaming success. They are, in effect, flaunting the law, daring it to come after them because they know it won’t, taunting the cowardly administration that shields them. Even worse, they are working to get us into the next conflict, in Iran, Syria, wherever. Not only aren’t they sorry about the catastrophe they brought upon Iraq and ourselves, they are only too eager to repeat the crime.
To paraphrase the president, are we really powerless in the face of such carnage? I think perhaps, but only by design. American political life demonstrates again and again how powerful the will of the people can be. Look at gay rights. Look at immigration. Our government has worked to insulate us from the experience of war by canceling the draft, borrowing the funds to keep the fighting going, etc. Perhaps we are simply not connected enough to act dramatically.
Perhaps. But nothing ever changes unless we do.
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Even by their reading of it as being an indisputable success (which killed about 1,200 Americans, b.t.w.), it could only possibly be seen as a minor corrective to one of the most heinous strategic blunders in the history of the American empire, as well as a major international crime of aggression that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive displacement. If Hagel was against the “surge”, it’s only because their war had gone so badly and that they had proven themselves incapable of managing the conflict.
I think the reason it looked so empty was that there were no flags to represent the hundreds of thousands that have died since that day, and in large part because of that day. The cautionary “Never Forget” is more of a challenge to Americans than its author likely supposed. I can tell you, I will never forget September 11, 2001 – probably the most deeply horrifying day of my life. Remembering that has never been a challenge. What I think we as Americans need to work on remembering is the fact that our political leaders used that atrocity to commit other atrocities in our names. If there is any slippage of memory, it is on that particular slope.