By Reid Collins on 5.9.06 @ 12:07AM
Stop calling the current condition in Iraq a war.
The slogan on the aircraft carrier was wrong. It should have
read, "The War Is Over," and not "Mission Accomplished." And
President Bush should have emerged from his arrival jet not in a
flight suit but in civilian dress.
The conundrum is underscored by Shelby Steele's "White Guilt and
the Western Past" article in a recent Wall Street Journal.
An excellent exegesis of the current American cultural ambivalence
toward minority peoples and attitudes, but misplaced, it can be
argued, when applied to Iraq. The Iraq "war" was prosecuted to the
fullest: the Iraqi Army was defeated, and subsequently disbanded.
The "leader" of these enemy forces was snagged from his underground
hiding place and placed on interminable trial.
"Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a
policy of minimalism and restraint in war," writes Steele. "And now
this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the
enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a
weak enemy." Stop calling the current condition in Iraq a war. Stop
the President and his Secretary of Defense from continuing to call
for a continuation of the "war in Iraq." It's over. We won. By any
measure of conflict. What we are now engaged in is the confusion of
a postliminium made impossible by the very nature of the defeated.
It was not, is not, a nation. It is the invention of a long-past
British Empire, a tri-partite amalgam whose pieces are not
acquainted with nationhood and whose allegiances are sectarian, if
any.
Would a nation countenance the daily massacre of scores of its
citizenry, inspired by sectarian malice, without a whimper? Would a
nation confound its re-emergence in petty quarrels based loosely on
which imams are to be obeyed? Would a nation kill scores of its own
people while only occasionally slaying a battle-dressed member of a
winning army? The answers expose the better explanation for
American presence in Iraq, a phrase we are now hearing more often:
"nation-building." How to build a nation now, when decades ago an
imperialist friend of ours did it simply by drawing a line on a
map? Can nationhood be imposed, or is it home grown?
Expunge that phrase, "we're sticking until the war is won." It
has been won. Go back to the aircraft carrier under a proper
banner. Mourn and honor those who lost life and limb winning a war.
Honor them more by acknowledging that the mission to be
accomplished now is not ours -- it is theirs.
topics:
Iraq
