Animal Science

I found out from tumblr today that the Iraq War ended this morning, something I was completely unprepared for.   It’s a headline that’s easy to miss on the New York Times’ or Chicago Tribune’s website, where it’s buried underneath something about the payroll tax.  I’d opposed the war before it began and marched against it after the shock and awe campaign, and while my understanding of what the war was, what it represented, and what it was even for shifted regularly between 2003 and the present, I can’t remember taking any position besides thinking the US should be out of Iraq over that time.  And now at the end of 2011, with hardly any to do, we actually are.

.

I don’t know what I expected today would feel like when I was 21 and learning about the history of capitalism in anthropology classes, or when I was 17 and watching Bush get reelected, or when I was 15 listening to Colin Powell’s presentation on WMDs to Congress.  I can’t say how this must feel for the Iraqi people, or for the US and European soldiers who this personally affects.  But this awful war- and the minimally more justifiable one in Afghanistan- have been part of civilian life for well before my adulthood, and now well into it.  But what did any of it mean now that the war is over?  We might repeat the idea that the Iraq War was part of a 9/11 mindset, or a constituent part of the post 9/11 world, and that’s probably true.  But the America that experienced 9/11 is markedly different from the one that invaded Iraq, which is markedly different than the one trudging out of Iraq today.  9/11 was marked by an outpouring of fervent emotion- a flag on every house, a cautious quaver in every reassurance, and a variety of fear that was altogether unfamiliar to us then.

.

But the America that invaded Iraq had lost the fervency with which we experienced 9/11 while it retained every ounce of its outrage.  I don’t know when it happened (talking about it as though we could simply assign it a date is spurious in itself), but as the shock of 9/11 faded and the occupation of Iraq stretched longer and longer, the nation simply settled into a mixture of frozen anger and ambivalence.  Every week, another handful of Americans died in an ambush or ‘helicopter crash;’ Osama bin Laden remained at large; and strategy after strategy was adopted by the military and discarded.  Meanwhile, interest turned to the plummeting economy as the Bush era policies of detainment without trial and torture continued unabated by the courts or legislature.  But the domestic somehow slowly took precedence over the international.  Whereas Bush won the 2004 election by conjuring the specter of 9/11, Obama won in 2008 by naively promising an era of compromise and cooperation between the political factions in the US.

.

Obama, meanwhile, would replace the Bush era policy of indefinite interment and torture with his own policy of assassination without trial, without ever closing the Bush era torture facilities.  And while it’s impossible to tell from here if the surveillance networks established by the Patriot Act have diminished under Obama, I see no reason to believe they have.  The looming passage of the National Defense Authorization Act will establish the military as a virtually autonomous police force accountable to the president alone (meaning, not the courts), and able to operate outside the language of the inherent rights of US citizens.  Suspicion of ‘terrorism,’ a term so nebulous I have way of distinguishing it from civil disobedience, is now cause for indefinite internment for US citizens without trial.  The trend in the US is not towards less supervision, but towards more.  Enforcing this supervision is more coercion and not less, as students and protestors as young as their late teens are sprayed with military grade pepper spray for their non violent participation in the Occupy movement.

.

This is the changed America that ostensibly left Iraq this morning.  I say ostensibly in recognition of the secret operations, diplomatic, corporate, military, and otherwise that the American public are simply unaware of.  For this reason, trying to make sense of the Iraq war might be superficial, even with the White House’s release of the video footage of the last American convoy leaving in the Iraqi dawn.  And yet, I don’t think I’m alone when I say this isn’t how many of us thought things would end.  The naive fiction the Left correctly accused the pro war Right of was a belief that the war was a matter as simple as locating and destroying an enemy whose interests are other than ours.  Things certainly didn’t end this way- the war on terror was a war on an idea that simply couldn’t be erased through making Iraqis into corpses.  But the naive hope that I, and I think many others held at some level, was that the end of the Iraq War would mark the beginning of a trend away from attempts at global domination and capitalist hegemony.  What we hoped for in the end of the Iraq War was a recognition of the flawed motives that brought that war into existence, and a realignment of behavior and self image to match.  With the end of military presence, the US would adopt preventative measures to match, like enforcing equitable international exchange rather than free trade, or abandoning the supremacist ideology that informs ‘nation building.’  What the end of the war is instead is simply a limping movement away from a war that has become ideologically and economically unmanageable. 

.

I pictured, or at least hoped, that when today would come, it would be the culmination of a long trend towards understanding something of ourselves and our place in the world.  But as I read the news this morning, I found no lesson or meaning there.  The convoy of Humvees snaked through a border checkpoint, the gates were closed, and then the video ended.  Historians will piece together all of this someday in the future and dredge it for some kind of meaning that the end of  Vietnam maybe had.  But as it stands, the war remains in varied forms at home- the surveillance of citizens, the suspension of civil rights, and the suffering economy.  I don’t know that sense can be made of a war that was somehow thought to be fought for safety from atomic annihilation, for the profits of the oil industry, for expanding democracy and liberation from tyranny in alternate measure.  I think by the end, the Iraq War was fought for little more than grudging responsibility not to leave after causing the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi citizens and overthrowing a sovereign government.  And I don’t know that it ended for any better reason than inconvenience.  The Iraq War didn’t go out with a whimper or a bang, but a shrug- our interests are simply elsewhere now.