The Iraq reckoning still to come
On the 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, here’s a fact worth contemplating: In the presidential election of 2016, Donald Trump got the blood sacrifice vote. More specifically, communities that paid a high price for the Iraq War in terms of casualties tended to vote for Trump. In communities where the preference was for letting someone else’s sons and daughters do the fighting, Hillary Clinton prevailed.
Allow me to posit an interpretation of this fact. While many issues divided the electorate in 2016, the Iraq War was prominent among them. To be clear, the division was not between Americans who had supported the war and those who had opposed it. Rather, the crucial division was between those inclined to forget the war and move on and those for whom the war still sticks in their craw.
Hillary Clinton was the preferred candidate of the forget-and-move-on camp. Clinton had voted for the war, then disavowed it, and even today shows little sign of grasping its significance. Yet that camp also included the several Republicans who unsuccessfully competed against Trump for their party’s nomination.
None of these individuals had anything useful to say about the Iraq War. All of them treated it as old news.
The Americans who served and sacrificed, along with their families, thought otherwise. For them, the war was not old news. They were not ready to forget or move on.
What they knew was this: The arguments depicting a war of choice as essential — especially about Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction — turned out to be dead wrong. So too did predictions, common back in 2002-03, of a clean, quick victory resulting in Iraq’s transformation into a liberal democracy.
Worse still, the costs of the Iraq War in terms of lives lost and treasure expended far exceeded what anyone in authority predicted when the war began: thousands of U.S. troops killed, tens of thousands of lives permanently damaged, trillions of dollars spent, all to no avail. Please explain, they asked: For what? Clinton offered no answer to that question. Neither on the GOP side did Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, et al. Whenever Iraq came up, their shared inclination was to mumble a few platitudes and change the subject.
Only Trump bluntly called Iraq a mistake, even claiming (falsely) to have opposed the war before it started. Yet stating the larger truth that others dodged gave him an edge over his opponents.
Today, it appears that the Iraq War may finally be winding down. Saddam Hussein is long gone. The Baath Party is no more. Fifteen years later, the Islamic State — created as a direct result of the U.S. invasion — has been essentially defeated, at least as a territorial entity. Even so, the problems Operation Iraqi Freedom was meant to resolve persist, Islamist-inspired terrorism not least among them.
Let me emphasize that nothing Trump said back in 2016 suggested that he had a clue about how to solve those problems. Candidate Trump didn’t know squat about foreign policy. His embrace of “America First” was a rhetorical gesture, all but devoid of substantive content.
I’m prepared to argue that the men and women supporting Trump knew that. Yet they voted for him during the primaries and the general election anyway.
They did so because Trump said aloud what they themselves knew: that the Iraq War had been a monumental error for which they, and pointedly not members of the political elite, had paid dearly. In short, a vote for Trump offered them a way to express their disdain for establishment politicians whose dishonesty they considered far more odious than Trump’s own pronounced tendency to shave the truth.
Today, members of the policy establishment, Democrats openly and many Republicans covertly, want nothing more than to see Trump removed from the scene. That means persuading those who voted Trump into office to withdraw their support.
I submit that an essential first step in doing so will be for the establishment to come clean on Iraq, to recognize the need for accountability. Accountability in this context means answering questions that begin with “why?”
Why was it deemed necessary to start this utterly unnecessary war? Why was the war’s actual conduct so badly bungled? Why do Americans still await a comprehensive public inquiry into the causes and consequences of this fiasco?
As a prerequisite for regaining the trust Trump took, members of the political establishment wishing to restore their credibility in the eyes of voters must confront these questions head-on. For large numbers of Americans, Iraq remains unfinished business. They await a proper reckoning. And they deserve one.