Hey, did you hear? The last U.S. combat brigade has left Iraq. Like millions of other Americans, I only became aware of this after watching NBC’s excellent Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel make the announcement around 2:00 a.m. Iraq time as he rode on back of a fighting vehicle with the 42 Stryker Brigade, convoying down a dark and desolate highway headed towards Kuwait.
As of today, active U.S. combat operations in Iraq are over. This symbolic milestone has not been met with any of the pomp and circumstance or bombast that marked other major events in a war that has gone on longer than the U.S. Civil War, the U.S. involvement in World War One and longer than World War Two.
The muted ending of Operation Iraqi Freedom stands in marked contrast to its beginning. I vividly remember sitting in a television control room seven years and six months ago when I learned through the Associated Press that something big, very big, was about to go down in Baghdad. The press had known for months that a battle plan called ‘Shock and Awe‘ was going to play some major part in the war. Then in the middle of our noon news, we watched as military doctrine became a perfectly orchestrated symphony of destruction.
Watching the cruise missiles light up the monitors in our darkened control room, all I could think of was the hypnotic, surreal explosions that leveled the Kurtz compound during the closing credits of the movie Apocalypse Now.
Fast forward two months and I’m watching another surreal, seemingly picture-perfect TV moment. President Bush looking like he’s auditioning for a Kabuki theater version of Top Gun as he lands on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declares a victory that seemed easier than any proponent or opponent of the war in Iraq could have imagined. “Mission Accomplished” indeed.
But the declarations of victory and the claims about weapons of mass destruction did not seem to match the reports that were coming out of Iraqi cities like Mosul and especially Fallujah. In fact, I distinctly remember a conversation I had with one of our senior reporters as we watched a BBC piece on the nascent insurgency in Fallujah.
While I expressed my concern about the disconnect between what I was seeing and what was coming out of Washington, my reporter friend insisted I was watching a “mop-up” operation and that all our fighting men and women would be eating Thanksgiving turkey at home. A year and a half after that conversation, several of my friends were still fighting a full-strength insurgency in the wild-eyed, booby-trapped, hate-filled streets of Fallujah.
Two years after the siege of Fallujah, my little brother would find himself atop a rocky outcrop on the Syria-Iraq border armed with a rifle and binoculars, scanning the desolate waste for insurgents. More than seven years after the President’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” more than 4,400 members of our military have died in Iraq.
President Obama should not let the end of combat operations in Iraq become his “mission accomplished” moment. There are 50,000 U.S. “non-combat” troops who will remain in Iraq through at least the end of 2011, not to mention, the network of contractors and private security who will remain in Iraq long after that. To think that they will not encounter some problems from the remnants of Al Qaeda, among others, is just naive. Are things better in Iraq than they were five years ago? Without question. But Iraq is a inchoate democracy, and there is a lot that can still go very wrong there.
Revisionism is part and parcel of history. Just what was gained in Iraq and whether it was worth the cost of lives and national treasure will be debated for decades; but whether you agree with the war or not, it’s now part of the collective American psyche. I’m hoping that the memories of our premature victory lap in Iraq resonate in our national consciousness forever.
