Despite Celebration, the Iraq War Continues

Something about 21st century warfare brings
out Washington's lust for historical comparison. The moment the combat
starts, lawmakers and the national press corps inevitably portray every
explosion, invasion, front-line dispatch, political machination and
wartime icon as momentous replicas of the past's big moments and Great
Men.

9/11 was Pearl Harbor. Colin Powell's Iraq
presentation at the United Nations was Adlai Stevenson's Cuban Missile
Crisis confrontation. Embedded journalists in Afghanistan strutted
around like the intrepid Walter Cronkite on a foreign battlefield.
George Bush was a Rooseveltian "war president." The Iraq invasion was
D-Day.

A byproduct of reporters' narcissism,
politicians' vanity and the Beltway's lockstep devotion to militarism,
this present-tense hagiography ascribes the positive attributes of
sanitized history to current events. And whether or not the analogies
are appropriate, they inevitably help sell contemporary actions-no
matter how ill-advised. As just one example: If 9/11 was Pearl Harbor,
as television so often suggested, then American couch potatoes were
bound to see "shock and awe" in Baghdad as a rational reprise of the
atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

Of course, after we were told seven years
ago that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," and after an
historically unique conflict that has lasted longer than almost any
other, you might think the press would start questioning the
government's martial stagecraft. You might also think all the
comparisons to the past would stop. Instead, D.C. journalists and
lawmakers are now celebrating the supposed withdrawal from Iraq,
implicitly presenting the White House's August announcement as the
second coming of V-J Day.

The trouble is that the announcement is
anything but, because the war isn't even close to over. And we know that
because the military is quietly acknowledging as much.

Just beyond pundits' soaring paeans and President Obama's
history-referencing declaration of victory, the Pentagon admits "nothing
will change." That isn't a paraphrase-it's a direct quote from the
Army's chief spokesman in Iraq. It came just before a Colorado Springs
Gazette dispatch quoted another military official saying "our mission
has not changed." The article then went on to point out that "current
and scheduled deployments will resume as planned," as 50,000 soldiers
remain stationed in Iraq.

"American troops in Iraq will still go into
harm's way," notes the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack.
"American pilots will still fly combat missions in support of Iraqi
ground forces, and American special forces will still face off against
Iraqi terrorist groups in high-intensity operations. ... (The United
States) will probably face casualties therein the years to come,
regardless of how we label our mission there."

The truth, in short, is clear: Despite
Washington portraying this month's Iraq announcement as another big
happy event created by Great Men, the only history that's truly germane
to this moment is the kind that may portend future misfortune.

Notice that the White House has taken to
saying that the remaining American troops are merely serving with the
Iraqi army in an "advise-and-assist" role. Notice, too, that these same
officials are now touting the Iraqification of that nation's security.

Considering this, if historical allegory
must infuse America's foreign policy discourse, shouldn't reporters be
pondering how our government deceptively employed the same "military
adviser" moniker in the disastrous Vietnam buildup? And shouldn't
elected officials remember that "Vietnamization" was the seemingly
pro-withdrawal panacea floated four blood-soaked years before U.S.
forces finally left Southeast Asia?

Sure they should-but they don't because
it's easier to pretend this is just another gauzy snippet in a
saccharine History Channel documentary. And it's not just easier-as with
most present-tense hagiography, pretending the Iraq conflict has
concluded serves a deliberate purpose: to make America forget the
altogether unglamorous consequences of permanent war.