How soon they forget

April 9 was the anniversary of the triumphant 2003 American conquest of Iraq, a day filled with stirring, martial imagery of American flags flying in the desert winds and the toppling of Saddam’s Stalinesque statuary.

Curious that hardly anyone took note of that fact in the United States. I guess we’re not feeling all that triumphant any more given the utter failure of the U.S. armed forces to achieve their long-term war aims. Let’s review: these included introducing a new ‘democratic’ era throughout the Middle East, intimidating Iran and eventually overthrowing the mullahs, and advancing a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian mess. Hmm, that would be a batting average of roughly .000.

It’s one thing to blast your way into a country and kill the enemy. It’s quite another to create something viable out of the rubble.

But instead of taking a moment to meditate on this discomfiting truth, we are off to the next showdown with the latest enemy du jour—is it North Korea or Iran? I can’t remember.

Israeli P.M. Netanyahu is doing his part to shift our attention by thumping the drums about Iran’s nuclear weapons, which do not exist, while remaining silent about his own, which do. The U.S. political class, including President Obama, dutifully echoes this surreal refrain although Obama, to his credit, raised the principle of nuclear weapons possession in his Prague address. As long as they are ‘used’ as a means of intimidating the enemy (as Bush and Cheney did regularly with their threats to nuke the Iranians), every country on earth will be tempted to obtain them.

Simultaneously, the predictable debate is now taking place about whether to ‘dig up the past’ and hold to account those responsible for institutionalizing torture as state policy. The establishment and its media, as Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com and others note, are eager to push all that under the rug, which they will fail to do because torture doesn’t go away.

But the real point, to my mind, is the desire to forget about our military failures as quickly as possible, just as occurred in the post-Vietnam epoch. Less than a decade after the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime there, we had forgotten that the Vietnam war had produced over 50,000 American deaths and countless physical and psychological injuries, and all for nothing. (And who even remembers the Vietnamese casualties?)

Soon, Reagan was president, and it was time to rearm, face down the Russians and invade Caribbean islands. The smell of napalm in the morning!

I wonder how long it will take to get over the Iraq and Afghanistan hangovers, and what new narratives will emerge from the militarists as Obama tries to salvage something from the debacle they created. The fight over understanding what happened, just like the culture wars over the meaning of Vietnam, is crucial to determining what we will do with our warmaking capacity in the future.