Mark the Date: Four Years of U.S. Failure in Iraq

Four years ago today, U.S. troops took Baghdad.

It may seem incredible from this distance, after all the heartache and destruction of the past four years.  But at the time, it was heady stuff.  After all, say what you will about this debacle of a war — Saddam Hussein was an evil guy and a terrible leader.  One had to sympathize with Iraqis and hope for them the same outcome as we saw in Serbia or Russia or East Germany.

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On that day four years ago, Iraqis began to chip away at the edifice of Saddam.  No doubt you remember the image of the statue of Saddam in Fardus Square, a few dozen Iraqis trying to pull it down.  And then, when things didn’t go easily, a U.S. vehicle coming in to finish the job, its soldier first putting an American flag over the visage of Saddam before hurriedly replacing it with an Iraqi one. 

I thought at the time that the symbolism was all wrong.  If Iraq was to be free, its people needed to take ownership of their new, Saddam-free land.  If Iraq was to have a future, it would have to be a future dictated by the Iraqis, not us.

And yet there we were, toppling the statue of Saddam for the Iraqis, taking charge of their destiny for them, showing them that we knew better than they what was best, and that we knew better than they how to get things done.

Four years later, it’s clear that the symbolism that day, breathlessly hyped across the board as analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall or the stand outside the White House in Moscow, instead forecast something much darker and more dangerous.  For but a few hundred Iraqis populated the square that day, with Americans largely sealing off the area. 

It was a photo op.  It had nothing to do with the Iraqis and everything to do with domestic politics.
And so began our long, strange stay in Iraq.  For months, almost a year, the image of a free Iraq was projected to America, despite it being at odds with reality.  We were told that the statue of Saddam falling would mark the turning point, that Uday and Qusay Husseins’ deaths would mark the turning point.  That Saddam’s capture would mark the turning point.  That elections would mark the turning point.  That a new government would mark the turning point.  That a constitution would mark the turning point. 

And through it all, we’ve seen the situation in Iraq deteriorate ever further.  By now 82 Americans have died in Iraq, 3,138 since the statue of Saddam was pulled down four years ago today.  Iraqi deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.  And we are, if anything, farther from anything that could be conceived as victory today than we were when Baghdad fell.

We have failed in Iraq, and the reason that we have failed goes back four years.  We were never interested in what the Iraqi people really thought.  We were interested in getting Saddam and seizing the weapons of mass destruction that “everyone knew” he had.  And we wanted to show the world that we had gotten the tyrant.

But there were no weapons of mass destruction.  And Saddam, while evil, was just one man, a tinpot dictator in a third-world country.  And — having failed to consider the wishes and desires of the Iraqi people in the first place — we have never learned how to help the Iraqis build a nation for themselves. 

And so we surge, as we are told that this will mark a turning point.  And Republican senators stage photo ops in marketplaces, proclaiming all is well in Baghdad as soldiers seal off the area.  And victory remains as ephemeral as the Iraqi desire to topple Saddam’s statue, four years ago today.