After five years of war in Iraq, we know a few things. None of them gives us much comfort for the future.
We know that, contrary to President Bush after 9/11 (used as a false pretense for waging war in Iraq), that everything did not change. That was certainly true on the home front. For the first time in American history, taxes were cut as the nation went to war. Most Americans were asked to make no sacrifices at all — indeed, we were told to "consume" more (imagine that admonition from FDR). Americans continued the unthinking choices that helped lead to the mess in the Middle East, chiefly driving ever longer distances in automobiles. Televised and electronic distractions continued and even increased. Many Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack. The media unthinkingly report on "al Queda" in Iraq, although it is a separate group of insurgents that emerged as a result of the invasion. Most Americans, it seems, have "moved on."
In other words, the drive-consume-watch TV unreality in which many Americans live didn’t change after 9/11 or after the war of choice in Iraq and its horrendous, continuing toll in blood and treasure.
But the world keeps changing, whether we like it or not. The American people have spent some $3 trillion on direct costs of the war, much of it on credit from China. Thousands of American families, many of the blue-collar households that have been so damaged by the uneven "booms" of recent years, have borne the pain and suffering of their children in uniform, while the rest of the nation parties on and thinks patriotism is a bumper sticker, a lapel pin or a hateful rant on Rush Limbaugh. The military has come close to the breaking point. The economy is only beginning to pay the piper. A host of issues, especially global warming, just get worse from malign neglect.
Meanwhile, the Arab world has come to view the United States as the "great Satan" that the ayatollahs portrayed. We torture as national policy. We continue to back repressive Arab regimes, including the Saudis who export vast numbers of jihadis to Iraq and whose role in 9/11 remains unexplained. The Israeli-Palestinian mess is worse. Democracy meant the election of extremists in Palestine. The nation’s standing in the world has been stained — remember when American presidents rode or walked through adoring crowds overseas? Our competitors have become stronger. Genocide continues apace in Darfur. NATO is coming apart over Afghanistan, a war botched through more Bush malpractice.
Five years later America is more brutal, more polarized, more paralyzed. Our civil liberties have been eroded. We’re Americans: We torture. The constitutional separation of powers has all but been destroyed. The very integrity of the vote is in question. Amid it all, most of the corporate media has been complicit in extending ignorance and group-think throughout the land.
Now polls show that John McCain may well win in November. McCain who doesn’t even know the difference between Sunni and Shiite extremists. I fear Obama is fatally wounded, while Clinton is unelectable. McCain’s promised 100-year presence in Iraq is unsustainable, of course. But that doesn’t mean we won’t get another four years of death abroad and decline at home. We were not cut out to be a colonial power like Great Britain. We may prefer to rule through proxies as Rome did. But empire also meant the death of the Roman republic and Roman freedom.