We're All Responsible for Failures in Iraq

So, it’s been four years. And things haven’t exactly gone well.

God knows there have been plenty of failures. The military was not remotely ready for post-invasion peace keeping. The Bush administration did an astoundingly poor job of preparing the American public for the long-term commitments of war. The pro-war forces created unforgivable divisiveness, going out of their way to demean and alienate those citizens who were not so gung-ho. The anti-war forces too-often confused their hatred of Bush with a desire to see the nation fail. The media – well, those failures are too numerous to document.

Yet, in moments like this, we are prone to place the vast majority of the blame on our elected leadership. So this war is, in many people’s minds, Bush’s great blunder. But such analysis is misleading. For all their power, Bush and our others leaders are just representatives of the people. They are us. Yes, blame should fall in heavy heaps around Bush and his administration, but if we fail in Iraq, we are all to blame – those who supported this war and those who didn’t.

Why? Because we forgot one of the most important lessons of American history: divided we fall. Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we let ourselves believe we are two peoples with irreconcilable differences. When we treat our fellow countrymen as enemies, what hope do we have of combating the real threats of the world?

I firmly believe that, regardless of the decisions made by our elected leaders, we’d be in a much better situation right now if, once we went to war, we committed ourselves as a nation to winning that war. That means allowing vociferous dissent and not labeling such disagreements as unpatriotic. That means supporting not just the wellbeing of the troops but actually supporting the mission we’ve sent the troops to do. That means unity of purpose even as we welcome differences on strategy.

If I sound like a scold, I don’t mean to be. I’m just tired of the blame being focused completely on the government or, conversely, the leftwing. We can’t shrug of our own culpability in our nation’s failures.

We stop living in a democracy the exact moment we stop believing in our own civic responsibilities.

We have not lost in Iraq yet. There is still a chance to secure some form of victory, even if that victory is not the robust democracy of neo-con dreams. Instead of trying to guarantee failure with an arbitrary timeline for withdrawal, can’t we at least attempt to save the Iraqis from the chaos we unleashed? Can’t those who think the war was a disaster of an idea and those who think the war was a noble and essential undertaking come together and agree that, whatever our other differences, we Americans don’t just start a fire and leave it to burn uncontrollably?

I probably hope for too much. But I have to hope for something.