Jim Spiri
We’ve now been in two large wars in Iraq in the last two decades. It is said that the third time is when people get things right after failing twice.
Yesterday I was told by the big news stations on television that the war in Iraq is over. Really?
In the early part of January 2004 I first set foot in Iraq. It was at the base near Balad called Camp Anaconda. I was employed as a flight-line movement control specialist with the title of “logistics coordinator.”
From my very first day in Iraq I had a feeling it was going to be a long and drawn-out process. By the time I arrived, by all measures I was late onto the scene. My son had already done an eight-month deployment and was on his second tour of duty in a war zone. Most Americans had seen images of a giant statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled to the ground. The former dictator was still on the run. The word IED was not yet in most of our conversations.
But I was beginning to hear much about what was going on. And I was beginning to see even more, inside and outside the wire. At night, I was beginning to load more and more wounded onto medical transport aircraft. And so the story goes…
Nearly 4,500 KIAs and over 32,000 WIAs who were military personnel later, as well as untold U.S. civilians killed and injured, the powers-that-be say the war in Iraq is over. Historians will argue about whether the whole endeavor was worth it and will dazzle their readers with nonsensical statistics from now until the end of the next war and beyond. Every opinion will focus on whether there were or were not weapons of mass destruction, and whether we’ve failed at putting the genie back into the bottle that we broke.
Either way, none of the wrangling will bring back one single lost life from among the dead. But we still will all talk about it.
Bush should have come clean from the get-go
I worked in Iraq as a civilian contractor for nearly two years. I then traveled as a combat photographer for nearly seven months. One could say I saw a lot. What I saw will remain with me forever and has shaped my thinking about such undertakings in the future. I worked among Sunni, Shia, Kurdish and Christian Iraqis as well as several other ethnic and diverse cultures intermingled in and around Iraq. I have entered hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi homes, mostly uninvited. I’ve seen tiny babies and old men. I’ve seen young girls and old women.
I’ve met citizens from scores of countries, all in Iraq. I realized very early on that I was not the first outsider to “visit” Iraq or what I’ve always known as the “fertile crescent” or “Mesopotamia.” For literally thousands of years, people from outside this land have been “visiting” it, mostly uninvited. Whether that is a good thing is not for me to decide at the moment.
In the days, weeks, months and years prior to the United States entering Iraq in March of 2003, many reasonings were laid out before the home front on why we should enter with a large military invasion. In the very beginning I had come to the conclusion that there really was no reason for anyone to try and sell us a reason. It would have been better off to just say something like, “Hey, look American public, we are going to invade Iraq because they have pissed us off for a whole host of reasons. We are going to set up a lot of really big air bases and we are going to make ourselves known in the region as we fight this thing we call the war on terrorism.”
I am pretty sure that, had the folks in the Bush administration said this at the very onset of things, it would have gone over much better than all the baloney about weapons of mass destruction and all that came along with it. Speaking the truth is always simpler.
This in fact turned out to be the truth. We stepped right into Iraq, set up a bunch of bases, operated in the region as we wished and handled all kinds of things outside of Iraq because we were in Iraq. Whether that was a good idea or not is, once again, not up to me to decide. However, the matter of conducting a war would have been much simpler had we come clean with the American public from the get-go.
Free of Hussein, but Iran breathing down its neck
It is a fact that we drew literally tens of thousands of folks that hated the United States to Iraq so we could eliminate as many of them as possible without having them come to our own shores. After we were attacked in 2001, we decided not to let that happen again. One might say we acted in a kind of pre-emptive manner. Again, right or wrong is not for me to decide.
Where some things got out of hand was with us having taken our eyes off the ball in Afghanistan. It would have been a much wiser decision to have kept the pressure up in Afghanistan at that time, as we were making a huge footprint in Iraq and the region as a whole.
Then there was this fellow named Paul Bremmer who, against all rational thinking, singlehandedly dismantled the Iraqi Army. This one, gigantic egotistical blunder on Bremmer’s part is what I see as the biggest failure in Iraq. This one move is what I blame the loss of most of the American casualties on. Paul Bremmer ought to be given a job caring for the grounds at Arlington National Cemetery so he can constantly be reminded of his horrific blunder.
In the end, Iraq is free of Hussein but has Iran breathing down its neck. As the United States forces exit Iraq they are on high alert as a threat from Iranian-backed militias pose a clear and present danger. I am sure that, if need be, we would have no trouble going right back into Iraq if things get way out of hand. After all, we’ve now been in two large wars in Iraq in the last two decades. It is said that the third time is when people get things right after failing twice.
In the meantime, I am still not going to believe a thing the folks on the big television news stations tell me. They say the war in Iraq is finally over. I say, “The war in Iraq will never end and may have just begun, again.”
Spiri is a combat war photographer and writer. Find him online at jimspiri.com.