What we are losing in Iraq

It’s an article of faith that true military defeat in Iraq is impossible. Granted. Also: irrelevant. We may not be losing the war as such, but we are losing.

Among other things (all quotes from this AP article; emphasis added in each case):

• Our minds

In Samara, about 75 miles north of Baghdad, six U.S. Apache helicopter gunships blasted marshland after four rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the American military garrison at the city’s northern entrance, Iraqi police said.

• Our souls

One Iraqi passer-by was killed in the air attack.

What kind of “liberators” are we, that we so casually slaughter the “liberated”? That the violent death of this person—someone’s son or daughter, a human being just like you—is only parenthetical?

• Too many good young men and women

After the soldiers’ bodies fell into the street, the crowd pummeled them with concrete blocks, Jassim said.

Not to mention a large measure of our dignity as a nation, which by starting a war under false pretenses, invading a nation which posed us no threat, killing thousands of civilians there, and delivering the remainder from a life of totalitarian repression to a life of random violence, rampant crime, mass unemployment and absolute insecurity, and now preparing to cut and run before the domestic political wound becomes fatal, we are no longer “losing,” but have already lost.

Filed under: politics/war