Dexter Filkins of the NYT reviews Thomas Ricks' new book on the Iraq War.
Surging and Awakening
Dexter Filkins, The New Republic
Published: Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
By Thomas E. Ricks
(Penguin Press, 394 pp., $27.95)
I.
From centrality to banality: perhaps no other event in modern American history has gone from being contentious to being forgotten as quickly as the war in Iraq. Remember the war? It consumed a trillion American dollars, devoured a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, squandered a country's reputation, and destroyed an American presidency. Given the retreat of the American press--the first American withdrawal from Iraq, you might say--one could almost be excused, in the spring of 2009, for forgetting that 140,000 American troops are still fighting and dying there.
That an undertaking as momentous and as costly as America's war in Iraq could vanish so quickly from the forefront of the national consciousness does not speak well of the United States in the early twenty-first century: not for its seriousness and not for its sense of responsibility. The American people, we are told, appear to be exhausted by the war in Iraq. But exhausted by what, exactly? Certainly not from fighting it. The fighting is done by kids from the towns between the coasts, not by any of the big shots who really matter. And they are not exhausted by paying for it, either: another generation will do that. No, when Americans say that they are tired of the war in Iraq, what they really mean is that they are tired of watching it on television, or of reading about it on the Internet. As entertainment, as Topic A, the agony has become a bore. "A car bomb exploded today in a crowded Baghdad marketplace, killing 53 and wounding 112." Click.
The irony of America's big tune-out lies in its timing. It has taken place during what has been the most dramatic phase of the six-year-long conflict--more precisely, during the reversal of the war's fortunes. It is this reversal, this unexpected turnaround to the possibility of something less than a disastrous outcome, that has allowed so many Americans guiltlessly to forget about it. In the summer of 2006, remember, the war in Iraq was spiraling toward defeat, and the Middle East seemed to be headed toward a regional war. Two summers later, however, conditions on the ground were so normal, relatively speaking, that the citizens of the invading nation could feel secure enough to avert their gaze.
rest at tnr.com
I would just like to add that there was nothing ironic in America's "big tune-out" per se. The war, which had greatly aided the liberal narrative, ceased to aid that narrative. While the war aided the narrative, coverage was obsessive; once it ceased to aid the narrative, coverage ceased. It takes a remarkable obtuseness to fail to connect these dots.
Especially when you add in Harry Reid's "The war is lost," "the surge has failed" remarks and the Democratic effort to portray Iraq as a catastrophe right until the moment in July 2008 (a whole year after anyone who chose to look could see the surge was working) when they all turned at once, like a school of fish, and admitted that the surge had worked better than they anticipated. |
