We Won. Now What?
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by Carl Hiaasen
Published on Sunday, August 3, 2003 by the Miami Herald
Early last Thursday, hours before this column was finished, a U.S. soldier died when an armored personnel carrier struck a land mind on the road to Baghdad International Airport.
As usual, the name of the dead GI wasn't included in the initial news story because the military command in Iraq had not yet released it.
In the absence of a name, what was attached to the soldier by way of identity was a number: 51.
He or she was the 51st American to be killed in hostile action since the White House declared an end to ''major combat'' on May 1. Most have been killed in ambushes -- 19 in the last two weeks alone.
As a nation of sports fans, we're comfortable keeping score by the numbers. This works fine for baseball or football, but it's not always the most informed approach to war. Or, in this case, peace.
Compared to the 58,000-plus who died in Vietnam, the American toll in Iraq is small, so far. The question for our government, however, is the same: What are we doing there?
GIs who were trained superbly for combat are now walking the chaotic streets as cops and peacekeepers -- chasing down looters, searching suspicious vehicles, even directing traffic.
And they are sitting ducks for the fedayeen and others acting out of loyalty to Saddam Hussein, or out of rabid hatred for the West.
Snipers armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades launch frequent attacks on U.S. troops -- 20 during a recent 24-hour period. Three soldiers were killed on July 26 by a grenade dropped from the window of a children's hospital.
At the start of the Iraq invasion, when the first Americans began dying, newspapers and TV networks devoted some time and space to the fallen heroes. We saw family snapshots. We heard from wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, comrades in battle.
That was when the war was new and the numbers were very low.
Today Iraq is a lethal grind. As of this writing, Saddam Hussein remains on the run, not a single weapon of mass destruction has been found, and we're spending almost $1 billion a week in a country where many of the citizens we ''liberated'' want us to fix the electricity and get the hell out.
Here at home, the satisfaction of that astonishingly swift military victory has given way, the polls say, to escalating doubts about our purpose in Iraq.
We roared into Baghdad and expelled a tyrant. That he could barely lob a Scud missile across the Kuwaiti border doesn't erase his bloody record of cruelty and genocide against other Iraqis. Getting rid of Saddam was good, but now what?
The so-called governing council, appointed by the United States, proved unable to choose a leader and eventually elected a panel of nine members, each of whom will serve as Iraq's president for a month. It's like Hollywood Squares, with everybody taking a turn in the center.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials predict that a new Iraqi constitution can be written and ratified within months, and elections held next year. Such optimism is mystifying, considering the current political disorder in Baghdad.
Even the killings of Saddam's sons failed to rekindle a mood of triumph here at home. Most of us were glad to hear that Uday and Qusay got smoked, but their demise has failed to curtail the murderous assaults against American forces.
These days, news accounts from Iraq unfailingly include the updated U.S. casualty figures, though usually as a brief and somber postscript -- another upward tick of the scoreboard.
Behind the anonymous numbers are men and women with names and faces, and loved ones back in the States who are shattered with grief.
All the dead soldiers' stories should be properly told, and maybe someday they will be. For now, though, the media will give more attention to Kobe, Ben and J-Lo than to the soldier who died Thursday morning on the road to the Baghdad airport.
That's not to say the public doesn't care about No. 51, even if he or she got only a mention at the bottom of a newspaper article. Americans do notice, and they're beginning to ask why.
Those running the campaign in Iraq are wise to remember that it was the drumbeat of numbers that turned much of our country against the Vietnam War -- our soldiers dying on the other side of the world, day after day, with no end in sight.
That, and the government's inability to explain what we were trying to do there, and what the plan was for getting out.
The answers we're hearing today sound no more convincing than the ones we were given back in the '60s. There was a No. 51 then, too, and thousands more that followed.
Copyright 2003 The Miami Herald
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