I was thinking this week about how the mood now, among normal people and political figures, is so different from the great burst of feeling that marked the early days of the war–the 17 days to Baghdad, the unstoppable Third Infantry Division, the dictator’s statue falling. The relief that Saddam didn’t use poison gas, as he had against the Kurds, that he collapsed like an old suitcase and got himself out of Dodge. There was a lot of tenderness to those days, too–the first tears at the loss of troops, the deaths of David Bloom and Michael Kelly. Still, the war seemed all triumph, a terrible swift answer to what had been done to us on 9/11 [bold mine-DL]. ~Peggy Noonan

To whom did it seem a “terrible swift answer to what had been done to us on 9/11”?  What kind of answer could it have been besides the wrong answer?  One might have thought that the month-long campaign in the autumn of 2001 against the Taliban would have had this effect.  How in the world could people watch the invasion of Iraq and think, “Ah, yes, it’s payback time for all those things that Iraqis did not do to us!  Come, let us celebrate!”  If there were people who felt that attacking Iraq was payback, this was because the government had deceived them into thinking that Iraq and Al Qaeda were in league together.

I remember the early days of the war very well.  I remember how many people whom I knew were very anxious about the lack of major resistance at the outskirts of Baghdad.  It seemed to them like a trap, assuming, of course, that the dire warnings about the grave Iraqi threat were not so much nonsense.  So many people bought into the propaganda about Iraq’s nefarious weapons arsenal that they were expecting gas attacks to come at any time.  In the event, there was nothing, which was a good first indication that we would find none of the weapons that were supposed to be there in vast quantities.  This was a relief of sorts and certainly good news for the soldiers, but it was the first tangible evidence that the entire thing was a wild goose chase.

Ms. Noonan goes on:

At one point Gen. Petraeus was asked by Sen. John Warner if Iraq has made America safer and said, “Sir, I don’t know actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind.” Later, invited to expand on this by Sen. Evan Bayh, said he’d been surprised by Mr. Warner’s question and added that “we have very, very clear, very serious national interests” in Iraq.

That of course is the great question. History will answer it.

No, actually, people answer this question.  They answer it all the time.  Petraeus just answered it (I think incorrectly).  I have a very different answer.  History doesn’t actually do anything in this regard.  History is a record of events and the interpretation of that record.  It does not issue final answers.  No interpretations in history are ever entirely settled, because the interpreters keep changing and the times in which they live differ so widely.  Historians in the 2020s may look back on Iraq as a moderate success of sorts, if it seems that no long-term damage has been done to the U.S., while historians of a generation later may see it as the beginning of some destructive process that comes to fruition only decades from now and so regard it as a colossal blunder of epic proportions.  The annexation of the Philippines looked much less foolish in 1920 than it did in 1941.  Many people had come to recognise the terms of the Treaty of Versailles as too harsh by the late 1920s, but too late for it to do any good.  Sending Lenin to Russia seemed clever to people in Berlin in 1917; it seemed much less clever in retrospect in 1944-45. 

We do not need to wait for historians to tell us whether the current course of action is wise; we do not need to wait for them to tell us whether it is working.  What we cannot know right now is the long-term historical significance of these events.  That does not mean that we cannot assess success or failure, justice or injustice, right or wrong.  Judging historical significance is a judgement of what effects resulted from a particular event or series of events.  Judging the merits and justice of an invasion, for example, is a question of political prudence and moral theology.  Judging whether or not a war is in our national interests is a matter for policy analysts in the here and now.  Future historians will only be able to fully vindicate the invasion of Iraq if there is a time in the future when people no longer view aggressive war as wrong.  Even if some future historian comes to accept that our government was defending legitimate interests by remaining in Iraq for years and years, that does not necessarily make it so.   

History is not a conscious being that wills and acts and answers questions.  (Yes, I know Ms. Noonan is speaking figuratively, but this constant appeal to history in lieu of trying to make our own judgements is a kind of secular fatalism.)  If our national interests were so very clear and very serious, it would not be difficult for someone, somewhere, to elaborate on what they are.  I have yet to see an argument along this line that did not boil down to one of two things: “I don’t like the Iranian government” and “there’s oil in them thar dunes!”  Far from being “very, very clear” and “very serious,” our interest in remaining in Iraq is utterly obcure and the importance of remaining in Iraq to U.S. national security seems to be anything but serious.  Iraq’s centrality to the region may be exaggerated; its centrality to our national security definitely is.  For that matter, the Near East’s centrality to geopolitics is vastly overblown.  This is not something that only History (or Mike Huckabee’s future historians) can determine.  Sound, informed analysis will do the trick.  When we abdicate judgement like this, we are acting irresponsibly.  So let us have no more of this grand talk about what history will tell us years from now, and perhaps pay a good deal more attention to the history of places that we propose to save from themselves by means of fire and sword.