Walter Russell Mead’s paean to the “victory” in Iraq is baffling. It is an extended version of the disgraceful “fly-strip” argument for the war that hawks began circulating after the original reasons for attacking Iraq were quickly discredited. Since the war in Iraq did not actually have anything to do with fighting Al Qaeda, the new excuse for this colossal strategic error and moral failure was that the war would bring jihadists to Iraq and create the opportunity to eliminate them there. Some hawks added on the ludicrous claim that “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” which conveniently ignored that they were “there” mainly because of our military presence. The occupation of Iraq encouraged massive jihadist recruitment and led to a spike in jihadist atrocities against the unfortunate Iraqi population (not to mention attacks on allied capitals by groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda).

These jihadists had not had a significant presence in Iraq prior to the invasion, but between the security vacuum that the war created and the rallying effect that the occupation had they briefly acquired one. After the population suffered greatly enough from jihadist brutality, terrorist attacks and sectarian conflict, they did recoil from those jihadists that had exploited and used the war for their own ends, but only after hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had died and millions were displaced or driven into exile, and tens of thousands of Americans were killed or wounded. The Iraq war needlessly opened a country to jihadist violence, and it was largely thanks to the jihadists’ own discrediting tactics that Iraq’s Sunnis turned against them. If there has been some sort of victory, it has been won at far too high a price.

American soldiers did achieve real military successes, and they did display great skill, courage, and competence in performing their duties in Iraq, and they did so despite being disastrously ill-served by their leadership at home. If we don’t fully acknowledge just how wasteful and needless the Iraq war has been, we are likely paving the way for similar blunders in the future, and it will be the soldiers who will be among those that suffer the most as a result. As Prof. Bacevich wrote in a very powerful column late last week, the empty rhetoric of “supporting the troops” masks a commitment to perpetual war whose burdens will be shouldered entirely by American soldiers:

As a practical matter, they [the civilian leaders] devote themselves to war’s perpetuation, closing one front while opening another. More strikingly still, we the people allow our leaders to evade this basic responsibility to articulate a plan for peace. By implication, we endorse the unspoken assumption that peace has become implausible.

Here at last we come to the dirty little secret that underlines all the chatter about “supporting the troops.” The people in charge don’t really believe that the burdens borne by our soldiers will ever end and they are not really looking for ways to do so.

As Prof. Bacevich notes, we are all complicit in this shameful abuse of our soldiers, because we refuse to hold our government accountable for their decisions to wage war. One reason for that lack of accountability is the activity of shameless apologists for unnecessary wars.

Mead writes:

The coalition victory in Iraq was a historical turning point that may well turn out to be comparable to the cannonade of Valmy. It changed the course of world history.

This is insane. The war in Iraq had some significant effects on the surrounding region, and most of them were harmful, but the humbling truth is that “the course of world history” would not have been much different had U.S. and allied forces departed from Iraq in 2005 before the occupation invited the worst of the violence that Iraqis suffered, nor would it have been all that different if U.S. and allied forces had cut their losses and come home in 2007. Iraq might or might not have been worse off than it is today, but considering how awful living conditions in Iraq still are it is hard to imagine how they could be that much worse.

One cannot properly honor the fallen and wounded soldiers in an unnecessary war if one cannot first come to grips with the reality that the war was unnecessary and not all that significant for the rest of the world. Iraq war supporters have consistently exaggerated the importance of the war for U.S. security and the rest of the region (and indeed for the rest of the world), and some of them continue to imagine that this major strategic blunder has been redeemed from failure to success. Exaggerating the significance of the war for the rest of the world does not respect the sacrifices that Americans, Iraqis, and other nations have made there, but disgracefully tries to distort reality. This is done not to acknowledge the achievements of American forces, nor is it done for the sake of honoring the fallen and wounded, but to gratify those who supported this disaster every step of the way and whose hubris and poor judgment plunged American and allied soldiers into a war that they should never have been called on to fight.