Whenever possible, I refer to the Iraq war as a war of aggression, because that is what it is and has always been. One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it could possibly mean to achieve a victory that anyone would want to celebrate as the result of a war of aggression. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans are dead. Tens of thousands of Americans are injured, some of them severely, and Iraq now boasts one of the highest percentages of disabled people in the world. Millions of Iraqis were turned into refugees or displaced within their own country. All of this has come about because of a war that did not have to happen. All of this has come about because of a war we started. It is bad enough that our government unleashed this hell on people who had never actually done America any harm, but it is unconscionable that any of us celebrate what has been done as if it were something good and worthwhile.

Of course the new administration will try to make the best of it, claim progress and take credit for anything it can. That is in the political self-interest of this administration. Having inherited a mess that the political class has convinced itself was improving, it would not be advantageous to be the one overseeing the unraveling. The rest of us are not burdened by such considerations.

I don’t think it is particular noble to destroy another people’s country on the basis of unfounded, paranoid fears that its small, economically weak, militarily inferior government posed grave threats to the global superpower. There are many words that come to mind to describe this, but noble is not one of them. It is not especially noble to do this with no meaningful plan for restoring order and governance in the wake of the invasion. There is no nobility to be found in the afterthought of poorly constructing a democratic regime whose elections served as the trigger for massive bloodshed. Likewise, there was not much nobility when our government belatedly recognized its incompetence and failure long after it could do the civilian casualties any good and proposed a plan that would temporarily reduce violence long enough for the previous administration to get out the door. It is also hard to find anything noble in a sectarian-dominated governing coalition that oversees a politicized military and police force that has begun reviving the nastier bits of the old regime. As The Economist reported last fall:

Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. In July the Baghdad police reimposed a nightly curfew, making it easier for the police, taking orders from politicians, to arrest people disliked by the Shia-led government. In particular, they have been targeting leaders of the Awakening Councils, groups of Sunnis, many of them former insurgents and sympathisers, who have helped the government to drive out or capture Sunni rebels who refused to come onside. Instead of being drawn into the new power set-up, many of them in the past few months have been hauled off to prison. In the most delicate cases, the arrests are being made by an elite unit called the Baghdad Brigade, also known as “the dirty squad”, which is said to report to the office of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

I suppose there is some kind of brutish justice to having the oppressed assume the role of the oppressors, but it is hardly noble.

When I refer to the Iraq “surge,” I usually make a point of emphasizing that its political goals have still never been met. The promise of facilitating political reconciliation was central to the purpose of the “surge.” Perhaps this was always an unrealistic claim, but it was the one the previous administration made. This was the thing that was supposed to make the “surge” different from previous escalations in troop levels, and it was one of the main ways to measure the success of the plan. As far as security was concerned, the “surge” of brigades did help improve things. This was aided by successfully turning Anbar Sunnis against jihadists that were killing their people. The Awakening was a product of successfully applying counintersurgency doctrine, but it predated the arrival of the additional brigades, whose presence was temporary and which ended over a year and a half ago.

During the presidential campaign, no one in the media wanted to hear an explanation for decreasing violence that did not endorse the conventional wisdom that the “surge” had achieved this all by itself. When Obama attempted to argue that the previous sectarian violence and mass expulsions were responsible for the lower levels of violence in 2007-08, this was derided as a refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth that the “surge” was genius. It was, in fact, a temporary fix and something addressing the symptoms of Iraqi political dysfunction. “Surge” enthusiasts are a lot like TARP defenders. Numerous other factors were involved in stabilizing the respective situations, the stated goals of the plan were never realized, and then when some measure of stability was restored the proponents of the plan declare that their plan succeeded beyond all expectations.

Contrary to Wehner’s claim, the “passion for the democratic process” and the revival of sectarianism are not mutually exclusive. In Iraq’s experience, one is the product of the other. In an already deeply divided country, the politicization of sect and ethnicity through elections has been and will continue to be a cause for disorder and violence. Let’s also remember that the levels of political violence in Iraq would be considered unacceptable in most other countries. It is only by comparison with the nightmarish conditions of 2006 that things seem “peaceful.” As The Economist reported last week:

A month or more can pass without an American killed in action and civilian casualties are at their lowest in six years—though this still means that nearly 300 civilians are dying from political violence every month [bold mine-DL].

Reviewing the deeply corrupt and ineffective government Iraq has, The Economist article continues:

Iraq’s citizens are the losers. They cannot rely on their government for basic infrastructure. Baghdad has no flights to Mosul, the country’s northern hub, since rival leaders are in charge there. The road south to Amara and Basra is littered with half-built flyovers, seemingly never to be finished. By the side of the road lie toppled power masts. No wonder only 25% of Iraqis get the electricity they need. The same percentage has access to adequate health care; 22% are malnourished [bold mine-DL]. In world rankings of income per head, Iraq comes 162nd.

Iraq is as much of an economic basketcase as you might expect a war-torn, corruptly-governed country to be:

Only one thing is preventing a humanitarian crisis: public-sector employment. The state accounts for three out of five jobs, and 70% of this year’s budget will be spent on salaries and pensions. Capital expenditure is rare, admits Iyad al-Samarraie, the parliament speaker. His office is decorated with gilded chairs and extravagant mouldings, ordered by his predecessor. “This is what passes for investment,” he says.

The private sector is in even worse shape. Few middle-sized businesses have emerged since the invasion. Companies are either small family affairs or sclerotic behemoths. The non-oil industries, still partly state-owned, should soak up labour. But they account for only 13% of GDP (the regional average is 33%). Mass idleness is the result. American soldiers stationed in rural areas with few government jobs say the unemployment rate there approaches 80%. The national rate is 45-47%, including the underemployed—and, because of the high birth rate, the workforce is growing by 240,000 a year.

Even if Iraq’s democracy did not labor under these burdens, democratization has always been an insufficient reason for turning Iraq into a killing zone for seven years and risking and losing the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of Americans. Greg Scoblete has written in response to Wehner:

The invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be justified solely on the basis of our love for democracy.

Of course, there is nothing else that war supporters can point to other than the quite meager fact that Iraq’s new heavy-handed, illiberal government happens to be an elected one favored by a majority of the population. Had another major power launched such a war for the explicit purpose of toppling Iraq’s government, most Westerners, including most war supporters, would be demanding that its leaders be tried for war crimes. Instead we are treated to the absurdity of dressing up an illegal, unjust war of aggression that has laid waste to an entire country as a noble victory of which we are supposed to be proud.