The Beginning of The End

When the Nazis' bombing blitz of London began to ease during the middle of World War II, Winston Churchill took to the airwaves and told his people that "this is not the end. Nor is it the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The end of the beginning in the Iraq War came just 3 weeks after the invasion, when Saddam's statue was pulled down in what was a profoundly radical and inspiring moment, regardless of how one may feel about the war itself.

Many at that time said that the pulling down of the statue was the end, but it quickly became evident that it was simply the end of the beginning. What followed were years of insurgency and civil war which claimed the lives of 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

This week we witnessed the beginning of the end. The last combat troops left Iraq this week under cover of darkness, but also under the protection of the Iraqi Army. What the actual end will look like is anyone's guess. My personal guess is that it will never come, at least not in any guise distinguishable to our western eyes.

But what came in the 7 years in between the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end is the real story of the Iraq War. Many of the combat soldiers who left Iraq this week had not reached puberty when we invaded that country. So much time has elapsed that it is easy to forget the beginning.

And in the beginning was deception. The midwife of America's war in Iraq was all manner of lies and propaganda, followed by new lies to cover the old, the entire insidious architecture supported by torture, willful blindness, and credit cards.

Unfortunately, the war in Iraq was not unique to American history. Perhaps the most unique thing about it was George W. Bush.

In all previous American wars, there was a war party. The presidents who led America into its previous wars were not indispensable to the project. To give a few examples, the Civil War did not happen because of Lincoln; the Spanish-American War did not happen because of McKinley; the Korean War did not happen because of Truman.

It is easy to imagine other presidents making the same decisions that Lincoln, McKinley, and Truman made. But the Iraq War was different. No American president, historical or theoretical, would have invaded Iraq in 2003. Only George W. Bush would have done it.

This war was uniquely personal, uniquely non-democratic, bizarrely conceived, and shamefully executed. It was inseparable from the person and mind of George W. Bush; nobody else could have come up with it.

Bush, of course, acknowledged this dimension repeatedly, although perhaps subconsciously. "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad". Remember that one?

The assassination plot against Bush's dad was purely mythical, invented by the vengeful and venal government of Kuwait after the first Iraq War. But we all know that this fact, even if Mr. Bush had it explained and proven to him, would have had precisely zero impact on him.

Perhaps this is why the war seemed to die and fall from orbit due to its own oppressive gravity as soon as Bush vacated the presidency. Mr. Bush was the alpha and omega of that war; without him the fire was deprived of all oxygen or, to be more precise, of all hot air.

The tragedy of this war is that the only person alive who could tell us why it happened is George W. Bush. But even he could never explain it. He was held hostage by his fantasies, neuroses, and delusions, and he still is. And so are we all.

A better writer than myself wrote of Bismarck: "the great leader, like the great artist, is the most inspired fantasist: he sees the object not only as it is, but as it can be, and persuades others to submit to his hallucination".

Perhaps the most poisonous legacy of the Iraq War was that Mr. Bush did not need to persuade others to submit to his hallucination; he needed only to convince himself. And the rest of us were just along for the ride.