The War in Iraq Finally Ends

I wasn't alive yet in 1975 when the last American helicopters left Vietnam, but I've always been under the impression it was a fairly anticlimactic final moment to a war that killed 56,000 American soldiers. Nonetheless, hard to imagine it was as anticlimactic as the closing chapter of our misguided nine-year $4 trillion quagmire in Iraq is shaping up to be. On Thursday, President Obama spoke to the troops on the eve of our withdrawal...and it was the third story on the evening news....following a head story about some student who died in a hazing ritual at Michigan State University, or something along those comparatively inconsequential lines.

As for the second story deemed more important than the President's speech to troops about their withdrawal from a war in which approximately 4,500 American soldiers died in the name of finding phantom weapons of mass destruction, it was the horse race among Republican candidates seeking to replace Obama. This is important because, with the exception of Ron Paul, the consensus among these Republican candidates is that the mistake was not invading Iraq in the first place, but "leaving too soon"! Only 17% of Americans believe we should remain in Iraq, but 86% of Republican Presidential candidates do. And the fact that the Iraq government doesn't want to stay and refuses to offer immunity to American troops if they do stay matters not at all to them.

And not only do these Republican candidates for President want us to stay in both Iraq and Afghanistan still longer, they also want us to pick up a fight with a third Middle Eastern country Iran. They've managed to turn the latest drama over that crashed drone into an epic foreign policy failure on Obama's part, and suggest that if they were President we would have gone in with guns blazing to retrieve it.

What's really scary is that they're not kidding...and even though American voters would overwhelming oppose starting even more wars in the Middle East, very few will base their vote on it next November. There was never a point where the war in Iraq was genuinely real to most Americans, even in the early years of heavy combat, but today it's just an afterthought, as evidenced by the fact that the war's end doesn't even make the headlines on the evening news. So I'm not sure Americans have war fatigue as much as they have war detachment. At least since the quasi-successful surge of 2007, hardly a word has been spoken about the war in any conversation I've been engaged in, meaning we've been in a state of war for four years and it has gone under the radar of just about everybody not directly involved with the military.

So when a bunch of idiot Republican chickenhawks start pounding the drums for yet another war to court favor with the bloodthirsty warmongers in their base and the defense contractors bankrolling their campaigns, voters are nominally opposed but collectively shrug while voicing their opposition. Only five years have gone by since the ugliest scenes of the Iraq war were played out on the evening news every night, yet it could just as well have been 50 years for as much as voters seem to care about it. Whether we invade Iran and spend trillions more or not, voters don't seem to feel strongly either way. At least they must not...or else none of these Republican chuckleheads insisting that not enough American blood has been spilled in the Middle East would be registering above single digits in the polls let alone well-positioned to win.