Among the most corrosive public debates of American history must be that over the Iraq War. Unlike so many other wrenching questions that seized the national attention, it has no resolution, and no definitively right or wrong side. (Contrast with, say, slavery, isolationism, or the equal-rights amendment, all with moral or pragmatic winners and losers.) In this, it is distressingly similar to the long war of the prior generation, in Vietnam. The parallel is limited, though: not least because comfortable collegians are not being forced to go fight (the observation that Vietnam-era protest ended when the draft did is not original to me), and hence social discord has been comparatively muted.
Policy and ideological discord have raged nonetheless, and there are many actors to blame for it. First among them must be President George W. Bush. No assessment of the Iraq War can fail to note his leadership failures in building the case for war — which is now barely recognizable from its 2003 incarnation — and in pursuing the war for its first several years. The crumbling Iraq from the March 2003 invasion through the beginning of 2007 is rightly remembered by nearly all parties (excepting, perhaps, the hard core of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s faithful) as a dark and bloody time. This was the era of the aimless war, punctuated by epic battles in which U.S. Marines fought Iranian “volunteers” in Najaf, and American soldiers subdued Fallujah with artillery and infantry — even as Iraq at large descended ever further into an abyss of anarchic barbarism.
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