What if they ended a war and nobody noticed?
As you may have heard — but only if you were paying attention — the last U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom will soon officially become Operation New Dawn. But if it is, in fact, a new dawn, no one can predict with any certainty how long this new day will last.
There are questions, of course. Did we win the war? Did we lose? Did we tie?
Does it matter?
There are still 50,000 American troops in Iraq. They’re not scheduled to leave for 16 months — and no one seriously thinks the U.S. presence will end then. If the remaining troops are not technically combat troops, they are, of course, combat-ready. And the only thing you can say for sure about Iraq is that we haven’t seen the last American casualty there.
If you read the newspapers, the few reporters remaining there will tell you about the continuing struggles in Iraq, about the dysfunctional government, about the resurgent violence.
The real question worth asking is whether the seven-year adventure has been worth it. Polls tell you the easy answer — that most Americans don’t think it has been. More than 4,000 American troops have died. No one knows how many Iraqi civilians have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. Many lives have been damaged.
You don’t hear anyone using the words “mission accomplished” or planning any parades. What you’re also not likely to hear is anyone saying that the troops are leaving too soon.
It has been a long, ugly war, started for the wrong reasons, fought, for all this time, because no one could seem to figure a way to end the fighting. President Barack Obama will eventually give a speech announcing the end of this phase of the war and talk about how the drawdown is on schedule. But what this really means for most Americans is that we give ourselves permission to pay even less attention to this war than we did before.
The war that once divided a nation stopped being a political issue as soon as the 2008 campaign ended. The anti-war left immediately grew quiet. The pro-war right suddenly wasn’t much interested in a war that Obama was leading.
The nation found other things to be divided about. Iraq became a war no one cared about — but not the only war. We got war fatigue, but the wars go on.
Obama turned his attention to the war in Afghanistan, but most of the country did not follow. Everyone knows why we went to Afghanistan. It’s a much tougher question as to why we’re there now.
We’ve had almost no debate about the war or what the objectives should be. What we have is a war that has lasted longer than any other American war. What we have are American troops dying and a deadline for when the troops would start to come home. It’s a deadline that the generals will argue against and which Obama will almost certainly have to reconsider.
It’s a war that, according to the polls, most people oppose. And it’s a war that, like Iraq, continues almost unnoticed.
The only time people have paid attention to Afghanistan in recent years was when WikiLeaks sent out thousands of classified documents. Or when Rolling Stone caught Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his team saying what they actually thought.
McChrystal was fired and is now at Yale, which seems like a better posting. Obama got lucky that he could hire Gen. David Petraeus to replace him. It was the non-controversial hire that would assure one thing: There’d be no controversy about how the war was being conducted.
What it didn’t assure was that Petraeus could get Afghan troops battle-ready anytime soon. And it certainly didn’t assure that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government would become any less corrupt.
Maybe the best way to get a close-up look at the war is to go to the movies. You can see a chilling documentary called “Restrepo” (showing at Chez Artiste), which follows a company of American soldiers on a 14-month tour to a dangerous place called the Korengal Valley.
I had never heard of the Korengal, a poor, sparse, mountainous region in eastern Afghanistan, a place that was apparently quite important to hold — until it wasn’t important any longer. It’s where hearts and minds are won or lost over the fate of a cow.
That’s a story we know too well. We follow the soldiers as they fight an enemy we never actually see. We become close to the soldiers, some of whom die, some of whom we fear will be forever scarred. The danger is stunningly real. These are real people at risk. It’s as close to the war as most of us will get — or want to get.
The documentary, which the filmmakers risked their lives to make, takes no political position. It doesn’t have to. It gives us Juan Restrepo, a 20-year-old medic we meet on the way to Afghanistan who tells us he is “loving life and getting ready to go to war.” We can only guess how that will end.
We see soldiers, in real time, at ground level, soldiers whose mission isn’t clear, who risk everything because it’s the job. But as I left the theater, all I could think of is if they’re going to put everything at risk, they should know the reason why.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
