Before the war began, we heard voice after voice from the left telling us that Iraq was going to be another Vietnam. We should have known better: we’d heard it just the year before about Afghanistan. Yet still these prominent voices told us that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be killed, or that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians would be killed. And we all worried about house-to-house fighting in Baghdad.

The war has been a stunning success, and not just militarily. Present estimates by international humanitarian groups put the number of Iraqi civilians dead at around 2,000 -- a tragic figure to be sure, but spectacularly low in terms of wars throughout history, particularly after the advent of the machine gun. To conquer a nation within a month, target its power structure so effectively, and yet do so with so few civilians dead is nothing short of fantastic.

Not to mention that we did this while putting our troops in harm’s way in order to prevent civilian casualties and to distribute humanitarian aid, which was a major prong of our work in Iraq from the moment the war started.

This is, I say again, the definition of a humanitarian war: a brutal dictator is out of power, the war had higher humanitarian ideals than almost any other in history, especially given the shocking level of ordinance used and the terrain covered.

And this was accomplished not only quickly, with unprecedented precision and humanitarian concern, but with a military strategy so unorthodox that it freaked out almost everyone knowledgeable in military history. We violated the classic rule of not outrunning one’s supply lines. We avoided the traditional air war to reduce our opposition prior to more dangerous ground invasion, and we did this not only to surprise the enemy but to avoid humanitarian disasters. This was a war without a front, in which our troops rushed north without firming up the areas they past, leaving them open to attack from all sides. And this happened. But the result, as a whole, was nothing short of spectacular. And it was done without a real northern front due to Turkey’s voting not to allow U.S. troops to use Turkish soil to open a northern front.

Our government is due credit for its humanitarian tactics, placing Iraqi lives over increased risk for our troops. As humanitarians, it is our responsibility to reward the government for this remarkable concern.

Not to mention that the U.S. and its allies suffered minimal, of course also tragic, casualties.

This is not to say that mistakes weren’t made. We must fix the problem of friendly fire, which has not substantially improved despite the vast technological improvements since the first Gulf War. The Pentagon has promised to address this. And, despite our efforts to prevent them, civilian casualties occurred: we must address issues like conscripts and civilians forced under threats to their families to run barricades. We have to aggressive address the fact that such tactics are a part of wars without fronts, wars won not by convoys of tanks following “traditional” strategies. Perhaps worst of all, we did not take adequate steps to stop the looting that occurred as Baghdad fell, partially because that fall occurred so quickly. The worst effect of this was probably the looking of the museum in Baghdad, in which priceless artifacts of Iraq’s ancient past as the fertile crescent, home to Sumeria and mythical site of Eden itself, were stolen or just destroyed outright. We should know, from history, how devastating it can be to a nation and to the world for a nation to lose its patrimony, or even a portion thereof, and we should have had troops there, if nowhere else. It can only be seen as ironic, as we avoided hitting ancient spots in our bombings, for such a museum to suffer in the wake of our victory.

As we rightly praise the Bush administration for both the military and humanitarian success of the war, there are now a few implications to draw for the Clinton years, and they are not all negative. Clinton did too much to appease terrorists and evil regimes, but so did Bush prior to 11 September 2001. But for all of the cries that Clinton eroded the military, Iraq as been a triumph for the Clinton administration’s program of shifting to a smaller, more mobile military. This is indeed the kind of military needed for the twenty-first century, and the Bush administration has now embraced this military philosophy. Additionally, the unilateral Clinton interventions in the 1990s, when they went against NATO and the U.N. in humanitarian interests, this was seen as a failure of those international organizations and a cause for reforming those organizations, making them more proactive when it comes to despots and organized murderers. The failure of international diplomacy to deal with Iraq, even when the U.S. spent months with the U.N. and did not demand additional monetary assistance before acting, should be a cause for the same.

Now, of course, comes the rebuilding. This is, for America, a far more difficult task. When the British in the nineteenth century conquered distant lands, they stuck around. Moreover, they explicitly called these territories colonies, part of a stated empire. Brits with good educations and prospects shipped off to spend decades in these colonies on civilizing efforts, anglicizing efforts that we must acknowledge were both good and bad, both hostile to indigenous civilization and often positive to infrastructures, to schooling, and to civil rights. Today, many of these bad effects are impossible for a nation that participates in an international community to pursue -- the world economy can be credited with that, at least. But the downside is that we are fearful of long stays, of extended occupations. To be sure, such occupations are a public relations crisis. But leaving a nation prematurely, history tells us, is at least as dangerous, if not far moreso, in the long term.

We must recommit ourselves to the long process of not only rebuilding but reconstituting a nation. The democracy that our government seeks to give Iraq will not be had in weeks or months, as some are publicly projecting. Democracy is more than having ballot boxes and a pretense that votes are counted: it is the reverence for democracy that we have that keeps us participating and supporting it even in the wake of such mishaps, as we have seen in our own country. It is the psychological infrastructure of civil rights and civic responsibilities, of religious tolerance that is, however imperfectly, so ingrained in the American consciousness.

Americans go for what’s sexy. Such a process of not just physically rebuilding but psychologically transforming a nation is distinctly not sexy. A war, with its troop movements and live reporting, is far sexier. This is all the more reason why we must make sure our government commits for the long haul and makes it clear to all the world that Iraqis are better off, from basics like food and water to more complex matters like education and religious freedom, each year after our invasion.

We’ve done a good thing, bravely in defiance of national and international criticism, and we’ve done it well. There can be no doubting this. The best among us will feel proud of the remarkably openness and humanitarian aspects of the war. The worst among us will feel proud at America’s proverbial dick, expressed in the singular might of our military. But making a finer, better world is more than taking out brutal dictators: it is the hard, less glamorous, noble work of remaking societies and ultimately the world for the better, leaving identities intact while bettering the lot of all.

To this, now, let us dedicate ourselves.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

I hate writing these essays on the war. They're easy; I'm a political junkie. But they're not the stuff I want to be remembered for, even though they're better analysis than anything else out there. (I know; I've read it.) It's just that it's more likely to be collected as historical documents; these essays are more topical, the details of the debate less remembered. But, you know, this war has remarkably divided this country and, to a lesser extent, the world. And, you know, I have a conscience. And an addiction to politics.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT is to go to comic book stores on Saturday, 3 May! Why? Because it's FREE COMICS DAY -- for the second time in as many years! That's right: one day after X-Men 2 premieres, comic book publishers are publishing free editions of a number of comics, and many comic book stores are organizing events like raffles. Come one, come all, and celebrate this underrated artistic medium!

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