On "Celebrating" the End of a War

I missed the parade. You know, celebrating the end of the war. Cheering the victory. Honoring the dead. But it’s hardly the only thing I’ve thought missing about our war in Iraq.

Yesterday marked the official end to our “combat operations” in Iraq. I heard it on the news, a little lower in priority than the 5-year anniversary of Katrina and the obsession with the recession. There was no fanfare. According to the website, http://nationalpriorities.org, military and non-military spending in Iraq now exceeds $745 billion, this for “incremental… additional funds.” (Regular military pay is not included, for example, but combat pay is included. Future anticipated costs are also not included.) “icasualties.org” lists the much greater costs, in human lives, at 4416 American troops killed in action. According to Patrick Goodenough, the International Editor for CNSNews.com, this is one death for every 15 hours of war. In addition to these grave numbers are the disturbing reports of the high number of combat injuries, especially traumatic brain injury, that are leaving thousands of our soldiers wounded – many with injuries that are not identified as combat related (mental health injuries), nor treated with the care which they deserve.

Because of the way the current and previous administrations and our news networks have chosen to provide coverage for this war, these losses are mainly nameless, faceless young people. Of course they are not nameless, nor faceless – that’s the point – they are beloved sons and daughters, parents, children, siblings, and friends whose faces and names are well-known, but they are largely forgotten because our War on Terror is a non-war in the traditional sense. In other words, we have conducted this war as if it were not costing us the precious resources, and the beloved children which are being lost every single day. At one point the former President remarked that the best we could do for this war was to “go shopping” – this war against the terrorists was about economic recovery – about not letting “them” steal “our way of life” (which may very well be caricatured by “shopping,” sadly enough) – not about deadly combat. There have been no calls for national participation much less for the kind of collective sacrifice that has been required of other national wars. As a result, while we have conducted life as usual, our daughters and sons have been giving their lives away – and the disconnect between those two concurrent lifestyles has far more serious consequences than we are prepared to admit. Though far harder to document (it was difficult enough to find a website that simply provided the numbers), another cost with which people of faith should be concerned is the loss of Iraqi lives. www.iraqbodycount.org places the estimate of documented deaths at between 97,461 and 106,348. To be sure, neither do those numbers represent nameless, faceless individuals.

While we should celebrate the end of this war’s combat operations, it should not be out of bravado or a sense of nationalistic superiority. We won! (I have never had any idea what “victory in Iraq” would really look like.) We should celebrate out of deep gratitude that this sad chapter is finally over. That the insanity of 7 ½ years is coming to an end. The sooner we can put this endless war behind us, work on repairing the broken relationships, the wounds of the horror of war, the better for our common humanity.

I don’t know what we have “won” in Iraq, if anything. I know that the quiet passing of “the end of combat operations” indicates a great defeat. We have conducted this war in a way that makes it clear that we mostly do not care. About the troops, the civilians, the “opportunity costs” lost in this nearly trillion dollar campaign. The commentators, hawks and doves alike, agreed that our plan for war was lacking. Now that the combat is over, I’d like to think we could do better with a plan for peace. To that end, I’ll be praying with you…