On the heels of yet another protest, the Iraq war's potential as a financial, political and emotional quagmire seems to have come into full fruition. In the five years since the U.S. military stormed into Baghdad under the misguided and disturbing notion of a "shock and awe" campaign, the United States has spent nearly $3 trillion on the war, according to Harvard professor Linda J. Blimes and Columbia professor Joseph E. Stigliz in a March 9 Washington Post opinion article. The conflict's casualties, an even more distressing figure, number at a worrisome 3,991, according to the Department of Defense. We can only guess at that statistic's Iraqi equivalent.
There's nothing we can say in this space other media and writers have not been saying for years. No matter how defensible the war's goal may have initially appeared to be, the pretenses under which the United States executed its military effort remain largely dubious. In addition to the Bush administration's misconduct in the U.N. Security Council and the unavailability of credible intelligence, AU professor Charles Lewis and the Center of Public Integrity exposed 935 instances of misleading statements in the two years following Sept. 11, 2001. Mistakes and misinformation have undoubtedly contributed to this worsening quagmire that Americans are still protesting.
That the media committed equally inexcusable errors is obvious: Too many journalists tacitly accepted what politicians told them, and too many Americans relied on that information - as they duly should have - to their own detriment. Even today, the war's fifth anniversary, as Americans across the country vehemently protest their local and national representatives' votes, the stories barely escape the depths of their newspapers' back pages. Many publications have relegated war reporting to covering politicians' bickering instead of analyzing the veracity of what's said or reported, contributing to a wholly inexcusable sense of ignorance.
Worse, many still liken dissent to anti-Americanism and scrutiny to treason, despite Americans' declining faith in war itself. Protests are looked at with equal disdain, and they're often diminished as a complete affront to the troops and their amazing work abroad.
Not to state the obvious, but none of that appears very democratic - a huge irony, considering it was that same political system Americans sought to export to Iraq. If anything, the United States is growing less democratic the more it marginalizes dissenters, those who seek only to keep Iraq on the nation's mind as the media and government neglect its discussion.
And look at some of the protesters' ages: Some of the members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group that protested in D.C. Wednesday, were merely 19. That's where the true tragedy lies. Between the casualty counts and the annual budget estimates, the pages upon which critical articles are relegated and the frequency at which protests appear, there are individual stories and emotional experiences we cannot quantify. Contrary to what indecisive, noncommittal and lukewarm politicians believe, the real quagmire of the Iraq war is a burden that exists - sadly for some more than others - in our hearts as much as our wallets. We hope this protest is the last, but we recognize with the same conviction that it probably is not.
