Get up and go

August 1st has come and passed this year. In fact, as I write this, we are two weeks hence and according to every calendar I have seen, there will not be another August 1st until at least 2012. Why am I highlighting this specific date? Because the American government gave the Iraqi government until that day to decide if they wanted to keep US Troops stationed in Iraq beyond a "protect our embassy" sort of role. And wouldn't you know it? That day came and went with little more than political grandstanding on both sides of the prospective decision.


If you ask anyone about Vietnam, a few images come to mind: the monk lighting himself on fire, the South Vietnamese Soldier getting executed, and the image of US Marines leaving Saigon aboard an overcrowded helicopter.

And this, too. Don't lie.

What do those images have in common? Minus PFC Gump up here, they all portray, in various levels of sickening, negative images of the war. Vietnam has been at the forefront of military thought for nearly half a century for what it did not teach us: namely, humility. We went in thinking we could do battle with an apparition, we scored a disproportionate number of tactical victories against a clearly over-matched foe, but were unable to stop the ideological spread of Communism, our altruistically stated primary goal. The end result? A generation of American Soldiers paid the price for our hubris. In the years immediately after the war, Iraq War fixtures like GENs Martin Dempsey, Ray Odierno, David Petraeus, George Casey, and Pete Chiarelli all received their formative education in all things Army from non-commissioned officers jaded from having fought in a war we technically lost. The mantra "we cannot afford another Vietnam" became as personal to them as " In God We Trust," and in my opinion shaped how they planned and executed the Iraq War Strategy.


The problem? Iraq is not Vietnam. Clearly. And more importantly, the Iraq War is really nothing like the Vietnam War. We are not stemming the tide of approaching jihadists any more than we are fighting a corrupt political system and a general propensity for nepotism. Iraq is an unstable country and, in our eyes, should not be left to the masses.

Pictured: The Masses

But it is in no danger of being taken over by another foreign country and is in even less danger of assimilating Communism - or its 2000s-era counterpart, religious extremism - into its government. Some would argue that before a government can take on a certain form there first has to be a government, which Iraq clearly lacks (rim shot!).


But where should that government come from? We seem to take for granted that democracies can form overnight, but given that Sarah Palin thinks Paul Revere was riding for the British and Michelle Bachmann believes that the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in New Hampshire and not, as previously reported, Massachusetts, I think we can forgive the general American populace for forgetting it took us 15 years to form a stabilized government, and it was almost 12 years later before that government had to endure any serious changes to the status quo. Its true: from the first Continental Congress in 1774 to the aborted Articles of Confederation in 1783 to the unanimous election of George Washington as president under the new Constitution in 1789 there elapsed 15 years of international war, internal strife, and far more questions than answers. And what did the world learn as a result? Honestly, looking at the two direct results of the American Revolution (the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution), not too much. The world just learned that if you want your way you have to kill people to get it and you might as well get used to it.


As Americans we are guilty of taking lemons and making lemonade when it comes to our own history. We romanticize the Boston Tea Party but gloss over the fact that, based on our current definition of terrorism, the Tea Partyers of the late 1770s were little more than home-grown terrorists. We laugh at the images of British tax collectors being tarred and feathered while forgetting that the end result of a good group tarring was more than likely death from asphyxiation. And we laud the founding fathers for creating a living, breathing Constitution while forgetting that their first attempt was a comically inept piece of government that couldn't even tax its citizens.

"I say, good sir, stop squrim-- oh. That's a good man. Bring on more tar!"

In short, we give ourselves a pass because we have the benefit of hindsight... that and some pretty ignorant leaders. We'll gladly stand on our soapbox and decry Iraq for failing at their first attempt at making a government. We will mourn the loss of Iraqi civilians to roadside bombs and agree among one another that it is high time Iraqis, and not US Soldiers, dealt with internal terrorists. You know, more or less we ask Iraq to do what we ourselves could not do after our own change from an absolute form of government to a representative one.


In this scenario are we the British and the Iraqis the colonists? I should hope not; we do have much better teeth. Then is Iraq Vietnam and we are, in a stunning turn of events, America? Again, no: their government, while still quite weak, will not fall to a foreign power and we will not abandon our state department buildings. But we do have a problem. We are so scared to leave another Vietnam we are turning to blaming the victim, but in our blind blamestorming session, we neglect our own history. Should we give Iraq a pass? No. They have competent political leadership who are simply too corrupt, or too scared of religious extremists, to do much good. We are unable to tell Iraq to "get over themselves and move forward together" because just over 80 years after the Declaration of Independence we were fighting each other in one of the bloodiest Civil Wars yet seen on Earth.


The fact of the matter is we are not going to leave Iraq in a haste but we are not going to see improvements on the scale that would make us happy. We are going to leave Iraq when it is time to leave Iraq, and not a moment longer, because Iraq is decidedly not Vietnam. Maybe instead of Iraqis getting over themselves, Americans should. Because last I checked, building a government from the ground up is an ever-evolving process and, in the beginning, there will be far more failures than successes. I guess, then, that it is the measure of the nation and its inhabitants to take those setbacks and successes in stride and continue to try to improve -- not because they are told to, but because they want to. And if that is true, then maybe Iraq not asking for Soldiers was the best decision their young government has yet made.