Iraq: Five years after ‘Mission Accomplished’

“President Bush will never live down ‘Mission Accomplished,’” said The New York Times in an editorial, nor should he be allowed to. Five long, bloody years have passed since our president, clad preposterously in an airman’s flight suit, stood beneath a banner bearing those words on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq. At the time, the message seemed merely “cocky and premature.” But countless lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later, we know that in fact the banner was “stunningly deceitful.” Our incursion into Iraq has become a “war-without-end,” and Bush’s only real goal at this point is to “abandon the mess to his successor.” Only now can we see the “full range of strategic damage to U.S. interests from this delusion of victory,” said Elizabeth Sullivan in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Bush thought, on the carrier deck that day, he was celebrating the triumph of American might and values. Instead, he had mired us in a war that would horribly erode them.

Bush’s critics are having a field day with this anniversary, said Amir Taheri in the New York Post, but a more useful debate about Iraq would surely “focus on what is happening now—not what happened five years ago.” Unfortunately for the “anti-war crowd,” the situation in Iraq at the moment

is actually pretty encouraging. Al Qaida has largely been defeated, and Iraqis “are discovering the values that, in time, helped develop the Western democracies.” U.S. casualties spiked in April, said Michael Yon in the New York Daily News, but that’s because our troops have “taken up the next crucial challenge of this war: confronting the Shia militias.” What we’re seeing in Iraq now is the “storm before the calm.” The mission may not yet be accomplished, but we’re getting there.

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That’s hardly true, said Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe, but the sad fact is, nobody cares whether it is or not. On the anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, the pundits and the public were embroiled in the ongoing battle for superdelegates in the Democratic presidential race, and debating 15-year-old Miley Cyrus’ decision “to pose in a sheet for Vanity Fair.” Regardless of the war’s ultimate outcome, one good thing has already come from it, said the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. No future president will ever “utter the phrase ‘mission accomplished,’ or anything close to it—not even after the last shot has been fired.”