“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
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