| Wednesday, November 17, 2004 |
16:37 - Retrospective
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One thing I've noticed from these last two or three years of being a news-hound is that there's simply so much data to process that the mental database rollups (as it were) occur way too frequently, purging items that happened way too recently, in favor of stuff that's even more recent.
And so, we've already forgotten some of the most gobsmacking moments of the months surrounding the tense few weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Now we have people who are convinced that the whole Iraq war was for naught because the Iraqis "never wanted democracy anyway"; with Saddam's horrors slipping into memory already and spackled over with newer and flashier events like our election and Fallujah, we've forgotten the vindication that thrilled through the blogosphere a year and a half ago as we affirmed our commitment to that action, hard and gruelling though we knew it would be, and ultimately thankless at that.
It's time to remember a few things.
Remember Johann Hari's testimony of Iraqi exiles coming home. Remember Steven Den Beste's expansion on it.
Remember the "Human Shields" who went to Iraq, thinking they were doing the Iraqi people a service; and remember when they came home, shell-shocked, muttering "My God, what have we done?" after hearing to their dismay that the Iraqis wanted the invasion, and thought the "Human Shields" must have been on Saddam's payroll.
Remember Andrea vs. Mohammed, the infamous radio confrontation between a well-meaning peacenik and an Iraqi expat mocking her "simplistic Nickelodeon diplomacy".
Don't let these memes slip away into the bit-bucket of history. Lots of things have changed on the ground in Iraq since we went in last March; the moral muddle in which we find ourselves in the post-Abu-Ghraib, post-Saddam-capture, post-sovereignty-turnover, post-election, post-Fallujah world clouds our vision and makes doubters out of all of us. But we had better not let that render passé the fundamental rightness of what we undertook, or the necessity of seeing it through to the fruition to which we committed ourselves.
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Brian Tiemann
