Bush’s “Mission Accomplished,” 20 Years Later
But Bush’s jubilant claim unraveled as combat escalated between Iraqi insurgents and occupying forces. During the next nine years, the official death toll among U.S. troops went from under 200 to more than 4,400 , while the deaths of Iraqi people surged into the hundreds of thousands . The physical wounds were even more numerous, the emotional injuries incalculable.
The “Mission Accomplished” banner and Bush’s
speech
going with it have become notorious. But focusing only on his faulty claim
that the war was over ignores other key untruths in the oratory.
“We have fought for the cause of liberty,” Bush declared. He did not
mention the cause of oil.
A few months before the invasion, a soft-spoken Iraqi man who was my driver
in Baghdad waited until we were alone at a picnic table in a park before
saying that he wished Iraq had no oil -- because then there would be no
reason to fear an invasion. Years later, some U.S. authorities were candid
about Iraq’s massive oil reserves as an incentive for the war.
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” former Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan
wrote
in his 2007 memoir. That same year, a former head of the U.S. Central
Command in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid,
had this to say
: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” And Sen. Chuck
Hagel, who later became Defense Secretary,
commented
: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
While touting the war effort as entirely noble, Bush’s “mission
accomplished” speech credited the Pentagon’s “new tactics and precision
weapons” for avoiding “violence against civilians.” The president added
that “it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear
from war than the innocent.”
Such soothing words masked brutal realities. Civilian deaths accounted for
40 percent of “people killed directly in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11
wars,” according to the
Costs of War project
at Brown University. In fact, a large majority of the casualties of those
wars have been civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a
reverberating effect of the wars -- because, for example, of water loss,
sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
By dodging inconvenient truths about the impacts of U.S. warfare on “the
innocent,” Bush was reasserting the usual pretenses of presidents who elide
the actual human toll of their wars while predicting successful outcomes.
On May 1, 2012, exactly nine years after Bush’s speech on the aircraft
carrier, President Barack Obama
spoke
to the American people from Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. With U.S. troop
levels in Afghanistan near a peak of 100,000, Obama expressed confidence
that “we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan.”
Both Bush and Obama would later be widely faulted for voicing undue
optimism about fulfilling a war’s “mission.” But the critiques have rarely
devoted much attention to scrutinizing the assumptions that propelled
support for the missions.
The U.S. government’s inherent prerogative to intervene militarily in other
countries has seldom been directly challenged in America’s mainstream media
and official discourse. Instead, debates have routinely revolved around
whether, where, when and how intervention is prudent and likely to prevail.
But we might want to ask ourselves: What if Bush had been correct in May
2003 -- and U.S. forces really were at the end of major combat operations
in Iraq? What if Obama had been correct in May 2012 -- and U.S. forces were
able to “complete our mission” in Afghanistan? In each case, conventional
wisdom would have gauged success in terms of military victory rather than
such matters as adherence to international law or regard for human life.
Today, it's a wonder to behold the fully justified denunciations of
Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine from some of the same U.S. government
leaders who avidly supported the horrific invasion of Iraq. The concept
that might makes right doesn’t sound good, but in practice it has
repeatedly been the basis of U.S. policy. Wayne Morse, the senator from
Oregon who opposed the Vietnam War from the outset, was cogent when he
said
: “I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the
right to try to substitute might for right.”
George W. Bush’s performance with the “Mission Accomplished” banner -- a
rhetorical victory lap that came before protracted bloodshed -- deserves
all of its notoriety 20 years later. His claims of success for the Iraq war
mission are now easy grounds for derision. But the more difficult truths to
plow through have to do with why the mission should never have been
attempted in the first place.
__________________________
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author
of a dozen books including War Made Easy. His latest book,
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military
Machine
, was published in June 2023 by The New Press.
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