The generational war

I spent a couple of hours on an airplane and was able to swallow George Packer's uniformly grim assessment of where we are in Iraq, and the "choices" that confront Americans and Iraqis right now and for years to come.

Reading it was weird, though. In These Great Times in which we live, what Packer writes is simply reporting, no great insights. And yet, the dead facts of Packer's piece are simply not spoken of, by those who opposed the war and those that didn't.

In Washington, the debate over the war is dominated by questions about troop numbers and timelines—that is, by immediate American political realities. The country seems trapped in an eternal present, paralyzed by its past mistakes. There is little or no discussion, on either side, of what America’s Iraq policy should be during the next five or ten years, or of what will be possible as resources dwindle and priorities shift. If there is any contingency planning in the government, it’s being done at such a secretive, or obscure, level that a repetition of the institutional disarray with which America entered Iraq seems bound to mark our departure.

And this is certainly not spoken of by the press, by bloggers, by people waiting in line for McDonalds at O'Hare. Although polls show nothing but dissatisfaction with Bush and His War, I suspect that the rhetoric has had one desired effect -- Americans equate Iraq with The Global War on Terror (NAMBLA), which we've been told is a generational war. Our war in Iraq is not going anywhere and nor are we*. And we know it.

* By "we," I mean the American soldiers over there, of whom fewer and fewer average Americans even know.