Will there be a holiday named for the American military achievement in Iraq?
Some holidays endure, and some come and go but thrive for a while. Decoration Day became Memorial Day, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, VE Day and VJ Day just seemed to disappear after a while. But even ephemeral celebration days have their enduring moments. Here’s what Glenn Reynolds reported last week about America’s victory in Iraq:
“The war is over and we won:” Michael Yon just phoned from Baghdad, and reports that things are much better than he had expected, and he had expected things to be good. “There’s nothing going on. I’m with the 10th Mountain Division, and…none of them have fired their weapons in combat during this tour, and about half of them are combat veterans from Afghanistan and/or Iraq…they’ve been here eight months. And the place we’re at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there’s nothing going on.
I’ve been walking my feet off and haven’t seen anything. I’ve been asking Iraqis, ‘do you think the violence will kick up again,’ but even the Iraqi journalists are sounding optimistic now and they’re usually dour.” There’s a little bit of violence here and there, but nothing that’s a threat to the general situation. Plus, not only the Iraqi Army, but even the National Police are well thought of by the populace. Training from U.S. toops has paid off, he says, in building a rapport.
He says the big problem everybody is talking about now is corruption. But hey, we have that here, too. He’ll be heading to Afghanistan next week. “Afghanistan is a bad situation, but on Iraq I can’t believe things have turned out so well.”
The White House waddled in with this the other day: “as a result of the surge, we’ve been able to have tremendous successes…We believe that the conditions are such now that we are able to celebrate the victory that we’ve had so far, and establish both a strategic framework agreement, which is a much broader document and talks about all sorts of cooperation that we’ll have with Iraq from here on out — from trade and health care and exchanges on science, and a real strong bilateral agreement that you would hope we would have with any of our allies. These documents usually take years to negotiate. We’ve been able to compress that and do it within the year”. Never has a victory seemed so much like something else.
Will Americans ultimately celebrate this victory? Who knows? But just imagine if the Iraqis put a statue of George Bush where that big one of Saddam Hussein used to stand.