Recently an Iraqi policy expert said that there was good news from that country, namely, a balance of terror has been achieved on the ground. Two years ago the Sunni militias were preying on the Shias, and now the Shias have just as many militias fighting back. The reason this stalemate is "good news" is that a balance of terror opens the way for negotiations. If hatred is equal, peace might be born. Such are the illusions of war.
The actual good news is that the greatest illusion of all has suffered a huge blow. This is the illusion that war works. From the beginning the Iraqi war was an attempt on the part of neo-conservatives to prove that war still worked. By flexing American military power, they hoped to achieve anything this country wanted. If we wanted Saddam gone and instant democracy in Iraq, a quick little invasion should do the job. Nobody expected to be in Iraq three years later with the price of combat soaring to hundreds of billions of dollars (we were told at the outset that Iraqi oil would defray all our expenses, another illusion that has already died).
This war will not end as Vietnam did, with a large section of the public believing that the U.S. could not tolerate defeat and must continue to fight everywhere we wanted to. Iraq is already a defeat far worse than Vietnam. That country became viable once its civil war ended and the Ho Chi Minh regime took over. Iraq has no fortunate future lying ahead. Whether or not civil war breaks out on a large scale, Iraq will be a broken country, open to foreign influence, rife with corruption, torn by sectarian divisions.
In our heart of hearts we know that we created this disaster. How can a good country be the cause of so much that's wrong? By using the tool of war. War will be more discredited after this conflict ends. One cannot hope for American militarism to end also, because we are fatefully tied to the military-industrial complex. But this generation, already skeptical about war after Vietnam, only entered Iraq because of 9/11, and even then, with direct provocation from Arab terrorists, the Bush administration had to use deception, misinformation, and manipulation to get the public to go along with its "good" war.
Being optimistic, the future of the peace movement could turn out to be very bright. It will not score its victories through rallies and protests. Instead, there will be a shift in consciousness across the board, from left to right, just as Russian consciousness shifted away from Communism. Communism was an ideology that could only survive by believing in an illusion. America's invincible militarism is exactly the same, and as we swallow the humiliation of the Iraq invasion and assimilate its lessons, the American people will choose to live in reality instead. The ideology of unilateral war-making is not going to recover from this setback any time soon.
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