Five Years

Baghdad fell five years ago today. If I understand the conservative blogs correctly, people like me were supposed to have been humiliated and distressed by the news; at the time, I was honestly relieved and mildly surprised that the city hadn’t descended into a cauldron of violence. Aside from the fact that the invasion had no legal standing, my greatest point of opposition to the war derived from my incorrect assumption that Baghdad would take weeks if not months to fall and that in the meantime, an unnecessary number of people would die. Because it happened to be on at the gym, I actually watched Fox News that morning and thought, “Well, okay. That was quick.”

I figured that Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the rest of them would be stuffing their codpieces with a little more toilet paper and asking us to support more of these sorts of things in the future; I was pretty certain I’d not oblige their wishes, but for the time being, I was relieved to have been wrong about the scale of the carnage I’d been predicting in my head. Then again, since I’m a pessimist by nature and anything but a military strategist by training, I wasn’t shocked by the revelation.

Here’s the thing, though. Though I’d opposed American wars before, I’d never seen an administration conduct a large scale operation with anything resembling abject incompetence. So five years ago today, it didn’t occur to me to think — and maybe I’m being naive to admit this — but it never occurred to me to think, “Well, okay. That was quick. I sure hope we don’t fuck this up.” Like I said, though, I was wrong about several things on April 9, 2003.