What Has the Mission Accomplished?
For a few brief, shining moments, it looked like another “splendid little war,” to borrow Secretary of State John Hay’s description of the U.S. triumph over Spain in 1898. Just six weeks after American and allied coalition forces had begun “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” President George W. Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of major combat operations. Above and behind the President, a banner announced triumphantly, “Mission Accomplished.” Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants were now deposed and somewhere in hiding. Iraq’s 26 million people were now free. Soon coalition forces would begin finding and dismantling those “weapons of mass destruction” that had been the central point in the Bush administration’s most persuasive rationale for going to war. The blitz to Baghdad had, indeed, been as close to the predicted “cakewalk” as a military conflict might be. Yet despite the brief and one-sided nature of the conquest and the apparent lack of significant resistance by Iraqi defense forces, President Bush compared the triumph to such epic World War II struggles as the invasion of Normandy and the battle of Iwo Jima.
“Operation Iraqi Freedom was carried out with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect, and the world had not seen before,” Bush boasted. To be sure, the President did say there was difficult and dangerous work ahead. But he was certain that freedom had arrived in Iraq and that Iraqis were rejoicing over it. “In the images of celebrating Iraqis, we have also seen the ageless appeal of human freedom,” he said. “When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”
Or sometimes they turn to rioting, looting, and tribal and sectarian violence, along with guerrilla warfare against the foreign forces occupying their land. As the glow of victory faded to scenes of government offices, libraries, and museums being looted and vandalized, chaos spread through Iraq, and those reputed weapons of mass destruction were not found. The message on the banner that hung over the President’s triumphant speech was quoted again and again, with more than a hint of irony. “Mission Not Accomplished,” Time magazine said on its cover in September 2003. Inside, Time noted that in the few short months since the official end of combat operations, 170 U.S. soldiers had died in Iraq and two potential Iraqi leaders and a United Nations representative had been killed by terrorists. The magazine quoted Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile the Bush administration favored as a new leader for the country, observing: “When the U.S. said we are not liberators, we are an occupying force, the views of the people changed.”
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