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Just what is to be remembered?

Thursday, November 13, 2008

A CLICHÉ COMMON ACROSS the media every year around the time of Veterans Day is “Lest We Forget”. Its provenance is as old as the day itself, from when it marked - under its original name of Armistice Day - the agreement reached “at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, in the eleventh month”.

The armistice ceased hostilities in World War One – which was so painfully mislabeled at the time “the war to end all wars”.

 

What we have been since urged not to forget, of course, is the vast company of men and women who have given their lives for their nation in all wars – especially since the day’s name was changed by a stroke of President Dwight D Eisenhower’s pen in 1954, in order to embrace the still fresh losses of WWII and the Korean War. In Britain the appeal to people’s collective memory is made explicit and general in the enduring name, “Remembrance Day”.

 

The formal moments of silence, observed in all countries who mark this solemn day, have indeed been to honor all those sacrificed lives. Something else, though, to remember now (in outspoken communications, and loud ones if necessary) is a straightforward on-the-record fact.

 

The fact may have been occluded a bit by the vast economic downturn that’s enveloped the world, altered our entire global conversation, and in the process helped to ensure Barack Obama’s election as US President, but it remains true … that the successful candidate did promise - from the very first moment of his entering the electoral race - that he would end the Iraq war.

 

Any journalist who calibrates one war alongside another is treading on invidious ground, but it’s worth emphasizing that this 21st century war has now lasted longer than that Great War of 1914-18 which first prompted this week's day of somber reflection. The current war has cost over 4,000 American lives and a none-too-reliably estimated 90,000 Iraqi lives - probably many more. And only this week, in the now reportedly “more secure” capital of Bagdad, another 100 people fell victim to a spate of bombings (the toll comprised 30 civilians killed, and the rest horribly wounded).

 

Will the media be holding Obama to this crucial promise to end this war – the promise on which was built his eventually successful claim to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer?

 

Again and again Obama told reporters on the campaign trail, and repeated in debates, as well as in newspaper Op Ed columns, that (to pick a characteristic quote): “I will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. We can remove all of them in 16 months” (North Carolina’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, May 2008)

 

That populist rallying cry has now morphed somewhat into the official position, as laid out by the Obama-Biden campaign. “Immediately upon taking office, Barack Obama will give his Secretary of Defense and military commanders a new mission in Iraq: successfully ending the war. The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased”.

 

No mention of 16 months, you’ll note. And the White House press corps, which is in its traditional throes of reconstituting for the incoming Administration, is already preparing for the term “responsible” to become another way of saying “extended, due to circumstances beyond our control”.

 

Readers of this column, distressed though many were to read it, know that my own experience of reporting on guerrilla insurgencies, especially those accompanied by murderous sectarian divisions, tells me that 16 months is a wildly optimistic timetable for any responsible extrication from the sort of mess made by George W Bush in Iraq.

   

 

AGAIN, COMPARISONS ARE ALMOST ALWAYS INVIDIOUS, and past military enterprises never an ironclad guide to the future, but it’s worth bearing in mind some little-reported news that emerged in Northern Ireland this week.

 

British troops have effectively ended their engagement there, but only after three hard-fought decades (yes, three decades). And the insurgent Irish Republican Army’s political leaders have entered into a power-sharing agreement that has finally brought some peace to the province.

 

Now, though, three years after the new peace commitments, my friends on the Independent Monitoring Commission (which includes, as well as British and Irish anti-terrorist experts, some representation from the US intelligence community as well) have just warned, in their latest six-monthly review, that disaffected Republican paramilitaries present a serious and growing threat.

 

Operating under names like “the Continuity IRA” and “the ‘Real’ IRA”, they are obtaining and using Semtex plastic explosives, and have been responsible, the Commission says, for "a more concentrated period of attacks [against security personnel] than at any time since we started to report”. Military measures to crack down on them may have to be invoked once more.

 

Obama’s much-prized and perfectly sensible phrase goes: “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in”.

 

But in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, where he has his other promise to enact - ramping up military efforts to deal finally with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whom the Bush team allowed to entrench while it recklessly switched its attention to Iraq - he and the reporters who’ll critically watch his every move cannot fail to remember that old inescapable truth:  once the genie of military engagement is loosed from the bottle, getting it back in again can never be neatly accomplished.

 

**CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN EVERY WEEK - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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