I was out shopping today and I saw a postcard of that famous picture of the sailor kissing some woman on the street after the end of World War II. I thought for a moment about everything that picture said about the situation those two people found themselves in. Years of indescribable horror, violence, sacrifice, and tragedy, and then, victory. Of course, things weren’t really over–decades of reconstruction and occupation would follow (and the latter bit still continues today)–but the joy these people felt at the successful completion of this horrific but necessary endeavor so moved them that they just started grabbin’ strangers and makin’ out. (Free love, two decades early?)
The sheer scope of atrocity that was World War II kind of helped put the endless stream of awfulness coming out of Iraq in perspective for me. Having been away from the Internet for a while I was getting all my news from the local paper and TV stations here in Colorado, and it’s all talk of “slipping into open revolt” and the like. And of course in the anti-war blogosphere (heck, even in its comics-related subsection–hi, Franklin! hi, Jim!) there’s barely restrained glee, not at the deaths of soldiers and Iraqi civilians, of course, but at the political ramifications of same for the Bush administration. There, it’s “the beginnings of a full-fledged guerilla campaign.”
But war is difficult. Actually, war is horrendously, mind-bogglingly awful. And compared to the horrendous, mind-boggling wars we’ve fought in the past, we’re actually still ahead of the game. The casualty level, both for American troops and Iraqi civilians, remains astonishingly low given the immensity of the action we’ve undertaken. The erosion of civil liberties in Ashcroft’s America (TM) during the So-Called War On “Terror” (c) is troubling, but also trifling compared to that under Presidents Nixon, Johnson, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Lincoln (to say nothing of the old-school from the early 18th century). Americans may be growing aware of the difficulty of the task at hand, but they’re not giving up on it, and neither is the military, and neither is the government–and neither, for that matter, are the majority of Iraqis. It’s not a civil war, it’s not massive daily uncontrollable rioting, it’s not the Tet Offensive–it’s the same kind of pointless vengeful bullshit that history’s losers perpetually engage in on their way down the chute.
What I’m saying is not that in a matter of months we’ll see sailors grabbing girls in front of the TRL studio in Times Square and getting their smooch on. This war is not World War II. But nor, in countless important ways, is it Vietnam. The bad news is still bad, and the deaths are still awful. But they are not in vain.