Iraq Archives - Not Even Past

Our New History Ph.D.s

For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class of new UT Austin History PhDs and tell you a little about them and their work.

Each of these students completed at least two years of course work. They read hundreds of books and wrote dozens of papers to prepare for their comprehensive examinations. After that, they developed original research projects to answer questions no one had asked before. Then they did a year or so of research in libraries and archives, before sitting down to write their dissertations. They did all this while working, teaching, caring for their families, having at least a little fun, and, in some cases, writing for Not Even Past!

Here they are, with their dissertation titles (and abstracts, if we have them). CONGRATULATIONS DOCTORS!

Sandy Chang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Florida
“Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s”

Across the South Seas explores the migration of Chinese women who embarked on border-crossing journeys, arriving in British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Between the 1870s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women traveled to the Peninsula at a time when modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial exclusion, curtailing Asian mobility into white settler colonies and nation-states. In colonial Malaya, however, Chinese women encountered a different set of racial, gender, and sexual politics at the border and beyond. Based on facilitation rather than exclusion, colonial immigration policies selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement across the Peninsula. Weaving together histories of colonial sexual economy, Chinese migration, and the globalization of border control, this study foregrounds the role of itinerant women during Asia’s mobility revolution. It argues that Chinese women’s intimate labor ultimately served as a crucial linchpin that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia.

Sandy Chang on Not Even Past:
Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

Itay Eisinger
“The Dystopian Turn In Hebrew Literature”

From its inception in Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement promoted, leveraged and drove forward a utopian plan for a Jewish national revival, in the biblical Land of Israel, and in essence framed these plans as a pseudo divine right of the Jewish people. Numerous intellectual, cultural and literary historians therefore have focused on the role of utopian thinking in the shaping of Zionist ideology and Hebrew literature. By way of contrast, this dissertation focuses on the transformation, or evolution, of dystopian poetics within the realm of modern Hebrew literature. … Recent scholarship argues that while early “totalitarian” dystopias tended to focus on the dangers of the all-powerful state, tyranny, and global isolation as the main sources of collective danger to a prosperous and peaceful future, more recently published dystopias – both in the West and in Israel – have moved their focus to other topics and hazards, such as catastrophic ecological or climate disasters, patriarchy, sexism and misogyny, and the rise of surveillance and the integration of the intelligence community into the all-powerful well-oiled capitalist machine. While I do not disavow such arguments completely, I argue that most Israeli dystopias are still driven primarily by the traditional depiction of an authoritarian-fascist regime run amok – in alignment with the Huxley-Orwell model – while at the same time, explore creatively a vision of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s prediction in 1967 that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably force Israel to become a “police state.” … I examine the common themes found in these novels, including the dystopian depiction of an instrumentalization of the Shoah and manipulative abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to promote political agendas, allusions to the nakba, the over-militarism and nationalism of the state, the effects of the Occupation on Israeli society, and Israel’s neoliberal revolution…. By examining these novels from this perspective, and creating a dialogue between these works and different critical scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to the study of Israel by rethinking its history – through the prism of dystopia.

Itay Eisinger on Not Even Past:
Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

Carl Forsberg, 2019-2020 Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale’s International Security Studies Program and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy.
“A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: The Transformation Of The US-Middle East Alliance System In The 1970s”

This dissertation charts the agency of Arab, Iranian, and US elites in transforming the structure of Middle Eastern regional politics and constructing a coalition that persists to the present. In the decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the regimes of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, and Shah Mohamad Reza Pahlavi in Iran set out to overturn the legacy of Nasserism and Arab socialism. Animated by a common fear that their internal opposition gained strength from a nexus of Soviet subversion and the transnational left, these regimes collaboratively forged a new regional order built around the primacy of state interests and the security of authoritarian rule. They instrumentally manipulated a range of US-led peace processes, including Arab-Israeli negotiations, US-Soviet détente, and conciliation between Iran and its Arab neighbors to advance their diplomatic counter-revolution. US administrations at times resisted these efforts because they read the region through the polarities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1973 War, however, the opportunity to marginalize Soviet influence in the region proved too enticing for US officials to ignore. My project deploys multi-lingual research conducted in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, and the US. To overcome the lack of open state archives in Arab countries, the dissertation examines US, British, Iranian, and Israeli records of discussions with Arab leaders, as well as memoirs, periodicals, and speeches in Farsi and Arabic, to triangulate the strategies and covert negotiations of Arab regimes.

Celeste Ward Gventer, Post-doc, The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
“Defense Reorganization For Unity: The Unified Combatant Command System, The 1958 Defense Reorganization Act And The Sixty-Year Drive For Unity In Grand Strategy And Military Doctrine”

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles at the White House in 1956

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why, in 1958 and as part of the Defense Reorganization Act (DRA) passed that year, did U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower remove the chiefs of the military services from the chain of operational command and instead empower the so-called “unified combatant commands” to lead American military forces in war? The answer, this dissertation will argue, is that Eisenhower had found himself competing with his military service chiefs for his entire first administration and the first half of his second over national (grand) strategy and military doctrine. Taking those service chiefs out of the chain of operational command would, in effect, diminish the role of those officers. Eisenhower had found that simply getting rid of refractory officers was insufficient to quiet their rebellion: only by suppressing their role permanently in the bureaucracy did he hope to unify American strategy- and policy-making. This interpretation is at odds with the few accounts of the 1958 DRA that do exist, which tend to take Eisenhower’s stated purposes—to enhance “unity of command”—at face value. The circumstances that led Eisenhower to take this step were decades, if not longer, in the making. … The situation resulted from the inherent pluralism in American military policy making … it was also a product of the decades that preceded Eisenhower’s administration during which the American military was consistently forced to “fill in the blanks” of national strategy. What drove matters to a head in the 1950s was the steady growth of American power after the 1898 Spanish-American War and, especially, after the Second World War. It is necessary to also appreciate several legacies Eisenhower confronted and that colored his own views: the history of American military thinking about command and about civilian control; the creation of military staffs and the process of reform and professionalization inside the military services during the twentieth century; and the development of independent service doctrines. … This work will trace these conceptual threads over the sixty-year rise of the United States to a global power, culminating in Eisenhower’s standoff with his service chiefs in the 1950s.

Lauren Henley, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
“Constructing Clementine: Murder, Terror, and the (Un)Making of Community in the Rural South, 1900-1930”

Deirdre Lannon, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
“Ruth Mary Reynolds And The Fight For Puerto Rico’s Independence”

Ruth Mary Reynolds (Women in Peace)

This dissertation is a biography of Ruth Mary Reynolds, a pacifist from the Black Hills of South Dakota who after moving to New York City became involved in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence…. She bucked the social norms of her conservative hometown to join the Harlem Ashram…. Her work within the Ashram connected her to the web of leftist coalition activism launched by the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 1940s, and to A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for black equality. She became involved with organized pacifism, most notably through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and her close friendship with its U.S. leader, Dutch-born theologian A.J. Muste. In 1944, Ruth decided to make the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence her own. She helped form a short-lived organization, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence, which was supported by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck among others. She became close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos and his family, as well as other Puerto Rican independence activists. She traveled to Puerto Rico, and in 1950 found herself swept into the violence that erupted between the government and Albizu Campos’s followers. Her experiences in New York and Puerto Rico offer a unique lens into the ways in which the Puerto Rican independence movement functioned, and how it was quashed through governmental repressions. Her friendship with Pedro Albizu Campos, the fiery independentista who remains a figurehead of Puerto Rican identity and pride, helps to humanize the man behind the mission. Ruth never abandoned her friend, or their shared cause. She fought for Albizu Campos to be freed, bucking the climate of repression during McCarthyism. This dissertation traces her efforts until 1965, when Albizu Campos died. She remained an active part of the Puerto Rican independence movement until her own death in 1989.

Holly McCarthy
“The Iraq Petroleum Company In Revolutionary Times”

Signe Fourmy, Visiting Research Affiliate, Institute for Historical Studies and Education Consultant, Humanities Texas.
“They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”

“They Chose Death Over Slavery,” … examines enslaved women’s acts of infanticide as maternal resistance. Enslaved women occupied a unique position within the slaveholding household. As re/productive laborers, enslavers profited from work women performed in the fields and house, but also from the children they birthed and raised. I argue that enslaved women’s acts of maternal violence bear particular meaning as a rejection of enslavers’ authority over their reproduction and a reflection of the trauma of enslavement. This dissertation identifies and analyzes incidents of infanticide, in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri. Using a comparative approach to consider geographic location and household size—factors that shaped the lived experiences of the enslaved—I ask what, if any, patterns existed? What social, economic, and political considerations influenced pivotal legal determinations—including decisions to prosecute, punish, or pardon these women? Expanding on the work of Laura Edwards and Paul Finkelman, I argue that public prosecution and legal outcomes balanced community socio-legal interests in enforcing the law while simultaneously protecting slaveowners profiting from their (re)productive labor. The existing scholarship on slavery, resistance, and reproduction shows that enslaved women were prosecuted for infanticide, yet the only book-length studies of enslaved women and infanticide center on one sensationalized case involving Margaret Garner. Infanticide was more prevalent than the secondary literature suggests. Building upon the work of historians Darlene Clark Hine and Jennifer L. Morgan, I explore how enslaved women re-appropriated their reproductive capacity as a means of resistance. In conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, Sasha Turner, and Marisa Fuentes, I ask what this particular type of violence reveals about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives. Additionally, I explore what these acts of maternal violence reveal about enslaved motherhood—or more specifically an enslaved woman’s decision not to mother her child.

Signe Fourmy on Not Even Past:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor

Sean Killen
“South Asians and the Creation of International Legal Order, c. 1850-c. 1920: Global Political Thought and Imperial Legal Politics”

This dissertation argues that South Asians used international legal discourse both for ideological disputation and to mount political challenges to the domination and subjugation that accompanied British imperial rule between roughly 1850 and 1920. South Asians instigated political and legal disputes in India and Britain, throughout the empire, and overseas, and gained promises and partial concessions to Indian opinions and demands that limited British options in imperial and international relations. In so doing, they compelled the British state to alter the ideology, the policies, and the practices of the state, in India and in its relations with other states both within and outside the empire. Britain’s power, ultimately, meant that South Asians’ argumentation and actions shaped the contours of global order after the First World War….Traditional histories of international law argue that international law originated in Europe and regulated European states’ relations until colonized states were granted international legal recognition at the time of decolonization. Recent revisionist scholarship argues that the existence and experience of empire and colonial rule shaped the development of international law and global order throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation approaches empire in a way that emphasizes the global exchange of ideas and the active connections between colonizers and the colonized. Elite, English-speaking South Asians acted as cultural translators or intermediaries. They engaged in debates as public intellectuals, and they carved out spaces for themselves in the social and political communities that created public opinion. Consequently, South Asians’ ideas about relations among different peoples and between states, and South Asians’ mobilization of these ideas throughout the empire and overseas to make political claims about the obligations of the imperial state and the rights of imperial subjects shaped ideas about global order and the structure of international legal relations.

Jimena Perry, Teaching Instructor, East Carolina University
“Trying to Remember: Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia, 2000-2014”

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia.

Since the turn of the century, not only museum professionals but grassroots community leaders have undertaken the challenge of memorializing the Colombian armed conflict of the 1980s to the early 2000s. In an attempt to confront the horrors of the massacres, forced displacement, bombings, and disappearances, museums and exhibitions have become one of the tools used to represent and remember the brutalities endured. To demonstrate how historical memories are informed by cultural diversity, my dissertation examines how Colombians remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the countryʼs internal war. The chapters of this work delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their particular way of remembering, which emphasizes their peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. Bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, my work contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. In addition, my case studies exemplify why it is necessary to hear the multiple voices of conflict survivors, especially in a country with a long history of violence like Colombia. Drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, I study how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. My work also analyzes museums and displays as arbiters of social memory. It asks how representations of violence serve in processes of transitional justice and promotion of human rights for societies that have been racked by decades of violence.

Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:
When Answers Are Not Enough: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
More Than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellin, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig
History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogatá, Colombia
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Christina Villareal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Resisting Colonial Subjugation: The Search for Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803”

This dissertation is a history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, it traces the physical movement of Native Americans, soldiers, and African and indigenous slaves who fled conscription, reduction to Catholic missions, or enslavement in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands of the eighteenth century. It reconstructs geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of the dissertation is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the dissertation. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Native Americans, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.

Christina Villareal on Not Even Past
The War on Drugs: How the US and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullusa and Mike Wallace

Andrew Weiss
“The Virgin and The Pri: Guadalupanismo And Political Governance In Mexico, 1945-1979”

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and political governance in Mexico from 1945 until 1979 through the lens of Guadalupanismo. Guadalupanismo (devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe) is a unifying nationalistic force in Mexico. After 1940, Church and state collaborated to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe as a nationalist emblem following decades of divisive state-led religious persecution. Mexico, however, remained officially anticlerical sociopolitical territory. I analyze flashpoints of Guadalupan nationalism to reveal the history of Mexican Church-state relations and Catholic religiosity. These episodes are: the 1945 fiftieth anniversary of the 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe; the construction of the New Basilica in the 1970s (inaugurated in 1976); and Pope John Paul II’s trip to Mexico and the Basilica in 1979. Each of these occasions elicited great popular enthusiasm and participation in public ritual. And each brought politicians in contact with the third rail in Mexican politics: religion. The essential value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as I show, is that as both a Catholic and a nationalistic icon, she represented an ideal symbolic terrain for the renegotiation and calibration of Church-state relations under PRI rule. I follow these Guadalupan episodes to track the history of Guadalupanismo and interpret the changing Church-state relationship at different junctures in the course of the single-party priísta regime. These junctures (1945, 1962, 1976, and 1979) are relevant because they are representative of classical and degenerative phases of priísmo (the ideology of the ruling party [PRI] that governed Mexico from 1929 until 2000) and cover the episcopates of three major figures who ran the Archdiocese of Mexico for over sixty years. The Church-state covenant was renegotiated over time as seen by the Guadalupan episodes I analyze.

Andrew Weiss on Not Even Past
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey

Pictured above (Clockwise from top center): Sandy Chang, Andrew Weiss, Deirdre Lannon, Jimena Perry, Celeste Ward Gventer, Christina Villareal, Itay Eisinger.
Not pictured: Signe Fourmy, Lauren Henley, Sean Killen, Holly McCarthy, Carl Forsberg,

Was Iraq War Worth It? 10 Years after Invasion, It’s Too Early to Know

By Celeste Ward Gventer

Last November marked the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Since it ranks as one of the most popular sites on the National Mall with over 4 million visitors every year, it is easy to forget the outcry that accompanied the monument’s initial unveiling in 1982. Critics called it a “black gash of shame and sorrow,” and “nihilistic.” Prominent supporters of a Vietnam memorial pulled out of the project when the design contest judges selected Maya Lin’s now-iconic black wall concept. But the two reflective granite slabs that bear the names of over 58,000 service personnel killed or missing in Vietnam now rate as one of the most beloved pieces of American architecture and serve as a kind of national shrine.

The battle over the Vietnam memorial was more than aesthetic; it reflected a disagreement about how to interpret the war and how to communicate its meaning to current and future generations. It was a fight about national memory. For some veterans and their supporters, the black wall bespoke disaster and disgrace; it failed to recognize the heroism of individual human beings who fought valiantly and served honorably, even if the nation considered the war a loss.

A U.S. marine stands before the Vietnam memorial, July 4th, 2002 (Image courtesy of Indrani/Wikimedia Commons)

What might a future national monument to the Iraq war look like? This month marks 10 years since that conflict began on March 20, 2003. From a decade on, we can only begin to see how future historians and future generations will interpret the war and what questions they will ask. For now, Americans seem inclined to put it behind them. The contentious politics surrounding it are perhaps still too fresh. But much unfinished business remains in understanding the war and its implications. It hangs awkwardly in the background in discussions of U.S. foreign policy and strategy. What is the role of the United States in the world? How should it use its military? Under what circumstances should it intervene abroad? Iraq casts a long shadow on these questions.

For the moment, few rank the war as a success, and many view it as little more than a disaster. Iraq remains beset by strife between its major ethnosectarian groups: majority Shiite Muslims, minority Sunni Muslims who ruled the country before the U.S. invasion, and ethnic Kurds. The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government appears more aligned with Iran’s interests than with America’s. U.S. hopes to build a strong ally in the Middle East remain, for now, unfulfilled. But history often plays out in unexpected ways. Despite the conflict in Southeast Asia, the U.S. still won the Cold War and, 40 years later, enjoys cordial political and economic relations with Vietnam. Future interpretations of Iraq will depend on what questions historians ask and when they ask them.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who served in Iraq, as well as the families who lost loved ones, will inevitably take representations of the war and any collective conclusions about it somewhat personally. I spent nearly two years in Iraq as a civilian, attempting to make some small contribution to its future and to my own country’s prospects for success. My husband served three tours there with the Army and was wounded twice during some of the most difficult fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. To this day neither of us can bear to watch movies about the Iraq war and find some of the early histories of the conflict painful reading. We remain hypersensitive to what we perceive as inaccuracies and apparent agendas of filmmakers and authors. My father-in-law, a Vietnam vet, could not sit through any films about his war either. Those representations simply did not jibe with how he remembered it and what he thought the conflict was about.

An Iraqi man is detained in the village of Qarah Cham, 2007 (Image courtesy of Jim Gordon/Wikimedia Commons)

As with Vietnam, controversies over the Iraq war will not go quietly. Some questions may remain contentious for the foreseeable future. At least four issues stand out as subjects for ongoing dispute. Many discussions about the Iraq war tend to conflate these related, but nonetheless distinct questions:

First, why did policymakers in the Bush administration decide to invade Iraq? When we put aside conspiracy theories and judgments about the personal traits of the actors involved, we are left to grapple with the real questions of history: What were they thinking and why did they think it? In the 1990s, few people in the national security business doubted Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Critics often forget that many foreign policy experts were surprised by the lack of WMD found in Iraq. The country had possessed and even used them in the past and had been notoriously intransigent with U.N. weapons inspectors. But how did invasion become the administration’s preferred option? Did they believe that Saddam Hussein might really be in cahoots with al-Qaida? Were key figures influenced by the rapidity with which the U.S. had toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan just over a year before? How might their views have been colored by the overwhelming success of the U.S. operation against Iraq in Desert Storm in 1991 and their perception of American military prowess? Some members of the administration had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein for years. To what extent does the war represent a bit of cynical opportunism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks?

The second question concerns how the U.S. planned and conducted the invasion and its management — or lack thereof — of the post-war occupation. The small invasion force experienced little trouble in defeating Iraq’s military but was too modestly sized to occupy and stabilize the country. One possible explanation for the administration’s failure to plan for an occupation is that it never intended to establish one. Perhaps instead policymakers planned to remove Saddam and his cronies, quickly assemble a new Iraqi government, and withdraw U.S. military forces. This small, light, and fast approach had worked (seemingly, at the time) in Afghanistan just 18 months before. Whatever the merits of this theory of regime change, however, we are left to explain the change to an occupation when Ambassador L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad in late April, 2003. Bremer and other members of the administration offer conflicting accounts of this apparent shift. Moreover, if the administration planned for a small American “shock and awe” force to quickly topple Saddam’s regime and depart, how did it intend to secure the WMDs they believed existed?

Other controversies surrounding the handling of the U.S. occupation abound and form a rich vein for future research and discussion. But at least one issue bears particular mention. Most observers presume that the dismissal of the Iraqi Army in the early days of the occupation ranks as a grave error. This move, the argument suggests, antagonized a group of people with military training, which then turned on the U.S. and formed an “insurgency.” But this conclusion, while plausible, lacks the weight of historical evidence. If many or most of the “insurgents” attacking the U.S. and its allied coalition were former Iraqi soldiers angry at their dismissal (versus, say, being driven from power, which is a different cause), data that would validate this proposition is not available or has not been made public. The truth is that the U.S. faced a farrago of different groups during the course of the war, with different agendas, support networks, ethnosectarian compositions and ideologies. We arguably never fully understood the composition, intentions, and purposes behind the multifarious organizations and individuals arrayed against us. Moreover, the Iraqi Army was a fractured institution. Many of the senior officers were Sunnis while Shiites and Kurds made up most of the conscripts. Would those latter two groups, newly liberated from Saddam’s yoke, have tolerated the maintenance of the dictator’s army?

A Stryker vehicle lies on its side after being hit by an IED just south of the Shiek Hamed village in Iraq, 2007 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Army)

The third issue that will occupy historians is gaining a true understanding of the effect of the so-called surge of U.S. troops, which began in early 2007. Many observers have claimed that the infusion of forces and their application of counterinsurgency techniques turned the tide and led to an eventual decline in violence in Iraq. But there exist troubling questions about the causal connection between the surge and the reduction of violence, and multiple explanations might account for why the situation changed. Some Sunni groups took the political decision to stop fighting. Sectarian violence may have largely burned itself out. The political signal of the surge — as opposed to its specific form and content — may have convinced Iraqi leaders to accept at least temporary accommodations with each other and with the U.S. At this point, it remains unclear which combination of factors fully explains what happened on the ground.

The fourth and final question concerns the timing and circumstances of the U.S. military’s departure from Iraq. In 2008, the Bush administration signed an agreement with the Iraqi government that U.S. forces would depart the country at the end of 2011. But throughout that year, analysts and former members of the Bush administration suggested that this agreement had been intended as a temporary expedient and urged the Obama administration to negotiate a new agreement to provide for U.S. forces in Iraq into the future. The Obama administration made some efforts in this direction, but the Iraqi government refused the offer. U.S. military forces departed the country in December of 2011, thus bringing an unambiguous end to the war. Advocates of remaining in Iraq now argue that if at least some U.S. troops had stayed, the U.S. would enjoy an influence that it now lacks.

Future historians will confront a welter of other questions that have yet to be explored. For example, much of the discussion about the war so far concerns actions that America and its allies took and the presumed effect of these actions. But we do not fully understand the other sides of the story. How did the various Iraqi factions view the situation over time, and what steps did they take to advance their own interests? How did they leverage their position with the U.S., and how did they view American actions and intentions? Just how extensively did regional states interfere in Iraq throughout the course of the war? Beyond these “high policy” questions, we have as yet little understanding of how ordinary Iraqis experienced the war and the ways our decisions affected those millions of people.

Iraqi Special Weapons and Tactics team members on patrol in western Ninewah, Iraq, 2008 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Navy)

These and other unresolved questions will prevent any real consensus from emerging over the meaning of the Iraq war anytime soon. Consensus, in fact, may be too much to hope for, since many of the chief controversies of the Vietnam War persist after more than 40 years. Like that conflict, Iraq may continue to lurk in the background of our thoughts about future military interventions and the uses of American power.

This raises the question why, despite ongoing disagreement about the meaning of Vietnam, Americans have come to so fully embrace the memorial. Perhaps the ultimate genius of its design is that it does not require everyone to agree about the war. A memorial may not provide closure or answer any questions, but it can offer us a way to honor those who suffered and sacrificed. That may be the most important thing we can do. A visitor seeing her own reflection mingled with the names on the black granite connects her to the human beings who bore the cost of the conflict, whatever she thinks of how and why it occurred, or the strategic payoff to the country.

In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of the country’s citizens were killed, wounded or displaced. Over 4,000 American souls were lost, and tens of thousands returned without limbs, sight or hearing, or with seared skin, splintered bones, and shattered psyches. They still walk among us and bear witness to the decisions political leaders made a decade ago. It is difficult to say today whether their sacrifice was worth the benefit to the country.

Judgments on this will shift with the passage of time and events. But their names and their lives provide a reflection of our nation and of its purpose in the world. May any future monument to the Iraq war allow us to see those who were lost and maimed, honor them, and in the process, better see ourselves.

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman.

Recent Posts