peaking from the Oval Office last Tuesday evening to mark what he called, with more hope than precision, “the end of our combat mission in Iraq,” President Obama had occasion to mention the previous occupant. “This afternoon,” he said,

I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.

That was kind—and not untrue, as far as it went: there is no reason to doubt that the personal motivations of the second President Bush in launching the invasion and occupation of Iraq included the fine sentiments that his successor now attributes to him, even if these were mixed with others less fine, such as a desire to avenge his father and outdo him in a single bold stroke of Oedipal filial piety. But it was also a reminder, gentle but pointed, that the war was a war of Bush’s choice—a choice that has left Obama with no good choices, only the responsibility of withdrawing in a way that mitigates, or at least does not needlessly extend, the harm this war has done to Iraq and its people and to American interests, American honor, and American power.

The President devoted nearly a quarter of his speech to praise for the service and devotion of the troops. All of us, he said, are “awed by their sacrifice, and by the sacrifices of their families.” That is so, and the curious quality of the awe that many of us feel—fervent, awkward, tinged with guilt—has much to do with the disquieting features of the military adventure in which those sacrifices were made, two in particular. One is the lack of sacrifice that has been asked of the rest of us, especially the most comfortable. “We have spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas,” Obama noted. As it happens, a trillion dollars is roughly the sum that the Bush tax cuts have bestowed on the richest five per cent of us. And no one has been drafted: for the first time in a century, America is fighting a long war—indeed, two long wars, each longer than our participation in both World Wars put together—without conscription.

The other feature is the bitterness of the war’s fruits. The President touched on only a few of the most obvious: the thousands of American soldiers killed; the tens of thousands injured, many suffering from “the signature wounds of today’s wars, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury”; the impact on our relations abroad (“strained”) and our unity at home (“tested”); that unfunded trillion-dollar price tag, which, as he rightly said, has helped bring on our present economic and fiscal distress. But as Commander-in-Chief, with ultimate responsibility for the morale of the men and women of the armed forces, Obama can hardly be expected to tell the troops that, in the broadest accounting, their sacrifices in Iraq may have been in vain. Even so, he surely understands that the damage has been immense.

The casualties are many, and of many kinds: human and material, of course, but also strategic and moral. The United States came out of the Cold War and into the new century cloaked in an aura of mostly beneficent omnipotence, strengthened by the first President Bush’s quickly decisive (and truly multilateral) police action in Kuwait. If the aura was a myth, it was a useful myth: it served as a means of persuasion and a deterrent to mischief. It was a kind of hard soft power—a velvet fist in an iron glove. (Its efficacy, a little like a nuclear deterrent’s, was a function of potential, not actual, use.) That and more was squandered in Iraq. The principal rationales for the invasion—the assertions that led many reluctant liberals to sanction it—turned out to be false. There were no Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” a catchphrase that misleadingly equated a cannister of poison gas with a nuclear bomb; there was no connection between the Iraqi regime and the atrocity of September 11, 2001. The warmakers of the Bush Administration probably believed that these things were true, or true enough. They were like cops framing a suspect they feel sure is guilty; “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” as the famous Downing Street memo put it. Their underlying motive was the neoconservative dream of transforming the Middle East. In that they succeeded, but not the way they expected.

The same ideological arrogance and willful ignorance that drove the invasion informed the crucial early months of the occupation. When the defeated Army was peremptorily disbanded, many of its members—unemployed, armed, and angry—became foot soldiers in the insurgency and the sectarian civil war that followed. In Baghdad’s Green Zone, fortified against the looted, ruined city around it, young Republicans played at making Iraq a laboratory for the pet notions of conservative think tanks as the country descended into chaos. Incompetence was compounded by cruelty: the systematic use of torture, symbolized by Abu Ghraib, has ended, but it has left a stain on America’s reputation which General David Petraeus recently called “nonbiodegradable.” And the main strategic beneficiary of all this has been Iran. Instead of Iraq’s imaginary quest for the bomb, we now face Iran’s real one.

To dismiss Saddam Hussein as a “bad guy,” as some of the war’s opponents acquired a habit of doing, was to trivialize the sadistic evil of his regime. Considered in isolation, his removal was a boon. But more than a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed. More than four million have been forced from their homes or have fled the country as refugees. A generation of Iraqi children have been deeply traumatized. Daily violence, though much lower than it was at the height of the war, remains at a level that almost any other country would consider a crisis. No one can say whether the suffering of the Iraqi people would have been greater or lesser if Washington had not made its choice for war. But their suffering has been horrific.

America’s “combat mission” in Iraq may be over, but the combat is not. Neither is the mission, which now amounts to little more than holding on until the end of next year, when, by agreement with the Iraqi government, such as it is, the last of the remaining fifty thousand American troops will be gone. The President, so far, is keeping his promise to extract us from this war. And he is keeping his promise to prosecute another war more vigorously—the one that might have been over by now if his predecessor had not robbed it of resources and attention. The prospects of that war are unknowable, but there is a sense of foreboding. Obama must feel a little like the narrator of “Moby-Dick,” who, at the beginning of the story, describes what is to come as

part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”