When did the discussion end?

I got into an argument about Iraq with one of my professors over the summer. I told her that the U.S. has effectively lost that war. She said, "Everyone already knows that, why are you still talking about this?" I was taken aback. I didn't think everyone already knew that.

A couple weeks later, I met up with a journalist I know and recounted the story, hoping for a little validation. To my consternation, she told me the same thing. "Everyone knows the U.S. lost. Why are you still talking about this?"

Of course, the U.S. is still in Iraq — and may end up being there for a long time — but as far as their overall objectives go, the war has been a failure. I was puzzled. How did I not know what was common knowledge? I decided to test it.

I designed a short survey asking: Has the U.S. won the war in Iraq? I sent it around to a number of my co-students and a few professors at NYU. I also sent it to my sister in Florida so she could give it to her students in her eighth grade social studies class. Now, this is an advanced class in a public school. The kids are a mix of black, white, Asian and Latino — boys and girls.

The NYU respondents were in agreement: The U.S. has not won. They had a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say about why, but they were clear that the U.S. was not victorious.

Then I got the results from Florida. Of the 28 responses, 10 said the U.S. had not won. But eight of the students said the U.S. had won. Another 10 were not sure. So, 18 out of 27 didn't really think the U.S. lost. Not quite what my professor and journalist acquaintance were arguing.

I'll be the first to admit the limits of the survey, but I think it revealed something: The politicians and the major media are no longer saying much about Iraq. This is in sharp contrast to the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. Then you couldn't shut them up about imaginary WMDs, a smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud and all the other hype. Now ... silence.

It doesn't surprise me that these students' assessments were all over the map. They've been systematically lied to by the most powerful people in the world — what are they supposed to think? It makes a lot more sense than smugly saying, "Everyone knows we didn't win." What rankled me about such statements was a view, sitting just below the surface, that it really doesn't matter. We tried, we failed, let's move on. Now we're talking about Afghanistan. Now we're talking about health care. To me, the U.S. government is, in fact, saying, "Stop talking about this."

What are we supposed to stop talking about? Are we supposed to stop talking about Bush's war? Estimates say that more than a million Iraqis are dead. More than 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed. Are we supposed to stop talking about the shattering of a nation's infrastructure and its secular society? Or the renewed legitimation of torture?

The U.S. went into Iraq and did all this. And they lost, and they lost big. In the process they showed the world just what a new American century would be — what the "birth pains" of a new Middle East would feel like. That strikes me as a big deal. I don't think "everyone knows this" and I don't think it is something to stop talking about. On the contrary, it is something worth talking about for a long time to come ... to keep it from ever happening again.