I visited The Moving Wall this weekend. The Moving Wall is a half-size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that travels around the country so those who can not make it to Washington D.C. can experience the power, and hopefully the healing, of the memorial. As I was reflecting upon the wall, contemplating all the names, the sacrifice, the suffering, the bravery, and the controversy surrounding the war, I began to wonder what sort of memorial we will have for the veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The entire country was unified and clear in purpose for Operation Enduring Freedom, which is the military’s operational name for the invasion of Afghanistan. We knew why we were there and we knew what the goal was: to overthrow the Taliban and to destroy Al-Qaeda. It is a just war. And a just war deserves a memorial that befits the moral certitude of that war.

What the Afghanistan War memorial will look like is still shrouded in the future, but I imagine it will evoke a strong sense of pride and unity in our nation and in our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters who fought there. No one will ever question whether their sacrifices were in vain.

What the Iraq War memorial will look like is being shaped right now by the actions we as a nation take over the next couple years.

Unlike the previous war, the Iraq war was morally suspect from the start and the evidence to justify it circumstantial at best. We were attacking a country that had not attacked us. But President Bush had shown such strength and certitude after 9/11 and during the morally just Afghanistan war, he had earned our benefit of the doubt. There were nuclear weapons to find and support to Al-Qaeda to disrupt. We would be greeted as liberators and we would pay for the whole war with Iraqi oil proceeds that would no longer be sanctioned. We rallied around President Bush’s battle cry and largely supported the invasion.

The American military invaded and destroyed Saddam’s military and security infrastructure and took over Iraq, freeing the people from a truly horrible tyrant. The American military did a brilliant job. They then turned control over to President Bush’s hand-picked civilian leadership in the Coalition Provisional Authority. And that’s where it all went to hell. Why? Because President Bush never had a plan for the aftermath.

It was clear early on that the CPA had no idea what it was doing. Their time in power produced an inexcusable litany of massive bureaucratic incompetence: dismantling the Iraqi army, disbanding the Iraqi police force, not allowing former Baathists to work in the new government, failure to restore utilities destroyed in the war in a timely manner, behaving in manners that were patently offensive to the local culture, bringing in American contractors to do work that Iraqis could, would, and wanted to be hired to do, and the list goes on and on.

Why was the CPA so incompetent? Two reasons- they had no post-invasion plan to implement and the CPA was staffed not based on experience or skill, but on loyalty to President Bush. This is precisely how President Bush has staffs his own administration.

If Iraq is to be lost, it will be lost because President Bush and his caravan of ideologues have shown themselves not only to be inept in running our government but tragically destructive in trying to run Iraq’s. It’s as if we dug a hole, threw the Iraqi people into it, and then asked them why they’re in a hole. There’s no doubt the current Iraqi government is not doing much to help itself but we did a damn good job of hobbling it before it even got started.

We may have gone in for the wrong reasons but we must stay for the right ones. The Bush administration’s cronyism and sheer incompetence led us to this tragic point but that is not as important as where we go from here.

If we leave Iraq in the hole we dug for them, we will shame ourselves. If we pull out with the same rashness and lack of planning that we went in with, Iraq may not survive as a country. The chaos that would ensue will be our legacy in the region. Nobody will care that we toppled Saddam. All they will remember is how we abandoned the very people we claimed to liberate. Whatever moral high ground we once had will have been lost. America will be left with a somber and caustic national memory of what we had done to Iraq. Why would any nation ever trust us after that?

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was designed to not reflect a position on a war that was so divisive to our nation and our military. It is a meditation on the people who wore the uniform, rather than on why they were there and what they did. If we abandon Iraq, there will be a push to have another war memorial designed with the same idea in mind.

Our military in Iraq has done everything it has been asked to do and done it supremely well. Though the fight for peace in Iraq may ultimately end up being lost, it won’t be because our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. The battles they fought and the war they waged deserves recognition for what it was- a complete and just victory. They overthrew a bloody tyrant and freed an oppressed nation. Our Iraq war veterans deserve a memorial that reflects that.