I miss the Iraq War.

I don’t have much access to strategic U.S. documentation about troop and supply movement in the Middle East. I couldn’t lay down a super cool logistic about when it started becoming apparent that things were slowing down over there outside of some jumbled, projected dates I heard on the news. It’s O.K. I don’t see any popular historians jumping at the opportunity to be first to strategically analyze the Iraq War.

With the Iraq War, we can pretty much talk about one of two things: Was it a valid military operation or wasn’t it? I miss endlessly talking about that. And I could be sitting now, drinking hot cocoa and trying to squeeze the last little bit of controversy out of that decade of my life. If only Bin Laden were still around.

Do you remember? Oh, it was so important to everyone. Honestly, who’s had as much consistent fun whining about something? It divided the country straight down the middle for a decade. Whenever there was nothing else to talk about, there was the war. Like, was it even a war?

More than anything I miss the public energy — when people were actually looking in the general direction of where 70 percent of the government’s money goes — and has increasingly been going — for the last decade. Now, something about overwhelming, destabilizing debt is what people are talking about. Good thing the government and media are talking about all of the other way crazier budget imbalances, and that there’s no correlation between military spending and government spending. Ignoring our activity overseas makes me feel like America is attending more to its domestic issues. That makes me feel nice.

However, the government can spend its secret government money on what it wants when it’s in places I just don’t care about. We do not need reasons anymore, and thank goodness they’ve given up trying to manufacture them; especially now that Osama is dead, that Muslim Voldemort whose swift death just as quickly killed any meaningful emotional involvement people had over there. But that was getting really old, even though one of my favorite words, “terrorist,” became a cliché in circles of most self-aware mammals as a result.

But when the cameras face inwardly, of course we need to know exactly what’s going on. Who cares if civilians are being killed by soldiers who kill themselves as much as bombs and bored farmers with AK-47s do? We have too much to worry about. Like what’s being done with the little money not being used by the Pentagon to secure commodities in less stable countries.

The money (and life) that is being used up by the Pentagon, well, it’s not important anymore. Has Iraq or Afghanistan come up once in a political election of late? There is no controversy anymore. And if there is, it isn’t up to us to think about, guys. The people who are squabbling theatrically over how much they’re going to put government spending in check have got this covered. They probably know something that we don’t — like about how “dependence on foreign oil” wasn’t actually a bad thing. Obviously fossil fuel security is worth running our entire economy into the ground; because people advocating meaningful research into alternatives don’t have the pre-existing moneyed interests to be properly heard. Obama himself has had many such jokes at our expense.

Perhaps fascism is too strong a word to describe this unforgivable disconnect with reality. Government spending has caused a debt crisis, but it’s done so funding wars and paying off the megalomaniacal financial sector. To point the finger at education and public services is nothing short of the purest evil. But there are pieces of this political philosophy that have undeniably earned their validity; when was the last time you heard the news suggest funding anything with cuts to military spending? You haven’t.

I miss the Iraq War because, compared to now, it was a care-free conversation about the injustice of the most stabilizing country in the world arbitrarily adopting a primitive, violent foreign policy. We wrote the book on multilateral cooperation and peace through economic growth, won the heart of the world, and then abandoned all of it for something that is financially destroying us in a very real way. And conservatives would hold public school teachers accountable.

— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary studies. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.