The war in Iraq, which began a year ago this week, has been a massive, deadly failure, a bloody disaster. The sole positive outcome of the ongoing war has been the capture and imprisonment of Saddam Hussein, although he is, after all, a mere mortal whose regime was far shakier than we were initially led to believe and who might well have been brought down internally without the bloodshed and destruction that the war has entailed. The price paid for that “success” has been horrendous: the profound destabilization of the country’s political and social life; the destruction of the country’s infrastructure (and its profitable reconstruction by patrons of the Republican party); the slaughter of ten thousand or so Iraqi civilians and uncounted numbers (literally) of Iraqi military personnel; and the chaotic aftermath, which has more than doubled the number of American troops killed and wounded; and finally, the expenditure of scores of billions of dollars that could have been used for other domestic and international purposes. It has been, at best, a nasty business, from its dishonest onset to the present.

To suggest that the people of Iraq now live in freedom is a travesty of this term. They may someday be free to vote on the members of their government, protected erratically by the so-called coalition forces. That this will bring peace and quiet and freedom to Iraq, in the absence of supporting democratic institutions, seems quite unlikely. They Iraqis are a divided people who have always relied on a strong, and sometimes brutal, central governing authority to keep the warring forces in check. It will take a long, long time for this war to pay off in a free Iraq.

In the indolence and safety of our consumerist lives, we forget (and only a few of us have ever known) the horrors of war, its brutality, inhumanity and cruelty, its objectification of human life. In these times, we hire professional soldiers to do our war making for us, thus relieving most of us from any personal connection to its consequences. War becomes a bloodless abstraction. We are not allowed to witness the arrival home of the caskets of the dead, and most of us will never encounter a crippled veteran of this senseless war. We’re not even asked to make sacrifices, but instead to go our mindless way, getting and spending and wasting our energies on diversions such as exposed breasts, gay marriage, and the march to the final four.

And now our president has concluded that calling himself a “War President” will get himself re-elected, even in the face of the Iraqi adventure’s manifest failure, the weakness and clear unfairness of his domestic program, and his embarrassing machinations to stay away from actual combat as a young man.. And his strategy just may work. For war is a powerful force. In his stunning book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, the war correspondent Chris Hedges writes:

War dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it … War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

Whether this strategy will work in George W. Bush’s case, however, is still an unknown, possible but not certain. Increasing numbers of potential voters seem to be coming to understand that the American people were manipulated into supporting this war, manipulated through lies and distortions. Apparently there are no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and it has become increasingly clear that Saddam’s Iraq was not in league with Al Qaeda. Instead, the chaos of the war itself has been like a magnet attracting terrorists from the Arab world into Iraq.

It is fitting that the war has become a political issue. That is the only way we can sort it out and hold its perpetrators accountable. As the British commentator Gary Younge has written in The Guardian:

Sadly the inquiries to be launched in Britain and the US have been limited to intelligence. The premise for this war was not security but politics—it’s the politicians who should be in the dock.

The fact that they will not be reflects badly, not just on the governments concerned but on all of us. If a country can be led to war on false pretexts and there are no substantive consequences as a result, there is something seriously wrong with both politicians and the political culture that produces them. In a democracy worthy of the name, if the machinery of government cannot call those responsible to account, civil society and the ballot box must.

This war is not just killing Iraqi civilians, resistance fighters and coalition soldiers. It’s murdering any pretense that we live in countries that value, let alone practice, the principle of democratic accountability. It calls into question our ability to rein in political excess and to root out state-sponsored incompetence.

So that’s what it comes down to in this anniversary week of the Iraq War: It’s up to us to hold our leaders accountable. If we don’t, they’ll lie to us again and again with impunity. And why shouldn’t they? It seems to work with an unengaged and largely clueless population.