It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time. I’m not sure which night it was—March 19th or 20th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.
I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003. I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces. The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on. The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.
The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety. I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it. The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome. The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.
And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold. One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off. Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.
The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program. I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner.
Part of me wanted to believe that last part. But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq. I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences. Seems quaint looking back.
I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution. The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it. Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support. Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.
The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years. We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal. It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on.
But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention. Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones. Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.
There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders. The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency). The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever. Iraq ranks low on many human development indices. (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)
The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students. There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes. Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time. Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.). Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.
© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar
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