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Twenty years after the war in Iraq began, we have learned nothing

U.S. Army 3rd Division 3-7 Major Frank McClary (L) from Andrews, South Carolina, Cpt. Pat Sullivan (C) from Dumfries, Virginia and Captain John Whyte from Billerica, Mass. scout out the Iraqi side of the demilitarized zone March 19, 2003 from a position inside the Kuwaiti side of the DMZ in Northern Kuwait.  (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)
U.S. Army 3rd Division 3-7 Major Frank McClary (L) from Andrews, South Carolina, Cpt. Pat Sullivan (C) from Dumfries, Virginia and Captain John Whyte from Billerica, Mass. scout out the Iraqi side of the demilitarized zone March 19, 2003 from a position inside the Kuwaiti side of the DMZ in Northern Kuwait. (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

In May 2022, former President George W. Bush briefly made headlines with a Freudian slip during a speech delivered at his presidential center in Dallas: It was the “decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” Bush quickly corrected himself, clarifying that he meant to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Attempting to joke his way out of the gaffe, he added, “Iraq, too, anyway,” under his breath, prompting laughter from the audience.

Like many post-9/11 veterans, I was not laughing. But the verbal slip was telling and I thought of it when news broke last week that the U.S. Senate would be taking up a bill ending the Iraq War authorizations passed in 2002, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the coalition’s invasion .

"It's just representatives of the American people trying to do the right thing at the right time," said Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), one of the bill’s cosponsors, apparently without irony, as though 12 years after the official end of the occupation constituted the perfect moment for this particular piece of legislative housekeeping.

Self-congratulating senators aside, the act is largely symbolic. The Iraq authorizations have no bearing on any ongoing military U.S. military operations. This includes the nearly 2,500 U.S. forces still active in Iraq that NPR found took part in nearly three dozen raids with Iraqi counterterrorism forces last year alone — that’s 12 years and two administrations after President Obama announced the end of combat operations in that country.

Pointedly, the Senate bill does not repeal the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) passed in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That piece of legislation, meant to allow the Bush administration to go after Al Qaeda, has now been used by three subsequent administrations to justify operations in over 20 countries , against terrorist organizations that did not exist at the time of its passage, and even to assassinate a high-ranking member of a foreign military — all without having to go to through the hassle of seeking Congress’ blessing.

The repeal of the Iraq War authorizations represents a bipartisan consensus that our invasion of that country two decades ago was indeed a misadventure and shows that there is at least some appetite in Congress for that body to reassert its war powers. An optimist might hope that this represents a first step, and that the other legal pillars that have propped up decades of disastrous foreign policy decisions, including the 2001 AUMF, will begin to fall.

Removing the statutory underpinnings of the ill-conceived wars that have defined the beginning of this century is necessary, but it does nothing to address the structural and cultural issues that brought us those wars to begin with.

A picture released by U.S. Army March 16, 2006 shows U.S. helicopters fly from its military base during during an assault Operation Swarmer targeting insurgent strongholds north of Baghdad. (Sgt. First Class Antony Jose/U.S. Army via Getty Images)
A picture released by U.S. Army March 16, 2006 shows U.S. helicopters fly from its military base during during an assault Operation Swarmer targeting insurgent strongholds north of Baghdad. (Sgt. First Class Antony Jose/U.S. Army via Getty Images)

The costs of the Global War on Terrorism , that amorphous, dystopian umbrella-term under which the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan fall, along with countless smaller operations, in human, financial and moral terms are prodigious. And yet, the average American is largely insulated from these impacts.

It has fallen to the vanishingly small fragment of the population that serves in the military and their families to carry the weight of their fellow citizens’ indifference, and they have paid dearly. In addition to combat deaths and debilitating wounds, post- 9/11 veterans face a suicide rate as much as 2.5 times higher than the general population, and a litany of health issues from exposure to airborne toxins from burn pits at forward operating bases across the Middle East and Central Asia.

Even the financial cost of our wars is obscured by the sheer size of the federal budget. The Costs of War Project at Brown University puts the total cost of these operations from 2001 through 2022 at $8 trillion, but there is a tremendous lack of transparency about what precisely that money has paid for. Perhaps if there were a W2 attachment that showed how much of each of your income tax dollars were being used to fund drone strikes on Yemeni wedding parties these figures would be more difficult to ignore. But the opacity redounds to the favor of the general uninterest in the topic.

Opposition to military interventions appears to be one of the few areas where MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats find common ground, but I am deeply skeptical of how committed either side of the political spectrum is to this principle. The fawning reaction by his followers to President Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani is instructive: Principles are malleable when it’s one’s own team making reckless decisions.

Absent some kind of cultural revolution in how average citizens relate to our military and to policymaking, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

I do not pretend to have a realistic policy prescription to alleviate the structural forces that so easily birth ill-conceived wars. The retired New York Congressman and Korean War Veteran, Charlie Rangel, regularly called for reinstating the draft and imposing a war tax to ensure that the burden of armed conflict would be shared more equitably across society, a proposal both aspirational in its egalitarian stance and legislatively infeasible.

I believe that some form of a draft or compulsory national service would be a good for the civic health of the country, but our political culture today is one of unbridled individualism: Kennedy-ian exhortations of self-sacrifice for the betterment of the republic are as foreign to modern campaigns as debates on the gold standard . Were a bill calling for conscription to come to the floor of Congress, I suspect those same MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats would again find common cause if for no other reason than to preempt the attack ads which could so easily write themselves. No one wants to run on platform of potentially legislating their voters’ children into combat.

As members of the Senate take victory laps for reasserting Congress’ war powers by removing these outdated and superficial authorizations, I find myself in mourning.

Absent some kind of cultural revolution in how average citizens relate to our military and to policymaking, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. When I survey the story of physical and spiritual wreckage told by the raw statistics of the Iraq War, and stack it next to the lackadaisical and feeble response of our leaders, I am sure that we have learned nothing of substance. I grieve for the future generations of American service members who will pay for it.

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Andrew Carleen Cognoscenti contributor
Andrew Carleen is a former public affairs officer in the U.S. Navy who lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.

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