I am not the first member of my family to spend time in the Gulf.
In 1991, when I was in seventh grade, my mom’s Army Reserve Unit, the 50th General Hospital, was activated for the first time since the Normandy landing. She was deployed to Saudi Arabia as a part of Operation Desert Shield to provide medical care in support of what would become the first of two US military invasions of Iraq.
Military service is a tradition in my family. My father was a Warrant Officer in the Army and this was his route to the PNW. My brother was in the Army. My uncle was an Airmen, my step-father was drafted into the Army and wounded in the Vietnam War. I split the difference between my uncle and my mother and I enlisted in the US Air Force Reserves after high school. It felt like what I was supposed to do and I figured it would help pay for college. I enjoyed my time in the military. It gave me my first taste of travel—much of it in Texas.
But by mid-2002 the terrain changed. I publicly opposed the impending war in Iraq and my commentary about the war made for awkward situations during the waning days of my enlistment. I remember reading Norman Soloman’s Target Iraq and trying to explain the ways public opinion was being shaped in support of the war. I remember reading a PDF copy of Chomsky’s What Uncle Sam Really Wants and giving people highlighted copies of excerpts of the text. In 2003, I decided not to reenlist. I had become more a “college kid” than an “Airman”—those two aspects of my life having been at tension for years.
As the war went on, I remember being enraged listening to pols & pundits say “no one knew…” or “who could have foreseen…” as body counts soared and the nation soured on the war. It’s odd how clear those memories from twenty years ago are in my head because it seems like we’ve collectively forgotten about the Iraq War.
The Iraq invasion was based on false premises from the jump. The war was catastrophic, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, wasting an estimated 2.4 trillion USD ($2,400,000,000,000) dollars of taxpayer money, and destabilizing much of the region. The war undermined American legitimacy in the region. It created a power vacuum that allowed extremist groups like ISIS to rise and allowed Iran to make the new government in Iraq another of its client states. The war inspired the largest protests in human history, damaging America's reputation and credibility with its allies.
The Iraq invasion was a disastrous decision, a bipartisan blunder that passed 77-23 in the US Senate. All but the Ron Paul brand of Republicans were champions of the war and nearly 60% of Congressional Democrats supported it. My own Senator Maria Cantwell voted for it; 2016 Democratic Nominee, Hillary Clinton voted for it; Joe Biden voted for it, calling it “not a rush to war but a march to peace and stability.” But no one in the US political establishment ever faced any consequences for this failure. The cost was paid by the people of Iraq and the 7,000 US servicemembers and military contractors who died in the conflict.
For my older students, the invasion is like Watergate is for people my age: a formative event with lasting repercussions that happened before I was born, like a memory belonging to someone else.
The Iraq War was the moment I learned America is allergic to holding people in power accountable. We saw this again during the 2008 crisis, poor Covid pandemic management, and are seeing it again with the current bank liquidity crisis. This allergy is arguably the defining characteristic of America’s political culture.