It was a stock answer, and it came in many variations:
“I fight so my child won’t have to.”
It was a popular saying among soldiers during the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts, especially the ones you saw on TV. It’s a soundbite-friendly philosophy that communicates a sadness for having been at war but a hopefulness in what that war could accomplish. It lent meaning to the drudgery of day-to-day soldiering, and gave people at home (not exactly the homefront by any means, but home, even if upon returning to it it was almost unrecognizable) an insight into the motivations of those who would volunteer to serve, fight, and even die in the name of the United States.
For some in the military, that saying couldn’t have been further from the state of things. Service members who were children during the 9/11 attacks have served on the front lines. I served in a National Guard unit with a father and son—such examples of multigenerational service during this period of extended conflict can be found among the various branches of the armed forces.
While we can spin such stories into narratives of honor and family values, they are also a portent of a terrible new truth. We now live in a culture where perpetual warfare with nebulous objectives against an abstract enemy is the norm. We have a whole generation of young people who understand that the nation is at war, has been at war, and will be at war for the foreseeable future, but don’t understand what that really means—or should mean—in the context of a civil, democratic society. This is war without sacrifice, war by choice, war without end.
The enemy is, indeed, abstract. I’m not even sure what to call the “enemy”. The names and faces kept changing in Iraq and Afghanistan—in fact, former enemies became allies with a few bags of cash and some weapons shipments. With a new conflict—which, really, is the same conflict—should come a new enemy. It’s not clear what to call them. Sometimes it’s ISIS, sometimes it’s IS, sometimes it’s ISIL. Some of them were Al Qaeda; some of them were Syrian or Libyan rebels. All of them are funded and armed—albeit indirectly—by the US and her allies.
In fact, it’s so easy to confuse who the enemy is, our elected officials can’t even tell them apart. Senator John McCain went on TV to score political points against presumptive presidential candidate Rand Paul—by criticizing him for not meeting with ISIS, for not being in touch with them.
Perhaps McCain meant to say “Syrian rebels” instead of ISIS. The truth is, it’s often hard to tell the groups apart. Today’s moderate is tomorrow’s jihadist—now equipped with American-made arms.
It’s an established fact that McCain met with terrorists—while trying to drum up support for funding and weapons shipments. He calls them “moderates”, not “terrorists”, so I guess that makes it okay when our guns and money help them take over large swaths of Iraq and start beheading journalists or minorities, including other Muslims and ancient Christian communities.
They’re moderates, until they’re the enemy. Then we need to find more moderates to fight that enemy. And so on. It’s a lesson we never learned in the 20th century. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to learn it in the 21st.
Don’t get me wrong. ISIS—or whatever you want to call them—are bad guys. Their conduct is shocking, and their takeover of sovereign soil in a number of countries is disturbing. Their beheading videos grab our violence-immune attention. And why not? Executing someone—especially in such gruesome manner—is a barbaric, horrific, and dehumanizing act. The west is outraged by it—and rightly so. But are beheadings enough to push a nation to war? Or does the shock value of the act simply play into our leaders’ slow but steady push toward another open-ended conflict?
If ISIS’s conduct constitutes a moral outrage, why not apply the same metric to other countries? Why not look at Saudi Arabia’s funding of Wahhabist schools? Or ask questions when the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, our supposed ally? Who has chopped off more heads—ISIS, or the Saudis? Who is responsible for and behind the violence in the region?
These questions have, indirectly, been put to our hawk leaders, only to result in obfuscation. General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Senator Lindsey Graham that a number of regional US-Arab allies directly fund ISIS. Rather than address this issue—it would slow down his march to war, war, and more war—Senator Graham claimed they had recognized the “folly” of their ways, a claim completely unsubstantiated, and made a falsehood by US policy to arm additional “moderates” in the region.
Both Bush and Obama pronounced victory—in one form or another—in Iraq. What we left behind was a power vacuum. When I served in Kuwait in early 2012, I saw rows and rows of vehicles that had either returned from the front lines or arrived too late in-theater to ever see action. MRAPs, Humvees, and other vehicles stood silent and dark behind base walls in vast lots of whirling sand. We produced so much, and projected so much power—but to what end?
I’m just glad those vehicles weren’t among the American-made Humvees ridden into Iraq by ISIS. That’s another fact the pro-war crowd likes to overlook.
Another war is upon us, and in this coming conflict, the seeds are sown for future destabilization and war. Americans seem content to launch war after war against “moral outrage”, but don’t stop to consider that the monsters we fight may be so horrible precisely because we made them that way.
Looking back on all the times my brothers and sisters in uniform said “I fight so my child won’t have to,” or any of its variations, I can’t help but feel a pang of despair.
We thought it would be over, eventually. Our government—in its perpetual funding and arming of our future enemies—has other ideas.
