War. What is it Good For?

Absolutely nothing much

Every few years or so and sometimes more often, people reflect on how their beliefs have shifted over time. As our lives unfold, the way we think about things does too, so it’s natural to periodically take stock of these transformations.

Aside from that trifling bit about rejecting political party systems, the issue on which my views have changed the most is war and the general exercise of military force. I wouldn’t say that I favored war in the past—no one would say that, at least out loud—but I certainly supported it when I thought it was appropriate.

And I still do. I haven’t turned pacifist. But, the threshold for me to consider armed conflict between nations justified has risen substantially, while my trust in the leaders who make the case for war has plummeted.

My tolerance for protracted fighting has also become quite limited. Even in the case of so-called “just wars,” it should be incumbent on the international community to work toward reaching a lasting peace between the warring countries as quickly as possible.

Lastly, I’ve become particularly concerned about proliferations of military conflicts. Wars have a tendency to spread. Regional fights get subsumed by larger conflicts and merge, especially when global powers are orchestrating events behind the scenes.

So, the announcement that Israel effectively launched a second war early Friday morning against Iran, to go along with the one that it is already fighting against Hamas in Gaza, was, to say the least, disturbing. In an effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, Israel initiated “Operation Rising Lion,” featuring air raids on Iranian nuclear and military sites that hit more than 200 targets, killing numerous top military leaders and nuclear scientists.

Iran retaliated with “suicide drones” and missile attacks against Israel, which were accompanied by companion strikes from the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Israel and Iran have been trading volleys of missiles ever since, along with a series of escalating threats.

Israel’s attacks against Iran came after the campaign it launched in September against the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon. Those strikes followed Israel's invasion of Gaza at the end of October 2023, which was a response to Hamas’ murder of more than 1,200 people at a music festival in southern Israel earlier that month. Hezbollah has links to Hamas, and, at the time, Israel characterized its conflict with Hezbollah as a new theater in the Gaza war. Israel entered into a ceasefire with Hezbollah at the end of November.

Israel’s multi-front engagement joins the more-than-three-years-old Russia-Ukraine war among the list of active conflicts involving major players in Eurasia. Another has, so far, been narrowly avoided as, less than two months ago, India and Pakistan were on the verge of full-scale war.

When I was younger, I would have thought that it was cool that all this military action was going on. A lot of kids from my generation would have had the same reaction.

You see, in the eighties, we were socialized to see war as glamorous. It was sold to us. We watched the cartoon G.I. Joe^TM after school and bought the action figures and assault vehicles. In theaters, we saw Red Dawn (1984), Top Gun (1986), Iron Eagle (1986) and other films that were basically military recruitment videos. We wore camouflage clothing because we thought it was cool. We played video games that offered a neverending assortment of enemy forces to bomb, shoot, stab and otherwise kill. In P.E. class and on the playground, we played games with names like “War Ball” and “Bomb.” And, in the neighborhood, we played “Army” or “War,” which involved running all over the block and pointing plastic guns or sticks at each other, while making machine gun noises.

Naturally, we endorsed U.S. military ventures without question. In 1983, as a nine-year-old, I had no idea how to find the Caribbean nation of Grenada on a map or even how to spell it, but I knew the U.S. was justified in invading it. Because we were America. We fought the bad guys.

So, in 1986, when President Reagan told us that we needed to bomb Libya to defend our freedom, we supported the move robustly. It was our patriotic duty.

Ditto for the revelation that his administration sold arms to Iran and diverted the funds to a group of Nicaraguan resistance fighters called the Contras. We learned that the Contras were battling their country’s government, which was run by a group called the Sandinistas, who were communist.

That was all we needed to know. We knew communists were bad because the Soviet Union was communist, and the Soviets were America’s great enemy. So that made the Contras like U.S. forces by extension or something.

And so, even as we grew up, our attitudes toward military interventions were consistently supportive. If Uncle Sam said this or that incursion was necessary to protect our national security, then that was all that needed to be said on the subject.

I did get more cynical about the use of the military in the late 1990s. I saw the movie Wag the Dog (1997), in which a fictitious American president stages a war in order to distract the public from a sex scandal involving a young girl, which, in a case of life imitating art, was released just weeks prior to the revelation of President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Six months after the news broke, Clinton reinforced the parallels by launching 75 missiles at assorted terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan on the same day Lewinsky testified before a grand jury.

But, then September 11 happened, and I reverted to reflexively supporting U.S. military maneuvers again. We had to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban government because they had provided support for Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And we had to invade Iraq—again—because our government told us that the Iraqis had chemical and biological “weapons of mass destruction” (and they were working on building nukes), even though Iraq’s WMD manufacturing capabilities were—correctly—believed to be destroyed after the first Gulf War ended in 1991.

Almost everyone initially backed the strike against Afghanistan after 9/11, including more than 90% of Americans, according to Gallup. But, though we were able to topple the Taliban within two months and establish a new government, eventually holding democratic elections, the regime change we orchestrated didn’t last. In August 2021, the U.S. finally withdrew in disgrace, with the Taliban back in charge.

The attack on Iraq, however, was much more polarizing from the start. Some people didn’t believe that Iraq had WMDs. Others thought that Iraq did have them, but that it wasn’t worth going to war over because they didn’t have any weapons with the capability of reaching us.

But, even though it shattered the post-9/11 consensus, we invaded. And we didn’t find anything that we were looking for. No WMDs. And no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.

OK, we did find one thing. We found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole.

Three years later he was executed. But, his removal created a power vacuum that would eventually be filled by ISIS, leading to more than 30,000 additional deaths.

It was the U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq that made me much more skeptical of war. More than 4.5 million people died as a result of post-9/11 wars. And these wars have cost the U.S. $8 trillion.

And we, arguably, left both countries in worse shape than before we showed up to “liberate” them.

Portions of this post have been inspired by the ideas in my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.

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