Not All Veterans

As a veteran, I hate it when other veterans speak for me. I also hate it when they use their veteran status as a way to promote unexamined bellicosity. This kind of appeal to veteran authority has been happening a lot lately. Most of it has been in response to the violent sectarian unrest currently dissolving borders, and disrupting the predominantly Sunni and Kurdish areas, in the North and West of Iraq.

John Nagl, a veteran of both Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, wrote in the Washington Post that the 2007 surge worked and the war was “a possible win” before defeat was tragically “snatched from the jaws of victory” when Obama pulled out American troops. Nagl describes coffee mugs emblazoned with the phrase “we were winning when I left” as a sort of down-home prognostication. He makes it seem like the soldiers just knew that civilians would find a way to mess it all up—that they would make it so the lives that were lost during the hard work of country-building were lost in vain.

Nagl’s sentimentality is a cudgel used to hide a conservative political agenda. How exactly does Nagl’s coffee mug define “winning”? Are the lives of soldiers lost in vain if, and only if, America doesn’t achieve the specific goals of global hegemony?

I think it’s important to make the distinction here between veterans feeling a more complex emotional connection to the sectarian violence for having actually been in Iraq, and pretending that those feelings are enough to rationalize an entire political agenda. I understand why vets are distraught by the prospect of Iraq’s descent into anarchy. During the two deployments that I served as an Infantryman, I broke bread with, talked to, and lived beside a lot of Iraqis. What’s happening there now is much more to me than an abstraction, more than just something to feel vaguely anxious about while reading the paper in the morning. I’m obsessed by it. I can’t read enough about it. My thoughts are saturated with memories of the Iraqis I’ve known and concerns about whether they’ve survived the upheavals. The names of soldiers that I knew who were killed, young men with laughing faces cut down in their prime, have been on my lips lately, like mantras used to ward off a creeping sense of nihilism.

But feeling sad isn’t a substitute for cogent analysis, and being a veteran doesn’t give you access to a secret reservoir of morality that civilians don’t have. Of course the experiences of veterans have a special value, idiosyncratic and important in their own way as narrative history of the war. The personal experiences of veterans are so profound they challenge the limits of comprehension. But being in a war doesn’t guarantee that you’ll have a better understanding of foreign policy, and the experience of organized, state-sanctioned violence doesn’t cleanse your politics of ideology. In fact that experience can often do just the opposite. It might be a cliché to say so, but that’s exactly how ideology works; it’s more efficient when it’s invisible. That’s why so many conservatives fall back on the rhetoric of “common sense.” And relying on one’s own personal keyhole experience of war as a way to argue for broad, sweeping, foreign policy action (or inaction) is a category of logical fallacy all its own.

The New York Times recently got in on the action too, with the melodramatically headlined article “Veterans Watch as Gains Their Friends Died for Are Erased by Insurgents.” It’s a pretty tragic piece, and it articulates the frustration a lot of veterans are feeling right now as clearly as that sort of thing can be articulated. It tells the deeply moving story about how veterans who were once stationed in what’s known as the Sunni Triangle are watching aghast as the Sunni militia ISIS takes control of the areas they used to patrol. (If you remember any news at all from the aughts, you’ll know that the Sunni Triangle is the oil-rich, predominantly Sunni region to the North and West of Baghdad.)

Former platoon leader Phillips McWilliams talks about wanting to say that “everything we did or attempted to do is being torn asunder, that it is all for naught.” The article goes on to talk about dead comrades, favorite translators, and struggles with PTSD and alcoholism. And the vets are right. The entire scenario is fucked up and sad. But Iraq’s collapse didn’t spring fully formed from Obama’s id. The country rushed to invade Iraq, led by unrealistic men without a plan who were willing to break the law to see their fantasies through. Our failure was already there, waiting for us.

I have to wonder why troop outrage and “betrayal” seem to only find voice in major media outlets when they coincide with conservative war rallying. Where was the betrayal when the CIA handpicked Maliki as its man in Baghdad? Where was the outrage when his government began terrorizing its own citizens? It’s a morally evasive oversimplification to claim, exactly as Nagl does, that the war in Iraq was lost because Obama removed troops too soon. I guess it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that Nagl goes on to suggest that we stay in Afghanistan. Because, you know . . . what his coffee cup said.

Nagle ends his Post column by saying that this isn’t the “end state” that his friends fought and died for. The implication here is twofold. On one hand, he’s suggesting that we do something about it (and by “something,” he means military action). Secondly, he’s suggesting that the deaths of soldiers are meaningless unless a very specific political agenda is realized. It’s pretty offensive to assign value to peoples’ deaths, according to how effectively they served a political agenda. In doing so, he devalues all human lives.

The losses of the people I served with are immeasurable. I don’t feel comfortable making the case for them being “worth it” or not. But I do feel comfortable honoring their memory by refusing to use them as a rhetorical prop to ballast my political arguments.