Editorial: Our generation and the Iraq War

It has been 10 years since the United States invaded Iraq.

Amidst the sea of reflection, revisionism and apologies, two questions have emerged most salient and critical: Have 10 years of warfare been worth it? Knowing what we know now, would we do it again?

Since most undergraduates were in their early teens or younger at the time of the decision to invade, our relationship to the war has always been somewhat distant. The justifications for the war — alleged weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s ruthless dictatorship — are familiar to us only in hindsight. As 12- to 14-year-olds, most took no part in the initial enthusiasm and drive for war.

Furthermore, the war never made itself particularly known to us. Americans currently 18 to 29 years old are by far the least likely demographic to have had an immediate family member join the military. And unlike during the Vietnam War, the draft was never a concern, severely dampening any anti-war protest movement and largely restricting it to the political margins.

But just because it was never our war doesn’t mean we haven’t been affected by it. Nowhere is this fact better evidenced than in the pro-war editorials and columns that ran before the invasion.

Fouad Ajami, currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, provided perhaps one of the strongest moral cases for the Iraq War. Writing an essay in an early 2003 edition of global-policy magazine Foreign Affairs, hardly mentioning weapons of mass destruction, Ajami said that a potential war could save the Middle East from increasingly militant and anti-liberal religious movements.

Rebuilding Iraq and saving the Middle East from extremism were not uncommon reasons to support the war. In May 2003, 69 percent of the public thought the war was justified, even if WMDs were never found. Americans were ready for a successful war that could, in the words of Ajami, “embolden those who wish for the Arab world deliverance from retrogression and political decay.” Even if Iraqi Arabs would not see us as Wilsonian campaigners for democracy and the Iraqi crowd might “shout itself hoarse against the Americans,” a new regime would eventually “bid farewell to virulent pan-Arabism” and “crippling sectarian atavisms.” Further, as difficult as a campaign might be, America could “afford a big role in Iraq, and beyond.”

This mentality — a firm belief in Pax Americana and that dangerous and potentially destabling pan-Arabism needed to be defeated — has been utterly destroyed. For most of the country, this vision has been left in the past. But for us, it is a vision that we have never really known.

Now, rather than focus on larger ideologies, we prefer a more human-centric approach. Our most important convictions are far more in the belief that everybody deserves the same rights — both at home and abroad. One of those rights is to not be subject to intervention. Going into another country to liberate people who don’t want to be liberated has never felt more foreign.

Another aspect of the leadup to war that seems especially foreign was Ajami’s essay’s comparison of Iraq to Japan. The writer expressed hope that American intervention in Iraq would be similar to post-WWII efforts to demilitarize Japan. The hand of intervention, within one generation, completely altered a generation and set the island nation on a path to democracy.

But here again, a belief in the supremacy of our values ignored the question of who the aggressor was. Iraq was not to 9/11 as Japan was to Pearl Harbor, a fact known quite quickly after the 2001 attacks. The broad historic comparisons ignored a very important part of the relationship.

Ultimately, what Iraq has taught us is that humility isn’t a bad value. Questioning beliefs and abilities and thinking critically can lead to less harmful outcomes. And while we probably couldn’t have done much to change the past, having observed 10 years of Iraq should at least have taught us how we should change history in the future.