“It’s all for nothing,” Iraq veteran Joe Johnson told the AJC’s Jeremy Redmon.
And by “all,” Johnson means almost everything. In addition to his own service, Johnson lost a 22-year-old son, Justin, in that war. Like other Georgia veterans interviewed by Redmon, he’s angry that it all seems to be falling apart. And while he would support military action to salvage what we can, he doesn’t sound optimistic.
Joshua Winchester, on the other hand, puts the onus on Iraqis for not making peace among their various sects. Despite his service there, he opposes further military involvement.
“Like we tell our kids: ‘You have got to learn your lesson,’ ” he told Redmon. “When you put your hand on the stove and you get burned, you don’t put your hand back on the stove, right? We were there for years … and what has happened? We are back to square one.”
Like millions of Americans, I had no loved ones among the more than 4,000 service members to die in Iraq. I didn’t serve; I didn’t watch good friends die beside me and others still struggling to cope with it all. So while I may share their dismay, I can only imagine the much deeper emotions of those who did make such sacrifices.
But Winchester’s words strike me as particularly wise. In the wake of Sept. 11, we were an angry, fearful nation, and we allowed that anger and fear to be steered in a false direction. We can blame that on a cynical leadership, on a media establishment that failed to question and challenge, and on an opposition party that too often lacked courage.
But the bottom line is that we as a people went to war too easily. Our leaders chose it too easily; they promised us that we would win it too easily; we allowed ourselves to be fooled into it too easily. War is seductive. We think we learn, but we don’t.
One hundred years ago this month, in July 1914, the world began its descent into the Great War, the War to End All Wars, a war that we now know as World War I. That too was to be a quick war, an easy war, yet four years later some 9 million men had been killed in a war that merely set the stage for the next one.
And 150 years ago this month, the Civil War raged right here in metro Atlanta, at places we know well. Last Friday was the anniversary of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain; Saturday is the anniversary of the Battle of Pace’s Ferry.
That too was to have been a quick, easy war, with President Lincoln calling initially for men to volunteer for 90 days to put down the Southern insurrection. Over the next four years, some 600,000 Americans were killed before the Union could be restored.
World War I was an unexpected, almost accidental war; the Civil War had simmered for decades and had come to seem almost inevitable. Our war in Iraq, while much smaller in scale, was in some ways more evil. It was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. We could afford to lose it, so we did.
And while we can’t bring back our dead, we at least owe them an honest admission of our mistakes. So here are three lessons of Iraq:
1. When someone promises an easy war, they’re lying to you.
2. If it’s a war that you can afford to lose, you probably will.
3. A war that you can afford to lose is a war that you probably should not fight.
