The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
VETERANS WAGE WAR AGAINST ENDLESS WARS
From Trump supporters to opponents, a rising number of veterans say it may be time to halt ‘endless’ conflicts.
Tyler Wade was awarded the Purple Heart while serving in Afghanistan, and says he is “proud of everything” he did during his service. He also believes the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake, as do a growing number of veterans — from retired generals to those who served across the enlisted ranks, from supporters of President Donald Trump to “resistance” Democrats.
“All in all, it is a lot of wasted lives and money and time and effort spent to accomplish a goal we never accomplished,” said Wade, 31, who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during his five years in the Marines and is now a nursing student in Las Vegas.
The shifting attitudes of so many who served in the wars help explain why Trump has support among veterans as he brings troops home and has resisted military action against other nations. There is a slow but steadily increasing alliance of those on the left and the right on Capitol Hill to curb what Trump calls “endless wars.”
Among veterans, 64% say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, slightly higher than the 62% of civilians who feel the same way. Disagreement with the conflict in Afghanistan is lower — 58% of veterans and 59% of the general public believe that was not a worthy war. While some veterans support continued military engagement in Syria, more than half — 55% — oppose it.
Veterans have supported Trump more than the general population. About 56% of veterans said they approved of the job he was doing as president, compared with 42% of the population overall, according to a poll by The Associated Press last year, consistent with other poll findings. Veterans like Trump’s vow to support their care and bolster military spending, and in some cases they agree with his “America First” foreign policy calling for a smaller footprint for U.S. forces abroad.
A ‘cathartic bitterness’
For some veterans, especially those who identify themselves as liberal, the killing of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi underscored, rather than weakened, their views.
Peter Lucier is a law student in St. Louis who recalled cheering for the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida, when he was a 22-year-old Marine about to be deployed. Now, he says, “I am trying to get out of the killing business.”
“Also, the country is different,” he continued. “It’s been almost 10 years since we killed bin Laden and we are still in these places. We are not moving the ball forward.”
In the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump performed especially well in counties that had a higher than average number of service members killed in action, even when adjusted for other factors in the 2016 election.
“For conservative-leaning veterans, we signed up to defend our country,” said Dan Caldwell, a veteran and the senior adviser at Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative group with substantial backing from the billionaire Charles G. Koch that focuses heavily on withdrawing forces from around the world. “We didn’t sign up to build girls schools in the Al Anbar province. We had friends killed or wounded in action; it wasn’t clear for what.”
Yet, as with many policy areas, Trump’s words are not always consistent with his administration’s actions. About 200,000 U.S. troops remain deployed worldwide, about the same as when Trump took office. After originally announcing a full troop withdrawal from Syria — and abandoning Kurdish allies, for which he was widely criticized in public by many national security experts and in private even by some in the military — he opted to leave some troops in Syria.
“You get the argument that we have invested so much in treasure and blood, why would you abandon the project after we have had so many men and women wounded?” said Paul D. Eaton, a retired two-star Army officer who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops and who was an early critic of the policies of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. “What are you going to say to their families? Throwing good resources after bad is no way to run a country.”
While the vast majority of veterans have returned stateside to productive and happy lives, many who served are concerned that the suicide rate among veterans outpaces that of the civilian population and is rising faster among younger veterans. Thousands who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are struggling with life-altering injuries that would have killed veterans of previous wars. And homelessness is a stubborn problem — only 7% of Americans are veterans, but they make up about 11% of the homeless population.
But, just as important, many veterans say their views of the conflicts have been shaped by the lack of a satisfying outcome.
“I wanted out of Podunk; I wanted upward mobility,” said Daniel Schick, 34, explaining why he joined the Army before going to Iraq, where he lost seven members of his unit in one deployment. He now lives in Portland, Oregon, and has a temporary position with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
“I kind of developed a cathartic bitterness,” he said, reflecting on his service. “It was a waste of blood and treasure and destroyed what little infrastructure that the Iraqi people had.”
Such sentiments are not limited to enlisted personnel and lower-level officers.
In recent years, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine general who helped write the military’s counterinsurgency manual, and Stanley A. McChrystal, the former commander of Joint Special Operations Command who then led coalition troops in Afghanistan, have called the Iraq invasion a mistake, as have other former officers.
“I think there is a frustration that Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t turn out more like Germany,” said Dana J.H. Pittard, a retired Army major general who led combat troops in Iraq, referring to the successful victory and aftermath of World War II. “Afghanistan is still a mess. On the Iraq side, we are frustrated now about why we went there in the first place. What people see is a state that is not as stable as it should be. Afghanistan doesn’t look like it was worth it because of way it turned out.”
No reliable peace
While early opposition to the war in Iraq focused on the faulty intelligence cited to launch the invasion, opinion across a broader spectrum has been soured by the failure of the military — and the government — to secure a reliable peace and the failure of politicians in both Kabul and Baghdad to build stable governments that can contain deadly domestic violence after years of U.S. support.
Support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was already declining a decade after the terrorist attacks on the United States, with Pew finding in 2011 that about onethird of veterans of the post-9/11 cohort believed those conflicts were a bad idea. Disagreement with the policy was found to have almost doubled in the more recent Pew poll among this cohort. The latest Pew study found that neither rank nor combat experience differentiated veterans’ views of the wars, though partisan differences were clear. The poll found that 45% of Republican veterans versus 15% of Democratic veterans say the war in Iraq was worth fighting, mirroring party gaps in the civilian population.
For every veteran in Congress like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who has consistently advocated “military solutions,” there are now those like Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., who view the war in Iraq as an error and Afghanistan with ambivalence.
Crow recently returned to Afghanistan as a congressman and said that “it brought up a lot of memories for me, thinking about the time we spent there and the missed opportunities and wondering about things we could have done a different way.”
This year, VoteVets, a left-leaning organization started in 2006 to elect Democrats to Congress who would end the “endless wars,” and Concerned Veterans for America, which has long been VoteVets’ nemesis, joined forces to lobby lawmakers to end the post-9/11 conflicts.
“Donald Trump is a big reason” for the two groups to now work together, said Jon Soltz, an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq before helping found VoteVets, which struggled to build support for its anti-war agenda in its early years, even among Democrats. “He stood up and beat Jeb Bush by saying the Iraq War was a total joke. I don’t like him. He blocked us on Twitter, and we are going to work to beat him in 2020. But you can’t deny that Donald Trump trashing these wars was a game-changer for us all.”
Many veterans find this dynamic frustrating.
Amber Smith, 37, was a fourth-generation service member who served in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2005 and 2008. Like many other veterans, Smith saw a greater purpose in the war in Afghanistan than the one in Iraq, given the Taliban’s role harboring bin Laden and al-Qaida. But as with many veterans, that purpose ended in her mind long ago.
“We gave it nearly two decades, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and we have learned at this point there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan,” said Smith, who served for one year in the Trump administration in the Defense Department. “There are a few veterans in Congress who are very pro-military-involvement in the Middle East. Well, they already fought that fight. They are not going back. As we have seen, when Trump talks about reducing troops, everyone in D.C. becomes unhinged. Unfortunately, the U.S. service members pay the consequences for that.”
Those who have served — voluntarily — in the military since Sept. 11, 2001, “served primarily out of patriotism,” said David W. Barno, a retired Army lieutenant general and former top commander in Afghanistan whose children have also served in the military. “Every one of them knew they were volunteering for war. But there is a gnawing issue that we are still losing people.”