For Americans, war just drags on

WASHINGTON — The U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq aren’t the start of a new war but rather the latest chapter in a decade-long fight that shows no signs of abating.

Despite President Barack Obama’s 2013 vow — “Every war has to come to an end” — the war in the Middle East shows no signs of ending.

“There is no period in American history when the nation has been so continuously engaged in combat in a particular region of the world,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-based research center.

“To me, this is the global war on terror, chapter two,” said Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Upper Arlington, an Ohio Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq.

The war, in fact, has defined a generation: The average American sixth-grader never has experienced a time when the United States truly has been at peace.

For many Americans, it’s akin to a low-grade fever: The nation always faces a level of uncertainty and a heightened level of security. For those with loved ones serving, the anxiety is more acute, the threat tangible.

“This is a generation that’s growing up with conflict as a continuing backdrop to their existence,” said Pete Mansoor, a history professor at Ohio State University who served as the executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus during the second war in Iraq.

He and other military-affairs experts say this conflict is unlike any in history because of its length and shifting enemy.

Vaughn Shannon, an assistant professor of political science at Wright State University who focuses on political psychology, said that while conventional wisdom holds that terrorism creates a fear in society, that’s not necessarily the case for the generation in college. Many of his students, he said, were 5 or 6 when Sept. 11 happened and have known nothing different since.

He said the stress is more likely to be acute among those who spent many years in the pre-9/11 era. They remember life before the enhanced security.

“There are studies that say what really hits people is the proximity,” he said. “We are resilient, for good or bad, and with time things fade.”

Even in a post-9/11 world, many in the U.S. are inured to a wartime America. There’s been no call to plant victory gardens or pitch in on the home front; there is no draft.

“It is ironic, in some sense, that a war like this can go on for so many years with so many people detached from it, and it not feeling like real life,” said Patrick Haney, head of the political science department at Miami University.

The average American sixth-grader never has experienced a time when the U.S. truly has been at peace.

For those with a loved one in the military, the reality is much different. According to Brown University’s “Cost of War” project, more than 6,800 U.S. troops and at least 6,780 contractors died between March 2003 and April 2014. The Veterans Administration has approved an additional 875,000 disability claims through 2013.

Both President George W. Bush and, more recently, Obama have said the wars undoubtedly will stretch over long periods of time because of the nature of the enemy. Thompson argues that enemy has existed since the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter administration.

“The names change, the leaders come and go, but it’s always the same region, it’s always the same fundamental problem, and somehow, America always gets drawn in,” Thompson said.

It took the 9/11 attack to make Americans realize they were at war, he said.

Television has changed things, too, he said. Provocations that might once have been ignored — such as the beheading of U.S. journalists — now spur outrage because they’re quickly broadcast to a large American audience.

“Maybe the lesson we have failed to learn is how easily we are stampeded by the smallest little provocations,” Thompson said.

“The best way to stay out of wars in the Middle East is to stay out of wars in the Middle East,” Thompson said. “If you don’t want to be involved in the region, then at some point, you have to draw a line.”

But Stivers said the United States has little choice but to act. He compares the current conflict to World War II — isolation and appeasement, he said, didn’t work then and will not work now. The Islamic State, he said, is moving from country to country and threatens U.S. allies including Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

“We can fight it in the Middle East or fight in North America,” Stivers said. “I prefer we fight it over there.”

Mansoor, meanwhile, predicts the same core group responsible for al-Qaida and ISIS “will remain at war with the West for the foreseeable future.”

“The notion of peacetime has kind of disappeared,” Thompson said, “because although we’re not really at war, we are definitely not at peace. In the back of our minds, we always know something horrible could happen tomorrow.”

Mansoor said if Americans have universally paid a price for an indefinite war, it’s been the sacrifice of personal privacy and personal freedoms.

“We’ve surrendered part of our freedom every time we go through airport security, every time we get searched at sporting events,” he said. “This is going to have — and has had — an impact on the American psyche.”

Lawmakers, meanwhile, believe that how the U.S. has involved itself may have actually prolonged the war. But they disagree on how they did so.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Stivers argue that a rush to withdraw troops helped cause the rise of ISIS.

“This is a long war that we have ignored for a while at our peril,” Portman said. “And I think over the last several years, under the Obama administration, we once again chose to downplay and, in some respects, ignore the threat. And we live with the consequences of that now.”

But Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said the U.S. mistake was getting involved in the first place without solid Middle Eastern support.

“We didn’t think through the consequences of intervention in the Middle East without Middle Eastern allies, and some people still haven’t learned that lesson,” he said.

Stivers argues that the United States must carry this fight through to the end.

“Either we let this be the new norm or we stop it from being the new norm,” he said. “And the only way to stop it from being the new norm is to wipe these guys out.”