Let’s Talk About Forever Wars in the Middle East

Hi, kids! This is your old aunt Mary with a cautionary tale from the distant past!

I am what you’d call an elder Millennial. I am so very elderly, I was a teenager during Y2K and the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. What’s Y2K? Ah, let’s save that history lesson for another day. The point is, I was not yet sixteen at the last turn of the Millennium. I was here the last time the United States decided that they just had to liberate the Middle East and topple a dictator there. Let me tell you a little about how it turned out.

Have you ever heard of a soft-spoken mediocre portrait painter named George W. Bush? Well, that man was our president. I didn’t vote for him, because I was a kid, but both my parents did because they were good old fashioned conservatives. Bush was not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he surrounded himself with clever, greedy people who we trusted to make shrewd economic decisions. He had a rather rocky ending to his election campaign, which we certainly won’t speak about today, but suffice it to say that “chad” wasn’t a euphemism for an alpha male in late 2000 or early 2001. But in late 2001, Bush enjoyed a surge in popularity, due to his being the president during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The country was extremely traumatized after 9/11, and we immediately started idolizing everyone who looked authoritative and in charge: the NYPD, the fire department, the president, even somebody named Rudy Giuliani. So most of us jumped at the chance to go to war, just because the president said so.

Bush’s great idea was that we ought to invade Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban in October of 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This didn’t make a ton of sense, because Afghanistan wasn’t where the terrorists came from. They were mostly from Saudi Arabia. But still, Afghanistan was suffering under the sway of some extremely evil people who hated women and suppressed all freedoms. The invasion had the support of almost 90% of the American people. We invaded Afghanistan.

And then, in 2003, Bush announced we were also going to invade the country of Iraq. Again, this was a little odd since Iraq was not where the 9/11 terrorists came from, but supposedly, Iraq’s evil dictator was making weapons of mass destruction. We had to listen to George W. Bush pronounce “nuclear” as “new-cue-lar” until it made my flesh crawl. Still, that seemed like a pretty good reason to go to war. Nobody liked the dictator of Iraq. Nobody wanted to be killed by a new-cue-lar weapon. That war was also popular, enjoying over 70% of Americans’ support.

Now, not everyone thought these wars were a brilliant idea. There were some protesters we wrote off as silly hippies. France refused to help us, and a lot of Americans thought it was funny to start referring to French fries as “freedom fries” to get back at them. The Pope, John Paul the Second, was adamantly against the war, but we dismissed him as out of touch. We invaded Iraq.

George Bush posed happily under a banner that said “Mission Accomplished,” and I guess we thought that would be that.

But that wasn’t that. The wars went on for years and years.

Somehow, Bush thought we’d be greeted as liberators and then have our own oil-rich spare countries in the Middle East with no trouble. But human beings don’t take kindly to being bombed. They don’t feel like they’re being liberated when that happens. They fight back. Even if they hate their oppressive government and excitedly tear down statues of the dictator when a foreign military invades, that doesn’t mean that the military gets treated like heroes.

The Afghanistan war ended up lasting for twenty years. By the end, we sometimes had young people enlisting in a war that their parents had also fought in. Sure, we drove out the Taliban for a bit, but there was no plan on what to do to keep them from coming back. We just kept killing people, and even tortured some detainees to death, which was horrific in every possible way and also damaged our reputation with other countries. When the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, 176,000 Afghani people had been killed, and only about 50,000 of those were the enemies we were trying to fight. Nearly 2,500 American troops were killed as well. And the minute we left, the Taliban went right back in and took over. Things are as bad as ever in Afghanistan.

The Iraq war lasted for nine years. True, we did manage to topple their dictator, who was captured and eventually hanged. But again, we had no plan for post-invasion Iraq. The war is responsible for at least a hundred thousand civilian deaths and possibly many more. Almost 4,500 American troops were killed. We never did find those new-cue-lar weapons. And toppling the Iraqi dictator strengthened his old nemesis, the Iranian dictator.

Yes, now we’re getting to the Iran part of the lecture.

There is no denying that Ayatollah Ali Khameni was a horrible person. He was a ruthless dictator who held Iran in an iron grip, and I’m not sad to see him go. You don’t need to valorize a bad person to point out the ways in which war is wrong.

And, mind you, I’m not saying that this is the exact same situation as the one twenty-five years ago. After all, those wars had overwhelming support by the American people, and support for the Iran war is barely at 20%. At the beginning of the Afghanistan war, we’d just been the victims of a major terrorist attack and were excited to look like we were doing something about it. One of the reasons President Trump was elected in 2024, on the other hand, was because he promised to be a “peace president” and STOP embroiling America in foreign wars which we were quite sick of way back then. And instead of a Cabinet of clever shrewd people surrounding a president who might not be terribly bright, we’ve got the Trump Administration.

One thing that’s the same about both wars, though, is that the Pope is against this one. At yesterday’s Angelus address, the Holy Father said of Iran, “Stability and peace are not built with mutual threats, nor with weapons, which sow destruction, pain, and death, but only through a reasonable, authentic, and responsible dialogue… Faced with the possibility of a tragedy of enormous proportions, I address to the parties involved a heartfelt appeal to assume the moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss!”

Maybe we could listen to the Pope this time?

I promise you, you do not want to re-live the early 2000s. They were a breathtakingly stupid time. Just say “no” to low-rise jeans, sculpted eyebrows, reality television and forever wars in the Middle East.

And whatever happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you.