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The U.S. air strikes in Syria and Iraq last week weren’t the start of a new war, but rather the latest chapter in decade-long fight that shows no signs of abating.
Despite President Barack Obama’s 2013 vow that “every war has to come to an end,” the war in the Middle East — which some argue began on Sept. 11, 2001, but others say may have started decades earlier — shows no signs of ending, with the enemy shifting slightly, but remaining fundamentally devoted to the same cause.
“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 D.C.-based defense think tank.
“To me, this is the global war on terror, chapter two,” said Columbus-area Congressman Steve Stivers, R-Upper Arlington, an Ohio Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq.
The war has, in fact, defined a generation: The average sixth-grader in America has never been alive during an era when the United States has truly 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 The Ohio State University who served as the executive officer to General David Petraeus during the Iraq War.
He and other military affairs experts say this conflict – which has run either for 13 years, or for decades, according to your definition of when it began – is unlike any other in history, because of its length and because of the analogous and shifting enemy.
A new normal
Vaughn Shannon, an assistant professor at Wright State University’s Department of Political Science who focuses on political psychology, said 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 they have never really known anything different.
He said the stress is more likely to be acute in those who spent many years in the pre-9/11 era. They know what life was like before the enhanced security and the wire tapping.
“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 as they face a post-9/11 world, many Americans are inured to a wartime America. Unlike in World War II, there’s been no call to plant victory gardens or pitch in on the homefront. And unlike Vietnam and World War II, there isn’t a draft. So for many, the war is a far-off notion.
“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, chair of the political science department at Miami University.
That’s the reality for those who don’t have a loved one serving. For those who do, 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 Presidents George W. Bush and, most recently President Obama, have said the wars will undoubtedly stretch over long periods of time because of the nature of the enemy. Thompson argues that enemy existed long before 9/11. He believes it began during the Carter Administration, during the Iranian hostage crisis.
“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.
War was going on before 9/11
He counts the African Embassy bombings during the Clinton Administration, Desert Storm during the George H.W. Bush administration and the Beirut Barracks Bombings during the first Reagan Administration as other battles in a long and nebulous war. This has been going on for years, he argues; it just took the 9/11 attacks to spur Americans to realize they were at war.
One thing that has changed as well, he said, is television. Provocations that might’ve once been ignored — such as the beheading of U.S. journalists — are now spurring 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, adding that a “nut with a knife” changed gave Obama little choice but to act against ISIS.
He said, however, that military intervention in the Middle East has yet to eliminate terrorism, and may, in fact, “make it more likely that the terrorists will come here.”
“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 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. ISIS, 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-Qaeda and ISIS, also known as ISIL, “will remain at war with the west for the foreseeable future.”
“I think terrorism and warfare are the new norm,” he said. “And I don’t see an end to it any time soon.”
“The notion of peace time 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 to meet higher security needs.
“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 United States has involved itself may have actually prolonged the war. But they disagree on how it did 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 in order to finally end this war.
“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.”
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