Introduction

One of the defining elements of contemporary American history includes the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, on the World Trade Center in New York City, and the subsequent U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  These resultant wars claimed an estimated 400,000 to 1.2M lives, across all coalition troops and Afghan and Iraqi men, women, and children.  The sheer number of lives lost speaks to the injustice of these wars.  But there were also administrative failures that contributed to these unjust wars, including misinformation about the intent behind the push for war and later, military decision-making in a confused and conflict-prone Iraq.  Lloyd C. Gardner in his excellent monograph The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of the U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present, highlights these administrative and military missteps, demonstrating that the war in Afghanistan was as a bridge to a larger war in Iraq, where stated policy goals and military priorities produced a conflagration of unforeseen events and ultimately resulted in a long, expensive conflict that molded and shaped a generation of U.S. citizens.

Argument

Even before the September 11th attack on the U.S., the Bush administration had been raising red flags over Iraq to the Congress.  In response to these attacks, Congress granted broad powers to the administration for war in Afghanistan and other states deemed to be supporting terrorism, and within months of the start of the war troops were moving from Afghanistan to the borders of Iraq.  The administration moved to invade Iraq on several false pretenses, as Gardner recounts, including the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the lack of a clear escape plan, and without regard for the humanitarian toll on of the war.  The administration denuded the CIA by undercutting its intelligence assessments and lying to the public and the Congress that Saddam Hussein had developed nuclear weapons.  The Iraq war ended in 2011, after years of scrambling to export America-styled democracy to Iraq, and as many years fighting insurgency-styled resistance fighters in major cities across the country.  And as hinted at in the introduction of this essay, a body count that may be up to 1.2M+, including 300,000+ American service members.

Militarily, the U.S. administration of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was disorganized.  Fighters spent years acquiring proper armor and other basic supplies, while battles in places such as Fallujah and Baghdad were noted for the carnage brought to bear against insurgent fighters and civilians alike.  Once Saddam Hussein had been captured and hanged, multiple U.S. military-backed governments attempted to stabilize the country as it found itself in guerilla war with these insurgents, requiring a shift in posture for the military that would serve to prolong the war, adding the expense of a vast contractor-supported bureaucracy that cost billions of unplanned dollars.  The most consternating aspect of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars was the notion that America would export its democratic principles to prop up faltering states like Iraq, which had a traditionally patriarchal society that was unaccustomed to Western and liberal political mechanisms.  Becoming, as Gardner writes, a “war service industry [that has] expand[ed] and become a permanent fixture in the larger Pentagon order of battle."  Fraud has become rampant and contractual obligations totaled $418B per year in the 2000’s, doubling the numbers from the previous decade.

Conclusion

In support of these arguments and more, as viewed through the prism of ‘just war’ theory, historian Joseph M. Siracusa writing for the journal Social Alternatives (1991) invokes St. Augustine in his article “George Bush and The Gulf War: A Just War or Just Another War” and analyzes the first Gulf War, determining that it was unjust, offering clear parallels to the Iraq War that would soon follow.  Augustine’s logic tells us, broadly, that these wars were unjust, as they were devoid of “proper intention…proportion[ality]…discrimination…and [weren’t] taken as a last resort." The administrators and military command of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars indiscriminately targeted civilians, used excessive force, and failed to exhaust all diplomatic options.  Outside of moral compunction, this analytical tool from St. Augustine invites participants to objectively measure the use of force by an aggressor, and to aim for peaceful resolution, appropriately deploy forces, and to protect non-combatants where possible.  These are lessons for the U.S. that applied in Vietnam, before these wars, and apply today as the world considers threats from Russia, China, and Iran.

References

Gardner, Lloyd. The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present. 2008.

Siracusa, Joseph. “George W. Bush and the Gulf War: A Just War or Just Another War.” Social   Alternatives. Vol. 10, Issue 2. 1991.