"I never should have been there."
A combat veteran of the Iraq War reviews Draper's "To Star a War"
When I asked my friend Mike Connolly, a veteran of the Iraq War, to review To Start a War through the prism of his experience. Maybe, because he is one of the funniest writers I know, I expected something that hewed closer to his groundbreaking work as the wit behind the Pennsylvania Treasurer’s semi-official burner Twitter account. Maybe, based on his previous satirical writing for The Experiment, I thought we’d get Catch-22 updated for the era of eternal war. What he delivered was something I didn’t have any right to expect: the truth.
by Mike Connolly
Being in Iraq is like, well, being in Iraq. There’s no metaphor that conveys the experience of something that is at once so foreign and that becomes so familiar. The longer you’re there, the more it seeps into your bones and memories. It becomes a place that feels like a part of you. The smells become something that reach into you decades after you’ve sensed them, and makes you stare off into the distance when someone’s talking and remember that market where the kids hit you in the shins with a soccer ball, and giggled before looking up to realize you’re holding a rifle inches away from their family.
I never should have been there.
Robert Draper just wrote a book, To Start a War, that threatened to pull me further into the place I never left. Draper, on the surface somewhat inexplicably, covers a topic that has been relentlessly covered: the internal deliberations and dynamics that led the Bush administration to embark on one of America’s greatest foreign policy blunders.
His choice of writing a book like this nearly 20 years after the fact begins to show its wisdom as he unveils new sourcing, new information, and a new perspective on the tragedy.
His book shouldn’t be dismissed because of its timing. It should be embraced. Two decades of perspective helps explore the severity of the error in how American foreign policy tried to play at being an empire and ended up an empty shell of what it could have been.
That empty shell isn’t alone in its world of lost possibility. More than 4,500 American service members live there, too. So do hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who don’t matter enough to America to bother counting accurately.
His book shouldn’t be dismissed because of its timing. It should be embraced.
The true toll of the loss can never really be understood by anybody. The number of dead or wounded can be mostly counted on the American side, hardly counted for the Iraqis. The money can be approximated by adding up the spending bills passed through Congress and the spending on veterans’ disability benefits and healthcare and on the equipment we bought and blew up and left in place and that was later stolen by ISIS.
But the loss keeps climbing, every day. By all measures I count as one of the alive ones, even though every few days there seem to be hours that slip by while I’m staring into nothing and remembering the market, or the other market, or the car that was filled with artillery shells that exploded with enough force that the American Humvee next to it became yet another burning shell that melted for hours afterward and left little trails of molten Humvee flowing across the street and into the dirt.
None of us should have been there.
That opinion might not be new, and it is pretty widely shared. But Draper’s book goes beyond explaining all the ways we shouldn’t have been there, and explores some of the ways human judgement can take a relatively smart mind and overload it with information to lead it down a pathway to murderous decisions.
If Draper’s book becomes a flashing neon warning sign into all the ways we need to short-circuit the decision-making process, it may prove to be one of the greatest savers of human life ever created.
The mind of a decision-maker establishes something as Bad, because the world is a scary place and it’s easier to ascribe those scary things to something we’ve already established as Bad. Iraq Bad. Iraq gas Kurds. Iraq no good. Iraq want America dead, make joke of us!
Something Bad happens, like planes flying into towers. That Bad thing gets associated with what was already thought of as Bad, even if that association is only in the mind of an American president. No matter what the evidence says, the Bad things must be together, because they’re Bad.
Pressure gets exerted. Subordinates want to please. Evidence gets presented, then embellished, then eventually just made up. Plans are created. Decisions get made. People get dead.
None of this is unique, but it is urgent. Things are happening in the brains of people in power right now. They always are. We have very little insight into the inner mind of President Biden or his favored voices. But at any moment, some key event could happen that triggers the slow movement of the Rube Goldberg machine in the mind, where the mouse eats the cheese and the ball rolls down the tube and the lever falls and snaps the rubber band and somehow we end up invading Syria. Or Lebanon. Or wherever.
If Draper’s book does nothing, then we’re none the worse than we already were. But if his book becomes a flashing neon warning sign into all the ways we need to short-circuit the decision-making process, it may prove to be one of the greatest savers of human life ever created.
I might want to find him and thank him for it. But I might be too busy staring off into a market that isn’t there, still fighting the last war that never stop taking more life away, moment by moment by moment.
Mike Connolly is the principal of Salthill Communications, and former Deputy State Treasurer for Communications under Treasurer Joe Torsella. He served two tours in Iraq as an Infantryman, and can be found on Twitter: @MD_Connolly. His previous contribution to The Experiment was “Damn, y’all.”
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