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The quote that would secure Jim Mattis reputation as the most celebrated Marine general of his generation came during meetings he hadnt wanted to attend. It was April 2004, a half-mile east of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which had exploded in an insurrection that threatened to doom the American occupation after barely a year. Mattis hadnt wanted to take Fallujah, recognizing that flattening the City of Mosques would throw gasoline on a smoldering nationwide insurrection. But he followed White House-pushed orders to invade, and after roughly a week of intense urban fighting leaving 39 U.S. troops dead, an estimated 616 Iraqi civilians killed, and Fallujah untaken he followed orders to stop.

The first order was stupid, he thought, but combining it with the second was risible. It sent the message that America was not only idiotic during a crucial moment of challenge but also weak. Still, no matter how disastrous the order, no Marine general would ever resign his command as his Marines went through such a crucible, so Mattis reached for a different kind of weapon: his mouth.

In his 2019 memoir, Call Sign Chaos, Mattis recounts sitting down to discuss the future of Fallujah with local notables enlisted to guarantee its security. One of the sheikhs, evidently frustrated, demanded to know when the Americans would leave. Mattis replied that he had bought property on the Euphrates River, where he would marry one of your daughters and retire there. Then he warned the Iraqis: I come in peace. I didnt bring artillery. But Im pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, Ill kill you all.

It was quintessential Mattis: a threat of ultra-violence wrapped in a wit quick enough to make him as quotatious as Shaquille ONeal. As reports of the comment spread, Mattis became something of a folk hero in American military circles and back home. One of his nicknames, much promoted by journalists, was Warrior Monk, emphasizing not only his martial expertise but also his devotion to his craft. Years later, the kill you all line would take pride of place in an adoring Twitter hashtag, #Mattisisms, celebrating not so much his deeds as his attitude.Editors picks

The adulation obscured the fact that Mattis swagger didnt really work. The sheikhs did not act on my warning, Mattis writes in Call Sign Chaos. They were allowing their sons to be recruited by the insurgents while they were talking to me unwittingly abrogating their own authority. Maybe. Or perhaps they didnt like a foreign invader pledging to fuck their daughters and kill everyone they know.

The Iraq War was supposed to showcase American potency after 9/11. But the fuck-around stage gave way within months to a finding-out stage that lasted for years. A war partially predicated on dealing a lethal blow to terrorism instead prompted the creation of the Al Qaeda affiliate that would become the so-called Islamic State. Americas 100-plus years of experience with imperial policing were no match for widespread Iraqi rejectionism. At home, the humiliations of the War on Terror were political fuel for those who said America needed to be made great again. As we approach the 20th anniversary of one of the most unjust and calamitous wars the U.S. ever waged, #Mattisisms read like a way for Americans to save face amid self-inflicted disasters that revealed their weakness.

Mattis, who through a spokesperson declined an interview request, doesnt even crack the top 30 list of people culpable for the Iraq War. As a division commander, he was several rungs down from the decision-makers of George W. Bushs administration. Mattis tour ended months before the Marines began another operation to take Fallujah a grueling, bloody, urban battle that has passed into Corps legend. Yet his example is illustrative of an age of American hubris. Even when Mattis saw through the pretexts of the war he suggests in his memoir that Saddam Hussein was boxed in before the offensive even began he, like most officers, chose to serve rather than walk away, and expressed greater displeasure at the prospect of withdrawal from the war than the initial invasion. Ten years later, he was no more an obstacle when he joined the board of another doomed-to-fail enterprise based on deception.Related

Theranos was a Silicon Valley unicorn valued at $9 billion, a startup that claimed to have a proprietary machine that could perform a dizzying array of health analyses from a single drop of blood. The business press ate it up with the exception of Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyrou, whose reporting revealed that the companys technology just didnt work. Founder Elizabeth Holmes had browbeat her lab technicians to deliver impossible results just as Dick Cheney pressured the CIA to connect Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. (Theranos lead scientist Ian Gibbons committed suicide in 2013, a tragedy his wife laid at Holmes feet.) The prospect that Holmes concept could work became a certainty that it would, a rationalization that transformed lies into pre-truths; vindication awaited, as long as everyone stayed the course. It was the same sort of refrain offered by overseers of the Iraq War and repeated by their media tribunes: The war was constantly on the verge of turning a corner.

The consensus now is that the Iraq War was a mistake, a deviation born of post-9/11 madness. In reality, its an endeavor that captures the spirit of an age of grift. It was a big con that heralded a thousand more.

Mattis should have served as a guardrail for this kind of malfeasance. A corporate board is, in theory, responsible for oversight. That was certainly the sort of reputational validation Holmes sought in assembling her board with statesmen of Mattis caliber, including George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. But as the general had done in Iraq, he went along with an ill-conceived scheme. One of Mattis problems with invading Fallujah in 2004 was poor intelligence: They were tasked to take the city without knowing where the enemy was hiding, he wrote. Yet at Holmes trial in 2021, Mattis testified that for all his time serving on the board of Theranos, Holmes was his sole source of information about the company.

Today, Holmes is serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, a very rare example of a corrupt CEO doing time. Mattis went on to serve under Trump, loyally standing by through the Muslim ban, Charlottesville, and family separations. Meanwhile, the type of public deception the Iraq War helped rationalize, license, and unleash has only compounded and escalated in corporate America, from schemes run by Goldman Sachs to the insurance giant AIG and the crypto superfund FTX.

Perhaps it has worked out that way because so few people deceiving the public have paid any appreciable legal, political, or reputational price. Paul Yingling, an Army armor officer who served in Iraqs Nineveh province, wrote in 2007 that a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. From the vantage of 2023, it feels quaint that anyone ever thought it would be otherwise.

Bush and Cheney have been functionally rehabilitated by the Trump presidency rather than viewed as its preconditions. One of the most important Democratic validators of the war is our current president. Cultural cues like these function as permission, something Holmes prosecutors evidently understood: They said they werent just seeking to convict Holmes, they wanted to deter future startup fraud schemes. The distance of 20 years makes it easier to see that the disaster of Iraq, combined with the impunity its architects enjoyed, proved that lying and scheming and enabling at ever-greater scale would result in no real reprisal for the powerful.

The prevailing consensus now is that the Iraq War was a mistake, a deviation born of post-9/11 madness. In reality, its an endeavor that captures the spirit of an age of grift. It was a big con built on cherished myths of American power, greatness, and justice that heralded a thousand more.

THE BIGGEST LIES of the war, both self-deceptions and outright deceits, are indelible: Saddam Hussein had illicit stockpiles of the most dangerous weapons on the planet, meaningful ties to Al Qaeda, and a willingness to hand his secret weapons to the terrorist group responsible for the mass murder of 9/11. Bush stopped short of implicating Saddam in 9/11, but not by much, claiming a year after the attacks, You cant distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the War on Terror. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and 4,500 U.S. troops died for lies that the majority of American journalists, with the rare and important exceptions of Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, promoted rather than debunked.

But the occupation, once underway, floated on a raft constructed from other, less conspicuous lies. The Pentagon initially denied the existence of an Iraqi insurgency and called its adversaries Saddam dead-enders or, more astonishingly, Anti-Iraqi Forces. Bushs portrayal of our foes as people representing violence and innocent death papered over those same disgraces brought about by the Americans, from torture and sexual assault at the Abu Ghraib prison to the massacres of civilians at places like Haditha, Samarra, and Nisour Square. At least one unscrupulous service member even understood a #Mattisism as permission for atrocity. In 2004, a Marine lieutenant named Ilario Pantano wrote one of Mattis favorite refrains, No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy attributed to Sulla, one of the men responsible for destroying the Roman Republic on cardboard that he left on the windshield of a car containing the bodies of Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil, two unarmed Iraqi men he executed.

Through it all, the U.S. resisted acknowledging that its presence was the central cause of the violence it encountered. Americans had no shortage of obstacles to identify, from the scars Iraqi society bore from Saddams fear-based rule to the psychotic religious fanatics who rushed into the post-Saddam vacuum, but it was harder to admit that we were the problem and not the solution. In 2005, Ahmed S. Hashim of the International Institute for Strategic Studies spoke with a fighter battling the Americans at Tal Afar. Prior to the U.S. invasion, the man had been a teacher. He explained to Hashim, simply, What would you do if I had invaded your country?

The Iraqi novelist Mortada Gzar told me that Iraqis are more likely to describe the U.S. presence as an occupation today than they were during the formal occupation of 2003-11. It will not sound neutral if I dont use the term occupier in my social media, unlike 10 years ago, explains Gzar. I didnt initially understand that, having reported from Iraq back then, when it was indisputably a country under foreign occupation. But Amal al-Jubouri, an Iraqi poet, reminded me that I didnt see Iraq through Iraqi eyes.

Many Iraqi writers who were inside Iraq did not dare to name the American invasion as an occupation, al-Jubouri says. The word was dangerous. That may lead those who dared to utter it to a tragic fate through the unknown informers of the new Iraqi political process and the occupiers who reacted immediately by arresting and torturing Iraqis if they received any such reports. The Western press, she continues, called it the insurgency instead of resistance. I certainly did.

ABOUT EIGHT YEARS after Mattis left Iraq, an Army officer responsible for ensuring Theranos compliance with medical regulations, Lt. Col. David Shoemaker, came on the receiving end of a #Mattisism. Mattis wasnt yet on Theranos board. He was by then a military celebrity commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Southwest Asia and having met Holmes after giving a speech in San Francisco, he sought to test Theranos blood analysis on troops in Afghanistan. Shoemaker, who played a key role in the process by which that would happen, grew concerned that Holmes was looking to route around certification from the Food and Drug Administration. He told Holmes he couldnt approve a test without it.

When Shoemaker went to the FDA himself, prompting an FDA inspector to show up at Theranos office, Holmes erupted to Mattis, according to Carreyrous book Bad Blood. Who is LTC Shoemaker and what is going on here? Mattis emailed staff. The general referred to Shoemakers due diligence as this new obstacle and took personal umbrage at it. Shoemakers colleagues presented him with a certificate of survival for having the courage to stand up to Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive, Carreyrou writes. Though he didnt even work with Holmes at the time, Mattis directed more skepticism at Shoemaker than he ever would at her.

Mattis joined Theranos board after retiring from the military, which was an unremarkable transition. Several generals who had made their names in Iraq and the associated post-9/11 wars matriculated to corporate America. Surge architect David Petraeus became a partner at private-equity giant KKR. NSA director Keith Alexander took a board seat at Amazon. Stanley McChrystal of the Joint Special Operations Command started a business consultancy. After generations of a revolving door between the defense industry and the military, generals going corporate was normal. Businessmen believed that they were generals of capitalism. Generals, enjoying a worshipful post-9/11 climate, could be forgiven for believing that it was time to collect a reward after all they had given America.

And corporate America was more than ready to give them their payday and reap the reputational rewards. Holmes attracted the enthusiasm of bipartisan titans of American statecraft for her big con. Theranos has assembled what may be, in terms of public service, the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history, Fortune enthused in 2014. In addition to Mattis, who invested $85,000 of his own money, Shultz, and Kissinger, Theranos boasted Defense Secretary William Perry, GOP Senate leader Bill Frist, and Adm. Gary Roughead, who had been the Navys senior officer. Their high standings in elite circles contributed to the misperception of Theranos probity.

Donald Trump, a rare soul who truly merits the term con artist, sought to exploit that same perception. Enlisting Mattis as his defense secretary, Trump boasted that he was teaming up with a guy known as Mad Dog. It was a nickname Mattis had let his chosen media interlocutors know he used ironically, but Trump wasnt known for reading between lines. Unlike his rapport with Holmes, Mattis had a fraught relationship with Trump. He cast his own arrival at the Pentagon as a force of continuity, and the foreign-policy establishment, fearful of Trumps chaotic potential, cheered. Mattis escalated the Afghanistan war once again, intensifying the bombing of Somalia and, to his credit, arguing Trump out of torturing detainees. But along with his White House ally H.R. McMaster, Mattis also pivoted U.S. foreign policy in a crucial way, issuing a defense strategy for the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition. To bipartisan acclaim, it recontextualized American foreign policy as an imperial struggle against Russia, which Trump resisted, and China, which Trump embraced.

Beyond that, the line between resistance and complicity for Mattis was blurry. When Trump signed an infamous order preventing people from several Muslim-majority nations from traveling to the U.S., he did so at the Pentagon, with Mattis applauding over his shoulder. Mattis acquiesced to Trumps ban on military service from transgender troops and deployed roughly 5,800 service members to the southern border in support of an election-timed hysteria over migration. He finally quit in 2018, because he believed Trump to be insufficiently committed to the American empire not, say, a year earlier, when Trump hailed a white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville.

Mattis resignation gambit worked, in a way. He stepped down to stop Trump from withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria, and Trump backed off. The result has been that U.S. troops remain there without any defined mission. Sometimes a vague backstop to an ISIS resurgence, sometimes an insurance policy to another Iraqi military collapse, something like 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria face attacks from an evolving list of enemies, most recently militias backed by Iran. Its a version of the residual force Mattis and many others sought from the beginning. And it leaves Iraqis with the contradictory legacy of Americans who neither leave nor deliver on their grandiose promises of a brighter future. The U.S. presence is beyond the reach of Iraqs political institutions, as was proven when the U.S. refused to abide by a 2020 parliamentary vote to expel the troops.

This is all out of mind for American elites, who have long since moved on. Iraqis, who have paid the cost of Americans delusions, dont have that luxury. The war has created a country of multiplied mafias, al-Jubouri says. The middle class totally disappeared, and there are now two categories of people. Those who participated in the American political process and their adherents became the new Iraqi elites the ordinary people from all backgrounds, the majority, are living under the poverty line.

Meanwhile, a familiar form of capitalism has reshaped liberated Iraq. The streets and gardens of Baghdad were the lungs for its inhabitants to breathe the blessed smell of their flowers and blossoms of their trees. Gardens were the identity of their capital, remembers al-Jubouri. The gardens after the invasion turned into investment projects for the new investors. The large houses of the Baghdadis have been sold with overexaggerated prices due to money laundering, to the extent that no Baghdadi citizen can afford to buy even a studio there.

She continues: Its the greed of the new Iraqi capitalism, which turned everything into an open auction, excluding only the oxygen; and if they can get it controlled, then even our breath will be for sale.

OBVIOUSLY, FRAUD IN AMERICA didnt begin with the invasion of Iraq. The country that gave the world P.T. Barnum, Ivan Boesky, junk-bond king Michael Milken, and Trump (who pardoned Milken) is no innocent babe constantly committing well-meaning blunders. Iraq belongs in a lineage of wars, American and otherwise, waged on false pretexts, from President Polks 1846 lie that American blood has been shed on American soil to invade Mexico thats how we got California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and parts of five other Western states to the inciting Gulf of Tonkin non-event in Vietnam.

So, to be clear, Iraq didnt cause Holmes to lie about Theranos ability to perform a battery of tests from a single drop of blood. But it supercharged an impulse that was already there. Capitalism, particularly its current incarnation, isnt much interested in the difference between truth and deception. Both Apple and Microsoft stole the windows-based graphical interface from Xerox, as University of Chicago economic historian Jonathan Levy recounts in his recent book, Ages of American Capitalism. When Steve Jobs confronted Bill Gates about Microsoft naming its operating system Windows, Gates shot back, We both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set only to find that you had already stolen it. That was who Holmes modeled herself after, down to the black turtlenecks Jobs favored. She was hardly unique in not caring about the distasteful aspects of one of modern Americas greatest corporate success stories.

Theranos appealed to Mattis because, he said, in triage, this could be very, very helpful. A far easier way to save troops lives would be not to wage imperial wars like the one America launched two decades ago.

As the Iraq War persisted, the fraud cycle back home accelerated. Bushs invasion roughly coincided with the era of accounting frauds at corporate giants like Tyco and WorldCom, which now seem like footnotes. Eclipsing them all was a massive scheme in which banks turned their questionable loans during a housing bubble into financial instruments that concealed the fundamental toxicity of these assets. It devastated peoples homes, savings, and nearly the entire global economy in 2008. The subsequent Wall Street bailout reinforced the lesson of elite impunity that Iraq taught.

Carreyrous exposure of Theranos seemed to reveal a generational corporate deceit. Lately, it seems more like a new normal. Three years after Theranos collapse, Tesla CEO Elon Musk baselessly tweeted he had funding secured to take the electric-vehicle company private, swelling and then crashing Teslas stock price and seemingly violating the Securities and Exchange Act. His lies caused regular people to lose millions and millions of dollars, argued an attorney for Tesla shareholders in January during a class-action trial. Even as his trial was set to begin, Musk sold $3.6 billion worth of Tesla stock, The Wall Street Journal reported, weeks before the company announced that it delivered significantly fewer vehicles in 2022 than it had forecast. In an unsurprising turn, Musk was acquitted of wrongdoing on Feb. 3.

Last November, as Elizabeth Holmes waited for Judge Edward Davila to sentence her, another dizzying fraud began to unravel, this one involving the cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX. Pitched as a trustworthy exchange of a new and often unstable asset, FTX siphoned money to a crypto-trading firm co-owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, prompting an $8 billion solvency crisis. Like Holmes and Musk, FTX founder Bankman-Fried had enjoyed years of fawning media coverage that amounted to a cult of personality. He had thrown huge amounts of money into Democratic politics and media organizations like Vox, ProPublica, and Semafor, in the apparent hope of convincing an audience presumed to be skeptical of a digital currency favored by the right that crypto and specifically FTX was a safe bet. Even a federal indictment has not stopped Bankman-Fried from publicly insisting upon his blamelessness. After all, people like him usually get away with it.

None of these economic and geopolitical disasters have persuaded America to dim its global ambitions. The Biden administration, unencumbered by Trumps fondness for Putin, has embraced Great Power Competition, outlined in the Mattis Pentagons defense strategy. With Biden decoupling the U.S. economy from Chinas and rallying Europe against Russias aggression in Ukraine, Great Power Competition is coalescing into a commitment to wage two Cold Wars simultaneously, a global struggle for control of the 21st century.

Theranos appealed to Mattis because, he explained in court, in triage, where you have casualties going in, this could be very, very helpful for medical personnel if it could do what she said it could do. A far easier way to save troops lives would be not to wage imperial wars like the ones America launched two decades ago, and that continue to this day.

Most of the Iraqis see the occupation has yet to end properly, says Gzar, who tried to illustrate this twilight state between occupation and sovereignty in his 2020 novel, Fadhel and Abass. One of the characters describes the case to the leaving U.S. troops, he summarizes in an email interview. He told them, what you are doing is just like a doctor who opened up an ill body. He removed the cancerous tumor, and instead of closing the open body, the doctor just left, celebrating that his job is nicely done! But they left the hollow body to die.

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The U.S. Invaded Iraq 20 Years Ago. The Grift Just Keeps Going ...

The U.N. chief has praised Iraq for repatriating citizens detained in neighboring Syria on suspicion of ties to the Islamic State group during a rare visit to Baghdad

BAGHDAD -- The United Nations chief on Wednesday praised Iraq for repatriating citizens detained in neighboring Syria on suspicion of ties to the Islamic State group and pledged international support for the countrys efforts to regain stability and security.

U.N. Secretary-General Antnio Guterres spoke to reporters during a rare visit to Baghdad, his first in six years, ahead of this months 20-year anniversary of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The years that followed Saddam's overthrow saw widespread sectarian violence and the rise first of al-Qaida in the region and later, the extremist Islamic State group, which at one point controlled wide swaths of territory, including Iraqs second-largest city, Mosul. We recognize that the challenges Iraq is facing did not arise overnight, Guterres said, speaking at a news conference alongside Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. They are the product of decades of oppression, war, terrorism, sectarianism and foreign interference.

He praised the formation of Iraq's new government in October, after a yearlong political stalemate, and the country's ambitious and forward-looking reform agenda. He also pledged U.N. support for systematic governance reforms and for measures to address Iraqs looming water crisis, which experts expect to be exacerbated by climate change.

Guterres commended Iraq for repatriating its citizens from northeastern Syria, particularly from al-Hol camp, which holds tens of thousands of women and children primarily the wives, widows and children of IS fighters in what human rights groups have described as dangerous and squalid living conditions.

On Sunday, Iraq repatriated some 582 people from the camp to a rehabilitation center near the town of Qayara, south of Mosul.

Guterres described Iraqs actions as an example for the world while noting that many women and children remain stranded in desperate conditions.

He called for implementation of promised measures that would allow members of the Yazidi religious minority displaced by IS attacks to return to their homes in the town of Sinjar and for the central government in Baghdad and Iraq's northern semi-autonomous Kurdish government to reach agreements on contentious budget issues and on a law governing oil and gas deals.

Guterres was to visit the Iraqi Kurdish region's government and in the city of Irbil on Thursday, and meet with Kurdish leaders.

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UN chief praises moves toward stability in rare Iraq visit

For children and adults alike, Star Wars represented the defining film of a generation but most children didnt grow up to lead a paramilitary force as the son of a brutal authoritarian.

From 1995 until his death in Mosul in 2003, Uday Hussein, the erratic eldest son of the countrys former president, led the paramilitary group Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddams Men of Sacrifice.

Saddam admired science fiction movies like Star Wars, but it was Uday who took his admiration of the series to the extreme, infusing elements of the films characters into the Fedayeens uniforms. Made up of the elder Husseins most loyal supporters, the roughly 40,000-strong group adopted one prominent look from the series most notable villain Darth Vader.

Helmets were made of black fibre-glass with a deep neck & ear guard, culminating to a pronounced point to the centre of the peak, according to a description from the Imperial War Museums. Above the right side is fitted a black rubber oval (fitted upside down in this case) showing a silhouette of Saddam Hussein wearing his military style beret.

U.S. troops walk by scattered helmets and ammunition at the former Fedayeen Saddam headquarters in Kut in April 2003. (Wally Santana/AP)

Also on the rubber oval was Arabic writing that translated to The Lord, The Homeland, The Leader. Regardless of appearance, the helmet offered virtually no ballistic value, a lack of protection Darth Vader would no doubt find disturbing.

The helmets were further described as having an impression of being sinister to the civilian population, an appearance that was reflected in the groups ruthless attacks on political opponents and extrajudicial killings, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Uday also employed the group to carry out the beheadings of approximately 200 women as part of an anti-prostitution campaign, according to a State Department report.

In the end, the groups guerrilla attacks on coalition forces following the 2003 invasion may have surprised military leaders and policy makers in Washington, but the Fedayeen Saddams efforts would ultimately not prevent the units dissolution.

Observation Post is the Military Times one-stop shop for all things off-duty. Stories may reflect author observations.

Zamone Z Perez is a rapid response reporter and podcast producer at Defense News and Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.

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How Star Wars influenced Uday Husseins paramilitary unit in Iraq

The United States is good at getting involved in wars and not as good at getting out of them.

A year on, the Russia-Ukraine war has no end in sight. The war is at a semi-stalemate, and both Russia and Ukraine are sticking to their demands. Ukraine has been able to defend itself against Russian aggression in large part due to the $29.8 billion worth of weapons and equipment that the US has sent so far. While the US has hit some limits, it is sending ever more advanced weaponry and provides Ukraine with intelligence to help it target Russia more effectively. Ukraine cannot continue the war without Western military and economic support.

All of which raises the question of whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict is entering forever war territory.

The USs post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan turned into decades-long conflicts because the objectives kept shifting, because they were guided by ideological goals, and because they were enabled by legal authorizations that gave policymakers room to expand the wars. The situation in Ukraine is obviously different from US engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan for one, the US does not have troops on the ground in Ukraine. But when I asked former high-ranking military officials and national security experts about the risk of protracted war in Ukraine, they told me that those other forever war factors are currently present in the USs support for the Ukraine war.

The Biden administration does not view the war as endless. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in October, certainly we dont want to see a forever war, and he blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the wars continuation. But theres a lot of time between here and forever. And in statement after statement after statement, officials describe the USs enduring commitment to Ukraine. (Neither the White House nor the Pentagon replied to interview requests.)

This is going to be a generational conflict between the West and Russia, says historian Michael Kimmage of Catholic University, who has researched Putins strategy in the war. The further the West moves in, the more Putin is going to be motivated to keep on going, he told me. This is going to be the mother of all forever wars, because of the nature of the adversary.

So what can the US learn from its interventions in its Middle East forever wars? In the first year of the Iraq War, a young Gen. David Petraeus said he would repeat the mantra to himself, Tell me how this ends.

These days, Petraeus is retired from active duty and shares on social media daily Ukraine war situation reports from the Institute for the Study of War, where he is a board member. I think the most important question has to do with how one might see this war ending, Petraeus wrote in an email. Related to that is the critical question of what needs to be done to convince Vladimir Putin that the war in Ukraine is not sustainable for Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine and also on the home front in Russia.

But there are other ways of posing the question. Thomas Pickering, a former career ambassador who served in Russia and rose to be undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, says the potential for a nuclear conflict means the US does have to think about whether it would make sense to try to terminate the war on an advantageous but not perfect basis.

I dont [think] Ukraine has to become a forever war or even a frozen conflict; in fact, we need to do everything that we and our allies and partners can to enable Ukraine and ensure that this does not become a forever war, Petraeus, now a partner at the private equity firm KKR, added.

Talking about how and why Ukraine is becoming a forever war, then, is a fine place to start.

The global war on terrorism was a sprawling and ill-defined project.

After 9/11, the US was responding to an attack on its soil, but then the George W. Bush administration expanded its international campaign to target not just al-Qaeda but the concept of terrorism one that somehow the US is still fighting today. Though President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, US troops are still in the Middle East, and many aspects of the counterterrorism wars endure.

The way that Bushs interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began made that possible. Congress approved a joint resolution against threats to the US homeland in 2001 that was so broad that it evolved as the threats did. That vote authorized the use of military force against nations, organizations, or persons connected to the 9/11 attacks, and in 2002, Congress passed another broad authorization on Iraq that two decades later is used to counter the Islamic State terrorist group.

The USs goals in Iraq, for example, ran the gamut of eliminating the risk of purported weapons of mass destruction, regime change, nation-building, countering Iranian influence, and then debilitating ISIS. US troops remain there in 2023. And when there were opportunities to end the initial invasion of Afghanistan like when hundreds of Taliban fighters surrendered to the US the Bush administration rejected them. Even now, 18 months after the US withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan and more than a year after the US assassinated perhaps the last known planner of the 2001 attack, the initial authorization has yet to be repealed.

As Rep. Barbara Lee, the only lawmaker who voted against the authorization of military force in Afghanistan in 2001, warned just days after the 9/11 attacks: We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.

Some of the lessons of the Bush and Obama years seem to have been put into action. Strategists now recognize that a small footprint is better than a massive US presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, and that much can be accomplished by partnering with another countrys military (instead of having boots on the ground). From the first 20 years of the war on terrorism, the US learned well that corruption among recipients of aid is corrosive to US interests. That commanders on the ground offer overly rosy assessments of progress in a self-deceptive process that ends up extending the war is now a truism.

Throughout, the American people are somewhat willing to ignore ongoing US wars, even when US soldiers are deeply involved.

But perhaps what the US ought to have learned from the forever wars is the importance of practicing humility and not underestimating ones enemies. A more difficult lesson to put into practice is the importance of incorporating dialogue and negotiations with adversaries into policy.

Mara Karlin, a top civilian strategist appointed by Biden to the Pentagon, wrote a 2021 book on what the US learned from the post-9/11 wars. In The Inheritance: Americas Military After Two Decades of War, she details how wars without clear ends affect the morale, preparedness, and even civilian control of the military. Karlin warns of the danger of overreacting to threats and attacks, as the United States did in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks and of under-responding, as the United States has done in its persistent inability to recognize and act on the growing security threats posed by China and Russia to the U.S.-led global order over the last decade or so.

Karlin didnt respond to a request for comment. But that a key Pentagon leader in 2021 worried more about a US underreaction to Russia than the potential for another endless war shows how committed a leading strategist in the Biden administration may be toward a long-haul fight.

The striking parallel between the USs long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ongoing war in Ukraine is the rhetoric surrounding the conflict.

The US role in supporting Ukraine has been framed as ideological. Biden from the get-go described the conflict in terms of good versus evil, democracy against autocracy.

Does the US stand for the defense of democracy? Biden asked again in his recent State of the Union address. For such a defense matters to us because it keeps the peace and prevents open season for would-be aggressors to threaten our security and prosperity. And senior State Department official Victoria Nuland wrote in testimony to Congress last month that Ukraines fight is about so much more than Ukraine; it is about the world our own children and grandchildren will inherit.

The Biden administration may believe that. But rhetoric like that is also how wars continue in perpetuity. Its how the objectives creep, the goalposts shift. Ideological struggles are not so easy to win.

By some metrics, the objectives that the US set out to achieve in Ukraine have already been achieved. Christopher Chivvis, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained that the US in the past year has managed to avoid a direct war with Russia, made Russia suffer a strategic defeat, and kept the NATO alliance unified. Ukraine has also maintained its sovereign independence.

Continued unqualified support is good in the sense that it puts pressure on the Russians to try to moderate their more extreme objectives, Chivvis told me. But its not likely to get the Ukrainians to think seriously about restraining their own war aims, because they see the whole set of Western nations backing them to the hilt.

Though many experts told me that its time to begin plotting the contours of talks between Russia and Ukraine, neither side sees value in negotiating right now.

The types of military support the West is giving to Ukraine including US and German tanks and British promises to train Ukrainian pilots on their fighter jets acknowledge this reality and could help contribute to it, argues Chivvis. The most advanced and heavy weaponry, like the USs Abrams tanks, likely wont arrive till next spring. The trend is toward more and more military support to the Ukrainians, and they have no real reason as of now to limit their own war objectives, says Chivvis, who previously worked as a US intelligence officer in Europe. So its hard to see how it ends at this point.

And yet, the longer the war goes on, the more people will die in Ukraine and Russia, and the risks for the war to spiral out of control are real. As Pickering put it, the US risks stumbling into an endless war punctuated by nuclear use.

The war to defend Ukraine may be more coherent than the war on terrorism, but it also appears ill-defined in terms of goals and strategies. Analysts who might not agree on much else do agree that there isnt enough of a debate on what outcomes the US seeks.

The Biden administration, for its unprecedented mustering of allies through NATO, Europe, and elsewhere, has left some gaps unfilled. Deferring to Ukraine, as Bidens national security leaders have consistently done in public interviews, is not a strategy.

Less attention has been paid to how this conflict might end in a way that serves US interests in Europe and the world, according to Samuel Charap, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. And those trying to have that conversation about how to end the war, he told me, are sometimes cast as Russian sympathizers. But there is an urgency to have these difficult conversations. We know that, for example, conflicts that last more than a year are more than likely to continue to go on for 10 years, Charap told me.

I dont think that we should tolerate a war that stretches on for years, because if we do, it means that we are tolerating greater risk that the war will spread, said Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama defense official who now directs the McCain Institute think tank. If we knowingly accept a war that will go on for years, then I think we are taking on a moral hazard because Ukrainians are dying every month this war goes on.

The toll on human life is unfathomable, and the long-term effects on the country will be many. Kurt Volker, a former ambassador to NATO now at the Atlantic Council think tank, is worried about how the wartime mentality has forever changed Ukrainian institutions. Were going to have to help Ukraine get back to normal, he told me.

You have the presidential administration basically running everything. You have one centralized media operation for news for the country, which is highly censored, Volker said. These are things that cant go on in a normal society. So theyre going to have to decentralize. Theyre going to have to open new media outlets, going to have to have political pluralism in terms of political parties and competition all kinds of things that they are not currently grappling with.

The rebuilding of Ukraine will require massive investments, too. The countrys energy infrastructure will need to be rebuilt, and just keeping its economy afloat in the meantime may require up to $5 billion a month, the International Monetary Fund has estimated. After the hot conflict ends, the US commitment will likely continue. But an end to the conflict seems increasingly hard to find.

A Defense Department leader, Celeste Wallander, was recently asked at a Washington think tank event whether the Pentagon is planning for a negotiated outcome or an outright Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. It is difficult ahead of time to precisely predict how an armed conflict will end, Wallander said, though she did emphasize that it ends in Russias strategic failure, no question, and that the US will support the choices made by Ukraine as to whether it would negotiate with Russia.

But Wallander and her colleagues in the Biden administration have left open the question of how the US would extricate itself from this conflict. Without having a clear answer of how this ends or how the US will get out, they presuppose that Washington will be in this war for the long haul.

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Ukraine war: Whats the exit path for the US? - Vox

In 2013, MPs voted narrowly to reject a motion that would have allowed David Cameron to authorise military action in Syria. A year earlier, President Obama warned that the deployment of chemical weapons would be a red line. They were used; he did nothing. Half a million people have died; terrible crimes have been committed. The war continues, but the dictator Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russia, has largely prevailed.

In 2014, a few months after the US, UK and their allies washed their hands of that country, Vladimir Putin launched his first invasion of Ukraine (via proxies) and annexed Crimea. One direct line can be traced back to these events, and forward to present bloodshed: the invasion of Iraq. That war, 20 years ago next month, is a standard text on diplomatic and military failure.

A quick reprise: after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 Tony Blair became the galvaniser-in-chief for the White House. He was spectacularly successful in assembling a coalition of the willing for the invasion of Afghanistan (those were the days when British prime ministers had clout). Within months, however, George W Bush, had turned his attentions elsewhere, announcing in his State of the Union address that he would go after the axis of evil, at the heart of which was Saddam Hussein.

Blair resolved he would never be blindsided by the Americans again. As I wrote in Blairs Wars, he told Bush as early as April 2002 at the presidents ranch in Crawford, Texas, that he would go along with him, come what may. The rest, as they say, is dodgy dossiers, spurious legal advice, elusive weapons of mass destruction and a disastrous occupation. All the various public inquiries that followed have corroborated this chain of events.

One of the most important changes enacted after Iraq was the requirement, pushed through by Gordon Brown, that prime ministers seek parliamentary approval for future interventions. In March 2011 MPs backed action in Libya, only two years later to refuse it on Syria. The shock was immense. Bullish bombastic Britain doesnt do such things; it fights the good fight. That, at least, has always been its self-image.

Asked by the BBC to present a special radio programme on the vote, I was surprised when Blair agreed to be interviewed (he had blanked me for a decade). He was incredibly eager to be heard, to be understood. I quoted Cameron back to him, saying that people had felt let down by Iraq. As is his wont, Blair disagreed, asking in return what might happen to a world without a referee?

Iraq has left scars that refuse to heal. Libya was a smaller intervention, equally counter-productive. Afghanistan was the longest of them all, until it collapsed with the humiliating flight from Kabul in August 2021. Having given them false hope and fleeting security, the US decided that international forces should quit suddenly, leaving Afghans at the mercy of the Taliban.

These interventions and others, such as in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, were wrapped up in the doctrine of liberal, or humanitarian, intervention. It arose from the horror of a global community looking the other way as people were being slaughtered in Bosnia and Rwanda. It morphed into a messianic zeal to remove dictators and install democracy, at the barrel of the gun.

That is no more. On his appointment as secretary of state in March 2021, Antony Blinken declared: We will not promote democracy through costly military interventions or by attempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force. We have tried these tactics in the past. However well intentioned, they havent worked.

When the United Nations general assembly voted last March to condemn Putins invasion of Ukraine, some 35 countries chose to abstain, including pivotal states such as India, Pakistan and South Africa. The ability of the US and its partners to bring the global south along with it is vastly diminished. Some are less than impressed by the do the right thing tap on the shoulder form of diplomacy; some have long been non-aligned. Some see business opportunities with China and Russia. Many continue to cite Iraq as the basis of their suspicion of western intentions.

As for Britain, it has taken a while decades in fact but is it finally beginning to accept a role in the world more in keeping with its actual status rather than self-delusion? It cannot realistically pursue a global foreign and security policy while mired in the western worlds sickliest economy. It is no longer capable of mounting a military intervention of any note. It knows it has to prioritise.

The childish Johnsonian global Britain mantra is being replaced by patient diplomacy. Britain is no longer interested in dictating or telling others what they should do, declared James Cleverly, foreign secretary, in December. Instead it wants relationships based on shared interests and common principles. There is nothing ignoble in that.

Which brings me to Germany, which thinks harder than most, that takes the practice of democracy far more seriously than most. Yet when it came to their response to Putins invasion, many in that country drew the wrong lessons from history. The Germans instinctive caution about military action led them to refuse to take part in the Iraq folly. Yet it is also responsible for their dithering over Ukraine. Never Again War Nie wieder Krieg was not the conclusion to draw from the Nazi era. Yes, war is an option to be avoided where possible; yet succumbing to dictatorship, war crimes and aggression is an even worse outcome.

The west continues to show double standards, to be selective in its choice of allies and adversaries. Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most egregious case in point. No matter how terrible its human rights abuses, the kingdom is never touched. I am not advocating a return to the mindset or the actions of two decades ago. The days of the west setting itself up as the worlds policeman are long gone. Much wider alliances need to be built.

Putin has inadvertently reminded the world of its duty to protect. Such has been the despondency about the state of global democracy, so inexorable has been the rise of populism (aided and abetted by the likes of Putin), few expected such resistance from Ukraine and its allies. The response over the past year has been collective, principled and circumspect in some ways excessively circumspect.

Iraq was a terrible war, but to cite it in perpetuity as a reason for countries never to confront dictators is to give up on values that are worth fighting for.

John Kampfner is the author of Blairs Wars and Why the Germans Do It Better

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Iraq was a terrible war but it cannot excuse our failure to confront ...