Angry war veterans slammed President Donald Trump’s “unnecessary” war in Iran, which, they say, is propped up by “lies.”
The president teamed up with Israel to launch the conflict on Feb. 28. Since then, thousands of people have died, including at least 13 U.S. service members, and a spiralling energy crisis has erupted. The conflict echoes the Iraq War, which began on March 20, 2003.
The Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, remains blocked, and other countries in the region are being drawn into the conflict. Worst of all, the Trump administration seems to be running out of ideas, with the promised early exit looking increasingly unlikely.
“The lack of a clear strategy or end state only undermines U.S. credibility globally,” Jason Dozier, Atlanta City Council Member and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, told the Daily Beast. “As an Iraq War veteran, I’ve seen firsthand the costs of conflicts like this, and I had hoped those lessons would guide future decisions. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
John Kamin, who served in Iraq, recalled how he felt during the conflict.
Kamin told the Beast: “One of the daydreams I had in Iraq as a 21-year-old, and it was so grotesque I could only hold it for a brief moment, was imagining a future where the next generation would be fighting the same battles that we did. As we aged out and got fat, our children would take our place. It was a thought I could not hold... just too hard to imagine that our blood and sacrifice would not make America wise enough to spare those that followed. This hurts us all.”
According to Defense Department statistics, the Iraq war killed 4,492 U.S. soldiers and injured an additional 32,292. An estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians died.
Naveed Shah, political director for Common Defense and an Army veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, said he sees through the facade of Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and General Dan Caine, the main architects of the operation. “I deployed to Iraq 2009. I watched this country sell us a war on lies, and I watched my fellow soldiers pay the price for it,” he told the Beast.
He said Trump, Hegseth, and Caine are “running the same play by manufacturing urgency, failing to establish a clear objective, no exit strategy, and putting our service members in harm’s way.”
Invoking the messy and protracted Iraq War, Shah added, “History repeats itself because power-hungry leaders never learn and regular people pay the price. Veterans across this country see exactly what’s happening, and we’re not going to stay quiet while another generation is handed a war that politicians and their children won’t have to fight.”
Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona is a former Navy SEAL who left college to enlist the week after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. He was an early GOP critic of the war that has caused a schism between “America First” Republicans and MAGA loyalists.
“As somebody who knows a lot of friends that didn’t come home and a lot of Gold Star families, that’s why the week before the attack, I was actually one of the ones that was talking about caution and why we needed to avoid at all costs getting into another long, drawn-out Middle Eastern war,” he said earlier this month.
However, Crane voted against a war powers resolution that would have halted attacks on Iran unless Trump got congressional approval. That came a day after the Senate blocked a similar war powers resolution.
It was spearheaded by Trump’s top critics, Republican Reps. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, and Democrat Ro Khanna of California. Massie predicted the support for Trump’s conflict would waver quickly: “A war is never more popular than it is on the first day. And I think enthusiasm for this will decline.”
Indeed, support is in the gutter outside of his MAGA base. They are clinging to the president’s insistence that it is a “short-term” conflict, according to a fresh Politico poll. Trump predicted an exit after a maximum of five weeks, but three weeks in, there is no end in sight.
Crane’s comments came a day after an Iranian attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia killed American Sergeant Benjamin Pennington, 26. Since then, six more U.S. service members have been killed, taking the total to 13. Officials in Iran say that almost 1,500 people, mostly civilians, have been killed during “Operation Epic Fury.”
Chris Purdy is the CEO and Founder of The Chamberlain Network, a non-profit veteran-led organization that aims to safeguard democracy. Chris served for eight years in the Army National Guard, where he was deployed to Iraq in 2011.
He told the Daily Beast that Trump has got the country into another war in the Middle East on “fictional” pretences.
“The Iraq war was sold to the American public as a necessary to stop Saddam from using nuclear weapons, even though there’s no evidence he had them. Now, 23 years later, the U.S. is once again drawn into a war over fictional nuclear weapons in Iran,” Purdy said.
The Iraq war began in the spring of 2003, with a U.S.-led coalition invasion to remove Saddam Hussein. Officials justified that war by claiming that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction and was actively pursuing nuclear capability.
Trump has continually justified his war by saying that Iran was close to producing nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. “The major thing is that they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told MS NOW on Friday morning.
Experts and his own administration have contradicted the president on this point. In an assessment from May last year, a month before Trump’s first strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said it would actually take nearly a decade for Iran to produce such weaponry.
“The American people are tired of the forever wars and the politicians who continually drag us into them,” Purdy continued.
Dr. Maggie Seymour joined the Marine Corps in 2007 after her cousin, also a Marine, was killed in Iraq. She deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and then Kuwait as an intelligence officer.
She is worried about the long-term effects of Trump’s war. “Not only is this war unnecessary, there is a strong possibility that it causes more harm than good,” she told the Beast.
She said politicians have a bad habit of “using” service members, veterans, and their families as “political props.”
“This is an aggravated and dangerous extension of that,” she said. “It’s an egregious disregard for the life and livelihoods of our military community, not to mention the lives of thousands across the Middle East. Our military exists to protect the people of our country, and to uphold the constitution that governs us, not the whims of its politicians and political appointees.”
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Politico on Friday that Trump “campaigned proudly on his promise to deny the Iranian regime the ability to develop a nuclear weapon, which is what this noble operation is seeking to accomplish.”
Ingle failed to mention that Trump also promised to “expel the warmongers” from government and branded himself as the “peace” candidate.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the war was meticulously planned, rather than haphazard. “Thanks to a detailed planning process, the entire administration is and was prepared for any potential action taken by the terrorist Iranian regime,” she told the Daily Beast.
She added that Trump knew that Iran would respond to his war by choking the world’s energy supply. “President Trump knew full well that Iran would try to stop the freedom of navigation and free flow of energy, and he has already taken action to destroy over 40 minelaying vessels,” she said.
And despite muddled messaging on the war, she said the president has always been “clear” in his communication.
“President Trump has been clear about the goals of this operation: destroy the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile and production capacity, annihilate the Iranian regime’s Navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” Kelly said.
“Unlike the years-long foreign entanglements of the past that lacked clear objectives, President Trump remains confident that these goals will be accomplished in swift fashion,” she explained.
