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The End of the Long War: A Look Beyond
It’s over. The long war is over. The last military casualties of the long war were babies, or yet to be born when the war started. They were the last soldiers to die in the course of this long war. We lost our way early in the war. Somewhere along the way, we decided we could establish democracies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, we do not understand either country, and there are still some troops in Iraq.
This was hubris and American exceptionalism. Afghanistan has defeated great powers because it is not a centralized society. There are other reasons, but for the most part, we still do not understand the country.
It is time to turn all that money we spent over there to nation-building, inwards. We have great needs in the United States. We need roads, we need schools, we need healthcare. The pandemic revealed bare inequalities that are deeply ingrained. Rather, they made these unavoidable. Climate change is here, with the kind of destructive power that is hardly surprising.
We lost troops. There were also civilians killed. Some of our veterans are angry because it looks like this was for nothing. It was for something. I remember exactly when the Global War on Terror started. My husband was deployed, and I was at home alone. My sister called and instantly I was awake.