Iraq Is a Terrible Place to Succumb to Sunken Costs Fallacy

When they say “The first
casualty of war is truth,” (source: nebulous, but often
misattributed to Aeschylus) we may tend
to assume the public’s trust is what’s being slaughtered in the
justifications for war. But let’s not forget how misguided foreign
wars like our misadventures in Iraq sold the same lies to the men
and women who actually put their lives on the line in the
military.

As the slow collapse of Iraq that has actually been happening
for months has sped up this past week, media outlets headed
out to capture the certain non-plussedness of veterans who served
rotations there. Yes, there’s bitterness. We’ve certainly heard
about it before, but it’s getting another airing given the current
situation. Here’s The
Boston Globe:

“I’m not surprised that this is happening. I think it was
somewhat inevitable,” said Chris Lessard, a 36-year-old Newton
firefighter who was a Marine machine-gunner in Iraq from 2004 to
2005. “But to see it’s been pretty much handed over, it’s
disheartening.”

Lessard said he believed in the US mission while he was fighting
in Iraq, based near Fallujah. But now, with the Iraqi Army in
disarray and Sunni and Shi’ite unable to work together, Lessard
does not want the United States to reenter a centuries-old conflict
that massive amounts of American money and military force could not
resolve.

“This is Iraq’s problem now,” Lessard said. “I don’t think we
should even give them one round of ammunition. They need to
govern.”

Not every Iraq veteran is able to look back now and accept that
the we are not the ones who will fix the country’s mess. The
Detroit Free Press found veterans who insisted that the
United States must
do something to help Iraq:

[Christopher] Kolomjec said there are no easy answers to the
current situation. He said U.S. forces long struggled to win the
support of the Iraqi people because they knew the Americans would
eventually leave and the insurgents would remain. But the U.S.
can’t ignore the situation.

“The one thing we can’t do is nothing,” he said. “You can’t just
turn your back on them.”

Kolomjec said he thinks the U.S. should provide air support to
the Iraqi army as it attempts to hold off the insurgents, but
putting American troops on the ground is a much more difficult
issue.

“I don’t think this country right now has the stomach for ground
troops. That’s my impression,” he said.

I would argue that it’s not the stomachs telling Americans no,
but their heads. Despite the absurd arguments from the war-drum
crowd that we needed to spend even more time in Iraq, we know
that’s not a rational response. The Iraqis are not children, and
their factional issues are theirs to deal with, not ours.
Additional actions in Iraq not only would cost more money that we
really can’t afford, but any sort of military action (even absent
ground troops) can risk American lives. The perfectly reasonable
resistance to further military action is a reflection of the grasp
of sunken costs in Iraq. The trillions of dollars spent in Iraq and
the loss of American lives and the permanent injuries so many have
suffered didn’t liberate the country. There is no rational reason
to believe that additional actions will result in a better
outcome.

I can’t even fathom what it must feel like to be in the position
of these veterans, to have lost arms, legs and friends in Iraq and
to watch what’s happening now. But we can’t turn lies (the reasons
for the Iraq war) into something noble by continuing to throw money
and people at Iraq to “fix” it. I don’t know how to fix the pain,
emotional and physical, veterans must feel over Iraq’s crumbling,
but I do know that we can’t make it better by spreading that pain
to even more veterans. That would be the likely outcome of
additional military action in Iraq.