Why not leave? I ask this question of myself and my friends that have served in the Middle East. What do we gain by being there? In Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan? Nothing. And no one I know that has served there is able to tell me any different. I know that there will be those reading this that will tell me that I’m wrong. Other than telling me the Establishment Warmongers that say, “If we don’t fight them there, we’ll be fighting them here.” Nonsense. Utter, complete, stupidity. There’s no Muslim force that’s going to storm the shores of America. Certainly, they can cause harm as we’ve seen them do in France, Belgium, and England, but our immigration policies are different than theirs.
I’m a conservative and believe that that which is not in the best interest of my country should be avoided. We went into Afghanistan to kill Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We did that, mostly. The problem is that the administration at the time thought that we could rebuild a 7th century society into a 21st century democracy. Nation building. What we’ve discovered in the proceeding years is that we are unable to make a people that has no interest into a Western democracy.
I wrote that in January of 2020. The draft sat in a folder for almost seven years, unfinished — it literally stops in the middle of a word. I never finished it because I never found the ending. I think I have it now, and it isn’t the one I expected: everything since has proven the first half right, including the one place where events overtook it.
Afghanistan, for instance. We did leave Afghanistan — in 2021, after twenty years, in a rout, with the Taliban walking back into Kabul before we were even gone. That isn’t a refutation of what I wrote, it’s the receipt. The mission I described — kill al-Qaeda — was done early. The other seventeen or eighteen years were the nation building, and the nation we built lasted about eleven days.
But here’s the thing I didn’t understand in 2020, and it’s the thing that explains all the rest of it. Look at a map of the Middle East in 1914. Not one of the countries we have fought in, garrisoned, or argued about for a century — not Iraq, not Syria, not Jordan, not Kuwait, not the Emirates — existed. Not one. The land that is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel was Ottoman territory, provinces of one empire. What Iraq is today was three separate Ottoman provinces — Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul — stitched together under a British mandate handed out at San Remo in 1920. Iraq became a country in 1932. Saudi Arabia was proclaimed in 1932. Jordan became independent in 1946. Kuwait in 1961. The United Arab Emirates did not exist before December of 1971 — it is younger than I am. The treaty that fixed Syria’s eastern border describes it in the official text, without embarrassment, as “a straight line” across the desert. These peoples are ancient in one sense. But from our perspective, their countries are brand new — drawn up by European officials within living memory.
Iran is the exception that proves the rule. Iran was never a colony and never a mandate; in 1935 her government simply asked the world to use the name her own people had always used. Iran is an old country. The rest of them are new countries wrapped around old peoples — and that difference explains a great deal.
The peoples themselves were never blank slates waiting for us to write on them. They had their own civilization — tribal, Bedouin, not ours, and I mean nothing negative by that; they were happy the way they were, and they said so. The British spent years trying to run the place the British way, and were refused at every level that mattered. We arrived a century later with the same confidence and got the same answer. You cannot make people into something they are not, and have no interest in becoming, at the point of a rifle — no matter how good the rifle, or how sincere the intentions of the man carrying it.
Saudi Arabia is the exhibit. An absolute monarchy, unified by conquest and proclaimed in 1932, named after the family that still runs it. That isn’t a failure of Saudi society; monarchy is what they know, it’s the water they swim in. A few years ago the crown prince decreed that women could drive — the right took effect in June of 2018 — and the West treated it as the moon landing. For us, women not driving is a silly, backward thing. For them, changing it was a decision for their king to make, in their time. I’m not defending it. I’m pointing at the gap: we keep grading their society on our curve, and then acting surprised when they don’t care about the grade.
Iran is where it lands now. Last February the United States and Israel killed Khamenei and most of the men around him. Others simply took their places — within days. That’s what always happens, because the regime isn’t a man, it’s a structure, and structures replace their parts. The only way to actually break Iran is total: destroy the oil economy, wreck the pipelines, seize Kharg Island — the terminal almost all of Iran’s crude leaves through — and hold it. Nobody is going to do that, and everybody in Washington knows it. So instead we do the other thing, again: the threats, the buildups, the pauses. Nobody got it in Iraq. Nobody’s getting it in Iran. They’re not going to give up their way of life for ours.
And we still don’t leave. I want to be accurate about this, because it changed on me: on September 30th of this year, the last American combat troops left Iraq, twenty-three years after the invasion. You’ll notice nobody declared victory, because nothing was won — and you’ll notice where the mission went. The counter-ISIS headquarters packed up and moved next door, to Jordan, where we now keep some four thousand troops. Americans have been killed there, too — three of them, in an Iranian attack on a Jordanian air base this past July. We left Iraq the way we leave everywhere: sideways, into the country next door. In the region as a whole there are still roughly fifty thousand American troops, most of them there for the Iran war, with deployments now extended into 2027.
It isn’t just the Middle East, either. We keep about 55,000 troops in Japan and about 23,000 in South Korea. The excuse is China. Really? What are we going to do — attack China with those? They’re not a shield, they’re a habit. Once we’re there, we never leave. We just change the name of the mission.
I wasn’t against any of this before I went. I went believing it made sense. I came home changed — not 1960s anti-war, not marching about it; I saw enough, and the place is almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there. The men and women who have been there don’t have to explain it to each other. We just know.
Six years after I started this post and couldn’t finish the sentence, here’s the finished version: we are unable to make a people that has no interest into a Western democracy — and we are apparently unable to stop trying, or to stop staying.
I’m still tired.