In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Mohammad Mossadegh had nationalized his countryâs oil industry, which had been controlled by British interests under terms Iranians considered extraction disguised as commerce. The United States and Britain could not allow that precedent to stand. Operation Ajax removed Mossadegh, jailed him, and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a monarchy the CIA would spend the next 25 years propping up. The Shahâs secret police, SAVAK, trained by the CIA, became one of the most feared instruments of repression in the Middle East. When the Shah fell in 1979, and the Islamic Revolution swept him out, the hostility toward the United States was not irrational. It was historical. Iranians had watched us overthrow their government. They were not going to let it happen again.
That is where the hostage crisis came from. When President Carter admitted the Shah to the United States for medical treatment, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans for 444 days. Carter ordered a rescue mission. Eight helicopters flew to a remote staging site in the Iranian desert called Desert One. A mid-air collision and fire killed eight American servicemen and ended the mission before it reached Tehran. The failure helped cost Carter the presidency and branded Iran as unfinished business in the minds of Washingtonâs foreign policy establishment for the next four and a half decades. Desert One is the original wound. Every strategic miscalculation since has been shaped, in part, by the perceived humiliation of those burning helicopters in the Iranian desert. A foreign policy elite that could never accept the lesson that we caused the conditions that produced our own humiliation.
I was born in 1984. Five years earlier, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The United States responded by funding and arming the Afghan mujahideen, a proxy war strategy considered a great success when the Soviets withdrew in 1989. What we built did not disappear when the Cold War ended. The networks we funded, the weapons we supplied, the infrastructure of militant organization we helped create: it metastasized. By 2001, it had found us. My generation was in high school on September 11th. I enlisted in the Navy at 18.
In 2016, I read a book that gave what Iâd lived through a name. Andrew Bacevichâs Americaâs War for the Greater Middle East is a military history written by a West Point graduate and Army colonel who lost his son in Iraq. His thesis is simple and devastating: from the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What changed was the Carter Doctrine, his 1980 declaration that the Persian Gulf was a vital U.S. national security interest, that disorder in the Islamic world would be managed through military force. Carter lit a fuse, Bacevich argues, without knowing where it led. Every administration since has followed the same playbook, failed, and handed the next administration a worse situation. It is not a series of separate wars. It is one war. It has been running since 1980. My entire adult life has been inside it.
I studied political science because I wanted to understand why we went to Iraq. What I found was that Iraq wasnât an aberration. It was the latest installment of a strategy that had been failing, visibly and repeatedly, for two decades before the towers fell. Reading Bacevich in 2016, with a careerâs worth of deployments behind me, was the experience of finally seeing the whole map at once. Everything I had witnessed made sense as part of a single, continuous strategic failure. And now I am watching it start again, with Iran, in a way that tracks the same arc so precisely it is almost pedagogical.
It is always handed to someone else. The people who design these wars do not fight them. The people who fight them rarely vote for them. And the bill always comes due on a generation that had no say in the decision.
What I Saw From the Inside
I spent 13 years inside these wars at every level: flying strategic intelligence collection missions over the region, embedded with Special Forces and SEAL teams on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and back again as a contractor fighting the insurgency our previous âvictoryâ had created. When I describe what is happening, I am not working from a briefing. I am working from memory. The people who designed these campaigns were not in Diyala Province or Gardez when the consequences arrived. I was.
Afghanistan Ended. The Bill Hasnât.
Our war in Afghanistan ended in defeat. The government spent twenty years and over $2 trillion building collapsed within days of our withdrawal. That was not a surprise to anyone who had been there. It was the predictable conclusion of a war that was never honestly explained to the American people and never honestly assessed by the people making the decisions.
The Watson Institute at Brown University has spent years documenting what these wars actually cost. Their numbers are not partisan. They are accounting. The post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and related operations cost approximately $8 trillion. The long-term cost of caring for post-9/11 veterans will reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion by 2050. Most of it has not yet been paid. At least four times as many active duty personnel and veterans of these wars have died by suicide as died in combat. 38 million people were displaced by the post-9/11 wars. The bill was handed to someone else. It is still being handed down. The VA backlog has not cleared. The debt has not been paid. The suicides have not stopped.
My generation paid that installment. The question in front of us right now is whether our kids pay for the next one.
The War That Started February 28th
This war did not have to happen. That is not an opinion. It is a documented sequence of events. On February 26th, U.S. and Iranian negotiators met in Geneva through Omani mediation. Talks were active. A deal was within reach. Two days later, Trump ordered the strikes. The decision to go to war was made while the alternative was still on the table, by a president who had already destroyed the last diplomatic framework that had worked, in coordination with a foreign government whose prime minister had been pushing for this outcome for thirty years. This was not a war forced on us by circumstance. It was a war of choice made by specific men who would not fight it.
To understand what was thrown away to get here, you have to go back to 2015. The JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, was working. The IAEA verified compliance. The deal constrained enrichment, imposed intrusive inspections, and put at least a decade between Iran and a weapon. In 2018, Netanyahu delivered a presentation called âIran Liedâ at the Israeli Defense Ministry. Trump withdrew from the deal eight days later, over the objections of every other signatory and despite the IAEA finding no violations. Iran then accelerated its nuclear program, exactly as every critic of the withdrawal predicted. The maximum pressure campaign produced the precise opposite of its stated goal. By the time talks resumed in 2025, Iran was closer to a bomb than when the deal was abandoned. Trump and Netanyahu had spent seven years engineering the conditions that they then used to justify a war.
Twenty-four days in: the supreme leader dead, over 1,200 Iranians dead, thirteen Americans killed, a billion dollars a day, and a $200 billion supplemental request to a Congress that cannot constitutionally be bypassed but is being bypassed anyway. A U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate 2,000 miles from Iran, the first torpedo sinking since World War II. The Strait of Hormuz is contested. I have sailed through it. It carries 20 percent of the worldâs oil. Senator Lindsey Graham went on Fox News Sunday this morning and called on Trump to seize Kharg Island. When pushed on the cost to U.S. troops, Graham said: âI trust the Marines. We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.â Iwo Jima killed 6,821 Americans in 36 days. Graham offered it as a selling point. This is what the logic of empire sounds like when it has run out of road. Not a strategy. Not a plan. A reference to a battle from 1945 and the confidence of a man who has never been in the thing he is describing.
Here is what I think is actually happening, and I say it as someone who spent thirteen years serving the institution that is now executing this war. Empires do not end when they are defeated from the outside. They end when the costs of maintaining their reach exceed what society can bear, and the people in charge cannot stop themselves from reaching further. The United States has spent $8 trillion on wars in the Greater Middle East since 2001. It has nothing to show for it strategically. The Taliban governs Afghanistan. ISIS exists. Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than it was when we tore up the deal that was containing it. Every intervention has produced the conditions requiring the next one. And now, rather than reckon with what that pattern means, we are going further. Deeper. Into Iran, whose population is three times Iraqâs, whose terrain makes Afghanistan look manageable, and whose history with American interference goes back seventy years. Martin Luther King called militarism one of the three great evils, alongside racism and poverty, because he understood that a society organized around permanent war cannot build anything for its own people. Every dollar committed to this war is a dollar extracted from the country it is supposed to be defending. That is not a metaphor. That is the mechanism. And we are watching it operate in real time.
If You Have a Teenager
A draft is unlikely. Experts are clear on that, and it would require an act of Congress. My generation was also told Iraq would be quick, contained, and paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. We know how that ended. The honest question is not whether a draft is probable today, but what an unplanned ground war in Iran looks like eighteen months from now if the air campaign stalls and there is still no exit strategy. My generation knows what that trajectory looks like. We lived the last one.
If you have a son between 18 and 25, he is already registered with the Selective Service. If he turns 18 this year, a law Congress passed last year will register him automatically by December. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to be clear-eyed about the pattern you are watching, because you have watched it before.
What It Costs This Town
The Costs of War researchers at Brown found something that should follow every defense budget debate into every town hall in this country: military spending produces an average of 5 jobs per million dollars invested. The same investment in education creates nearly 13 jobs. In healthcare, 9. In infrastructure, 7 to 8. Every dollar that goes to the next installment of the Greater Middle East war is a dollar that does not build a school, staff a clinic, or repair a road in Wake Forest.
This town plans to issue tens of millions in voter-approved bond documents this year for roads, greenways, and infrastructure. The townâs own bond documents note the schedule is âsubject to change due to bond market volatility.â That volatility has arrived. Global bond markets have been whipsawed as the oil shock from the Strait of Hormuz pushes inflation expectations up and interest rate cuts off the table. Every dollar more it costs Wake Forest to borrow is a dollar not going to the road on your street. The S-Line commuter rail project, which depends heavily on federal funding, now competes with a $200 billion war supplemental for congressional bandwidth. Gas prices are up. Your grocery bill is rising. The lag between an energy shock and the receipt at the checkout line is about 30 to 60 days. That lag is almost up.
After Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Act of 1973, written after 58,000 Americans died in a war authorized by a resolution passed based on a naval attack that probably never happened. The law says: if a president commits forces to hostilities without authorization, the action must end within 60 days unless Congress votes to authorize it. They wrote it specifically so the next generation couldnât be handed a war nobody voted for. Then came Iraq. Then came the $8 trillion. Then came the suicides at four times the combat death rate. The law did not stop any of it because Congress kept finding ways not to use it.
The clock started on February 28th. April 28th is 60 days. Last month, Congress had its first chance to invoke it. Both of North Carolinaâs senators, Ted Budd and Thom Tillis, voted no. Ten of our fourteen House members voted no. Four voted to use the law: Alma Adams, Don Davis, Valerie Foushee, and Deborah Ross. On or before April 28th, there will be a second vote, because the law demands one. What our delegation does with it will be on record for a long time.
I am not asking you to have a settled view on Iran. I am asking you to be honest about what you are watching. The people who ordered this war are not new to power. They have been making these decisions, or versions of them, for decades. George W. Bush had advisors who had been pushing for war with Iraq since 1998. The same network, the same think tanks, the same logic of American primacy enforced through force, has now produced a war with Iran that started two days after a diplomatic meeting. These are not mistakes. They are choices. Made by people with names.
Bacevichâs argument, the one that reorganized how I understood everything I had seen, is that this was never a series of separate decisions. It is one war. One continuous strategic enterprise, driven not by genuine security requirements but by the institutional momentum of a military-industrial complex that requires conflict to justify its scale, and a political class that has found war more useful than the hard work of governing. King saw the same logic in Vietnam: that the bombs dropped abroad are connected to the schools not built at home, that militarism and poverty are not separate problems but the same problem expressing itself in two directions at once. I enlisted in this war without knowing it had a name. I spent thirteen years inside it. I watched it consume people I served with and produce nothing it promised. Three days ago was the twenty-third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. What I am watching now is not a new chapter. It is the final one, and it is being written by the same people who wrote all the others.
The decisions made in 1979 shaped my deployments thirty years later. The decisions being made right now will determine what the kids in Wake Forestâs schools are asked to do when they are our age. There are specific people responsible for those decisions. Donald Trump ordered these strikes. Benjamin Netanyahu coordinated them and has been working toward them for thirty years. Ted Budd and Thom Tillis voted to let him keep going without congressional authorization. Chuck Edwards, Virginia Foxx, Richard Hudson, Mark Harris, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Tim Moore, Jeff Knott, Greg Harrigan, and Addison McDowell voted the same way. These are not abstract institutional failures. These are people, with names and offices, who made a choice. That choice has a cost, and the cost will not be paid by any of them.
The vote records are public. The Selective Service rules are public. The bond schedule is on the townâs website. April 28th is five weeks away, and every member of this delegation will have to go on record again. Watch what they do. And when they come home to campaign, remember what they did when it mattered, and ask them to explain it to the families who will pay for it.
Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, Wake Forest’s only independent local newsroom. A Wake Forest native, Navy veteran, and intelligence professional, Tom launched Wake Forest Matters to bring serious accountability journalism to his hometown. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com