Cheering for Shock and Awe

Remembering the home front as we launched the Iraq War 20 years ago

On March 20th, 2003, I was on the trading floor at the Wall Street firm I worked for, where all eyes were on the televisions that showed the first explosions as we launched our attack on Baghdad. The cityscape on the screens was mostly dark, but they briefly flared a blinding white wherever a bomb burst. (I have a memory that it was a green-edged white, which would mean the scenes were shot through night-vision lenses, though that may be a false memory.) Every time there was a flash, a cheer went up from the traders on the floor.

I was standing a bit further back in the room, next to a visiting colleague from our parent bank in Brussels, a cultured and fundamentally obliging Belgian man whose family had been connected with the bank for generations. As he watched the scene, heard the cheers, I remember his face going pale, and him turning away, saying to me as he went that he couldn’t watch such behavior, that for a European it was impossible to imaging cheering on scenes of war and destruction. This was the sort of thing he expected from fascists and not from civilized people.

At the time, I remember feeling like on the one hand yes, the traders’ behavior was a bit unseemly. War was violence, people were going to die, and we should be somber about it, not cheering. But I also remember thinking: come on, man. Cheering was a normal reaction, after all, to seeing your own “side” in action; it didn’t make us fascists. We weren’t bent on conquest; we weren’t trying to terrify the world into submission; we didn’t worship the state or our supreme leader or death itself. We were trying to defuse a real threat and were proceeding under the authority of the United Nations. Inasmuch as we had larger aims, they were to liberate the Middle East from brutal dictatorships and plant new democracies there, a magnanimous objective if there ever was one. You could criticize our prudence, but our motives were good.

I feel very differently about that in retrospect. It’s not just that we’ve long known how the proverbial paving stones on perdition’s path are laid. Nor can I get agitated anymore by the endless debate about whether particular individuals involved in making the case for war were deceptive or themselves deceived. There’s nothing exculpatory about the latter, but I also just don’t care anymore. No, what bothers me most about those pundits out there who are still trying to justify the Iraq War, who say either that it wasn’t a mistake or that it may have been a mistake but hasn’t had an entirely bad result, is that they haven’t reckoned with those cheers.

They meant more than I realized at the time. They were, at the most fundamental level, what the war was fought for, not for oil or weapons of mass destruction or democracy. We needed to convince ourselves that we were no longer waiting on and responding to events, but were going to determine events, through violence if necessary. They were not cheers for ending a war, nor cheers for responding to an attack, though I suspect many of those doing the cheering might have fooled themselves into thinking that’s what they were. They were cheers for starting a war of choice, and we launched the war in Iraq precisely because this time we wanted to be the ones to start something.

That was the crossing of a rubicon in our national character. We ought not to forget that fact.

Mind you, I’m not naive about that character. I’m fully aware of how the United States acquired the territory that now comprises the states of California, Arizona and New Mexico, and how we settled the Great Plains. I’m fully aware of how we acquired Hawaii and the Philippines. I’m fully aware of our long history of intervention in Latin America and elsewhere to prop up friendly governments and destabilize less-friendly ones. The Civil War and World War II are not the only wars on our national record, and I’m fully aware that neither of them were exercises in pure idealism either.

But the Iraq War happened in the 21st century, not the 19th or early 20th. It came after a long era when the United States had professed especially high-minded adherence to the ideas of a rules-based international order and collective security, and at the peak of American might, when we were objectively a status-quo power with no reason to want to undermine much less tear down the international order we had built. For that reason, it was marketed to Americans and to the world as the natural extension of those ideas and that order, as indeed it had to be for it to get the formal imprimatur of law. But it was plainly their betrayal, understood at the time as such by our allies and our enemies alike, even if not by all of us. Certainly not by me. I was caught up in the same desires that so many were, with the result that I couldn’t see clearly the reality of what we were doing. I supported the war, and whatever reasons I might have given at the time, the truth is after 9-11 I wanted America to be shaping events, not to be shaped by them. I didn’t realize that about myself then, but I’ve understood it for many years now, and it has shaped deeply how I understand the world, and my country, ever since. We were not who I thought we were, and I was not who I thought I was.

Disenchantment isn’t always a bad thing, of course, and as we reenter an era of great-power rivalry—something that was probably inevitable, but certainly accelerated by the war in Iraq—it’s probably a good thing for us to be more realistic than we have tended to be about the world. But it behooves us to be more realistic as well about ourselves as well, not just as a country but as individuals. We’re not just manipulable because politicians lie, or because we profess ideals. We’re manipulable because we have desires and fears that we want to be slaked and soothed, and we hide that fact from ourselves.

The United States is currently leading a massive effort to bolster Ukraine’s self-defense against an aggressive invasion by its Russian neighbor. In its defensive nature and in America’s determination to avoid direct military involvement, the war is profoundly different from the war we started twenty years ago, and I think President Biden has charted a mostly moderate and prudent course so far through that conflict. But even if we’re playing it well, it’s a dangerous game. At the same time, the United States is preparing for the possibility of an attack by China on Taiwan, which would almost certainly involve the American military directly, which could put us at war with a peer competitor military for the first time since World War II. There’s a case to be made that our support for Ukraine is helping prevent a war across the Taiwan Strait and a case for the precise opposite, and I think it’s healthy for us to have that debate.

All of that should make for a fairly somber national mood. But for all the differences between the mood today and twenty years ago, the differences in the nature of the conflicts we are engaged in and that we face, those same desires and fears, the same impatience and determination to be free authors of our destiny, all of those feelings that lay behind those cheers on the trading room floor—they’re still there, still driving us. We still want to cheer.

I don’t trust that feeling. I never will again.