I have watched the ongoing debate over Iraq these past few days through the prism of the Washington Post‘s two-part series on the travails of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. (Part I, Part II) Reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull, with help from researcher Julia Tate, documented the despair, injustice and sheer Kafka-esque absurdity that these (mainly) men endure every day. The story elicited a pledge by the Army’s civilian leadership and Walter Reed’s commander to improve conditions, and a follow-up editorial by the Post arguing, persuasively, that even more must be done.

Then there was the story last week of Susan Jaenke, an Iowa woman caring for her 9-year old granddaughter, Kayla. The girl’s mother, Petty Officer 2nd Class Jaime S. Jaenke, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Before she was killed, Petty Officer Jaenke outlined her intentions, and she expected that her $100,000 “death gratuity” would go to her parents to help them in raising young Kayla. Trouble is, the regulations stipulate that these payments can only be made to next-of-kin, in most cases a spouse. Credit to Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa) for sponsoring legislation to change this rule so that the payments can go to grandparents and other family members raising the children of fallen troops. I hope that the legislation will be swiftly adopted, and that it will be applied retroactively, as the legislation allows.

I can’t say whether these stories affect me more or less than my fellow citizens, but I can say that they shape how I approach the question about what to do in Iraq, now, and what lessons to draw from Iraq going forward.

As noted in my bio, I was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy from 1989 to 1993. And, as chance would have it, I was deployed onboard USS TICONDEROGA in the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea and Persian Gulf before, during, and after the first Persian Gulf War. This, technically speaking, makes me a veteran.

This distinction has always made me uncomfortable. While I might have been — again, technically speaking — in a war-zone (and the chemical attack drills will always stand out in my memory), I suffered no personal hardship beyond the long periods of separation from family and friends back home. I ate three square meals a day – hot meals, not MREs. I slept (a few hours) in a warm bed at night, and was kept cool during the day by a massive air conditioning system. I never feared for my safety.

The same can’t be said for several of my NROTC classmates, especially those who were commissioned as officers in the Marine Corps. One served two tours in Iraq, including a year in Fallujah. He returned home safely, and remains on active duty, ready to deploy again if called. Another of my classmates, a Marine Corps reservist, saw action in both wars. He went into Kuwait in 1991, and then entered civilian life as a police officer. But he stayed in the Marine Corps Reserves, and he returned to Iraq when his number was called. This time, he didn’t make it back. He was killed in action in May 2005, while serving in a Civil Affairs unit.

These men, and the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have served and are serving, have a job to do, and they do it well. They are volunteers, but once they have made that fateful decision to don the uniform, we expect them to report for duty when called.

But the obligation goes both ways. We as a society must keep faith with our troops. Yellow ribbons aren’t enough. We must train them well. We must provide for their needs in both wartime and peacetime. We must do everything in our power to protect them from harm, recognizing all the while that it is their mission to go in harm’s way. If our best efforts to protect them fail, we must repair them if they are wounded. We must care for them if they are disabled beyond repair. And we must provide for their families if they are lost forever.

This is a societal obligation. And it isn’t cheap. We spend more on our military than the rest of the world, combined, and one could honestly argue — given all that we ask our military to do — that it isn’t nearly enough. That is certainly one of the takeaways from the Walter Reed story.

It is an important argument, but I prefer to focus on the demand side of the equation. We should pay more attention to the costs before we send our troops into harm’s way, and we must scrutinize every proposal to deploy our troops abroad according to a clear set of criteria. At or near the top of the list should be a connection between the mission and U.S. national security.

I have grave doubts about missions that would risk the lives of American servicemen and women in cases where there is little or no connection to U.S. national security, say in the case of a humanitarian mission to halt internal conflict in a distant land.

But for those who believe in such missions, I would urge them to at least adhere to the principles of just war theory that have served us well for hundreds of years. These principles include a reasonable expectation that force will be decisive, that it is likely to succeed, and that the aftermath of conflict will be vastly better than the conditions that prevailed beforehand. And even if we are confident of such things, we must ensure that force will only be used as a last resort. 

Many past interventions did not, and do not, meet such criteria. I often wonder if the questions were even posed. Here’s hoping that, mindful of the Iraq debacle, we will ask such questions in the future.

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