Since President Donald Trump first announced strikes on Iran on Saturday, members of Congress who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have had cause to remember their tours of duty in the Middle East and the personal and policy lessons learned from those conflicts.
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda, a generation of young Americans joined the military and prepared themselves to make the ultimate sacrifice in service of its people. Today, a significant number of those who served abroad in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now serve in Congress. Many of these lawmakers came face-to-face with terrorist proxies Iran chose to aid, even losing comrades at their hands. The issue is personal for them, and their experiences in the military influence how they view military actions against the Islamic Republic. Although they served as brothers and sisters in arms, they apply what they learned to current foreign policy debates in different ways, and the extent to which they support President Donald Trump’s military actions against Iran depends largely on party affiliation.
Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona is a Democrat who served in the Iraq War, where his company in the Marine Corps lost 22 members. He has recounted how he returned home with PTSD, a condition that led to his drinking and smoking to excess and affected his marriage, which later ended in divorce.
“I found myself in 2005 in a war that was illegal to begin with,” he told The Dispatch. “We weren’t properly manned in terms of the personnel that we needed to actually control the western part of Iraq. We didn’t have the military equipment that we needed, such as armored vehicles. And we didn’t have the intel support for us to figure out how to contain the insurgency that we were dealing with.”
Since the U.S. and Israel began their joint campaign against Iran, the Trump administration has offered different and sometimes conflicting objectives for the war—whether the goal is to wipe out the leadership of the country so that its people can live free, or to leave the regime in place while handicapping it by obliterating its nuclear program and other military capabilities. Administration officials have also declined to commit to a hard timeline for the duration of the operations, something that concerns Gallego.
“I’m not afraid to use our military to extend our national interest and protect this country,” Gallego said. “But there has to be a high threshold, there has to be an exit plan, and you have to have properly aligned forces too.”
Gallego on Wednesday voted in favor of a resolution under the War Powers Act directing Trump to rein in his military campaign against Iran. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky forced a vote on the resolution, which failed 47-53, with all Republicans except Paul voting no and all Democrats except for Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voting yes.
Also voting for the resolution was Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who served as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq in 2004. That year, an RPG hit her aircraft and caused it to crash, resulting in the loss of both her legs and partial use of her right arm.
“I am proud of every mission that I completed in Iraq,” she said in a Monday floor speech. “But I would never wish another needless, endless, unjustified war like the one that I served in on anyone else. I wouldn’t wish it on the heroes whose blood would be soaked into that desert sand. I would not wish it on their families, who’d spend their days anxiously awaiting for news from half a world away.”
Several other senators also served abroad during the war on terror, including Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Jim Banks of Indiana. Many more House members completed similar military service.
“[Trump] can’t almost knock out the regime and then stop. He’s got to finish it. We made that mistake in ’91 in the first Gulf War.”
Sen. Tim Sheehy
Some congressional Republicans who served in combat zones during the war on terror returned willing to utilize American military might when warranted. Among them is Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana, a freshman senator and retired Navy SEAL who deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He noted that he lost friends due to the actions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and said the U.S. should not stop its operations “until they’re all dead and gone.”
“[Trump] can’t finish until the job’s over,” Sheehy told The Dispatch. “He can’t almost knock out the regime and then stop. He’s got to finish it. We made that mistake in ’91 in the first Gulf War. We knocked Saddam all the way back to his box, and we didn’t finish the job. We need to finish it this time.”
Some more senior Republican lawmakers have long supported a hawkish posture toward Iran. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a retired Air Force brigadier general who flew combat missions over Iraq, talked bluntly about the Iranian regime days before Trump directed the U.S. to begin its bombing campaign.
“They’ve killed thousands of Americans, so I don’t like them,” he told reporters. “I’ve had my friends murdered by the IRGC, right? So I can’t stand them.”
During the Iraq War, the Iranian regime backed militias that attacked American forces. President George W. Bush accused the IRGC’s elite Quds Force of giving those terrorists roadside bombs that killed U.S. soldiers.
This week, Bacon recounted acts of aggression by Iran—”our underlying nemesis”—toward the United States and its allies since the country’s Islamic revolution in 1979, including the taking of 66 American hostages at the U.S. embassy that year as well as its support of proxy terrorist groups that have destabilized the Middle East for decades. In 1983, Hezbollah bombed a Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. More recently, dozens of Americans were among the 1,200 people killed and 250 taken hostage in Hamas’ October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel. Following that attack, Yemen’s Houthis began striking merchant vessels in the Red Sea.
Bacon dealt personally with Iran-supported terror groups while he was stationed in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. “In the area I was at, we were targeted every day,” he told The Dispatch. “Probably, on the best day of a year, we had three mortars or rockets at my area. The worst would be, like, 30.”
Rep. Tom Barrett of Michigan, who served as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq, acknowledged that there was a “war fatigue” in the country following the war on terror. He added that he was against “nation building,” whereby the U.S. engages in a lengthy campaign to rebuild a country’s political infrastructure after ousting its government, as it attempted to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. He distinguished, however, between the boots-on-the-ground operations in those countries and the primarily aerial assault happening today in Iran.
“Not every example is the same as the last,” Barrett told The Dispatch. “Engaging in coordinated and effective strikes in Iran is not the same as putting [troops on the ground]—I think at our peak in Iraq, we had over 120,000 troops on the ground at one time. Those are very, very different things.”
