I've written on this meme before, but I just don't buy the meme that Iraq has defined this/my generation, indelibly imprinting lessons and cautions and scars upon millions of burgeoning Americans. This last week saw FP publish two articles directly addressing this topic, and both are fascinating conversations pieces, if ultimately wrong.
The first, and more interesting (especially the comments), is a quick hypothesis by Dan Drezner. Inspired by the combination of the NYT's 8,000 words on the lifestyles twentysomethings and The Icarus Syndrome, an analysis of three US foreign policy "blunders" as a function of the formative foreign policy experiences of the actors, Drezner posits that the formative policy views of millennials is a function of the events of the 2000s. I've asked the exact question of what has shaped the foreign policy views of my generation before, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
For Drezner, it's a function of a youth of prosperity, an adolescence during conflict and coming-of-age with an implosion of the economy. From these, he "...would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism". Really broadly speaking, the comments support that view. They speak to the hubris of American power, the need to embrace multilateralism and accepting the narrative that there are impossible tasks, insurmountable hatreds, and a need to tend to our own house first. They speak to the discredit of the Freedom Agenda and, despite the recent furor over TIME's cover, don't speak of human rights. It was responsibility and setting suns.
Picking up the thread was Elizabeth Dickensons's My Life, Under the Iraq War. She states unequivicably in her intro that: "Our generation has lived its entire adult life under the Iraq war. And everything -- from the way that we see global affairs, multilateral cooperation, conflict, and politics -- has been shaped by that conflict". She draws four lessons from this coming-of-age, and while I have particular issue with each point, my broader issue is with the basic skein that Iraq was a formative experience for the generation.
First, I simply doubt the thesis that concurrence begets formative experience. True enough, the defining foreign policy events that Drezner outlines are likely the most significant, yet how does the existence of those events translate into personal learning experience? Merely being alive when something significant happened doesn't make the even formative. When I asked this question in my earlier post, it was in the context of how Vietnam specifically had shaped the foreign policies of the 1990s NSC. Anthony Lake had personally served as an FSO in Saigon, and had resigned in protest. Even in dodging the draft, Bill Clinton was forced to confront the conflict and weave it into both his personal ambitions and his eventual political narrative. Those were events of personal impact.
Compare that to our current generation of political operatives. How many have served? If they were FSOs, were they in Iraq, or defending American policies in Riyadah or Beijing or Bogata? At what distance does the Iraq or Afghanistan transition from an issue of immediate concern to simply yet another American foreign policy, like support for carbon credits? This begs the question of what exactly qualifies as a formative experience, as spending a tour in Brussels amidst the NATO maneuvering is it's own brand of personal experience that could be as formative as being in a convey that comes under fire. But the basic point here is that, especially after this duration, Iraq and Afghanistan are just one of many competing priorities on the American agenda. A young CIA operative in Beijing is more concerned about a rival hegemon than about Beijing's policy towards radical Islamists.
Though I can't rigidly support the observation, it strikes me that the people most interested in this meme aren't necessarily the people proximately involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I was struck in reading through the comments to Drezner's post that almost none of them mentioned any kind of service, governmental or NGO, in either country. Instead, they were future wonks, academics and commentariats. Dickinson's biography fits that profile as well, as best I can tell. She's sharp and insightful, but not a player.
Which brings up the second caveat. This meme is discussed almost exclusively (in my experience) within the cloistered world of foreign policy and security studies nerds. In that world, asking this question is both perfectly natural and informative. Drezner is a professsor at Tufts; curiosity about the future generation makes sense, as does contextualizing it against his own experiences. So if asking the question about Iraq defining the current generation of foreign policy wonks, then yeah, it's a much more insightful question. But that it needs to be caveated that severely limits its descriptive power about my generation as a whole (think of Drezner's inspiration talking about the full twentysomething generation).
Between the general lack of political participation, declining readership of news publications across the board, and the increasing strain placed on the Army, I just can't connect the impact of Iraq to the entire generation, let alone even the internationally inclined. Even among the politically motivated at CU, that translated into planting little flags and yelling. Sure, broadly speaking, those are formative experiences (the flags presaging Dickinson's comment about sensitivity to civilian casualties), but those people moved on to other issues or kept their involvement limited to symbolic actions. My peers in the international affairs program weren't enraptured with Iraq. They wanted to study development or post-colonial studies or the International Criminal Court; all subjects worth extensive study and passion, and all subjects that weren't Iraq. Iraq is just one more niche area of study.
Maybe I'm just too cynical about my generation. But Dickinson's parting line, "But like the generation that grew up in Vietnam, we will be the Iraq generation", simply rings hollow to me. Vietnam is a catch phrase summing up the 1960s in general, a period of profound social change that upended the established order and touched almost everyone in America somehow. Vietnam was fought by draftees, Iraq by volunteers. Today, the most determinative factor that someone will join the military is if they have family who served; it's becoming a cloistered world. Even among the foreign policy saavy, Iraq is just one issue, and one whose impact is being learned more from primary documents than primary experiences.
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