Memorial Day Reflections: A Veteran’s Perspective on Empire and Ideals
As a veteran who served in the US Army from 1990 to 1994, I find myself in a complicated relationship each Memorial Day. My service took me from the forests of southern Germany, where I guarded a military hospital during the first Gulf War, to the mountains of Hawaii at Schofield Barracks.
I didn’t particularly enjoy military life, though I valued the physical challenges, the opportunity to serve, and the chance to see the world. What I couldn’t have anticipated was how profoundly my understanding of that service would change in the years that followed.
After leaving the Army in 1994, I returned to civilian life, completed college, and entered law school. It was there, in a class called “Terrorism and the Law,” that I first encountered Noam Chomsky’s analysis of American foreign policy.
Then 9/11 occurred, during my first week at my first job as a lawyer at a small Santa Barbara law firm. I was in a hotel and happened to turn the TV on, which I almost never did, only to see what looked like very realistic footage of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Obviously, it was in fact real and I realized quickly the world had changed. While I mourned those who were killed I also mourned those who were about to die in other countries since I had a feeling our response to these attacks would be extreme. And it was.
I did not support the Afghanistan war — why should a whole nation suffer the US war machine because of the actions of a few? America’s longest war in its history unfolded in that ravaged nation, which is now back in the hands of the Taliban 24 years after we invaded that nation. Afghanistan is now literally last in the Economist’s annual democracy index. This tragic reality should make us all shed a tear.
The Iraq War was even worse in so many ways, shredding international law, costing additional $trillions in US taxpayer dollars, and becoming a devastating case study in imperial overreach. What we witnessed wasn’t just policy failure, but an illegal war of aggression that resulted in needless US military deaths and casualties, massive Iraqi civilian casualties (well over a million dead, according to reputable studies) and many war crimes, from the rank and file to top brass, that went largely unpunished. From the Ishaqi massacre, where U.S. forces executed an entire family including a five-month-old infant, to Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and the systematic destruction of Fallujah, we saw the predictable brutalization that accompanies wars of choice and a culture of misplaced revenge that filtered from the top downwards.
Chomsky’s work, along with other critical scholars, opened my eyes to the vast gulf between American ideals and American actions abroad. His documentation of America’s ravages of empire revealed a pattern of interventions that consistently violated the very principles we claimed to defend. The same country that declared independence to throw off “the yoke of despotism” had itself become what John Quincy Adams warned against — a nation that goes “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
The costs of the Iraq War alone tell this story starkly. The financial toll exceeded $3 trillion when all costs are calculated. Yet Iraq today ranks 126th in the world for democracy — firmly in the“authoritarian regime” status and only nine places ahead of Cuba. This is the fruit of nearly a decade of occupation and the sacrifice of over 4,400 American lives — and far far more Iraqi lives.
Decades of Neocon-instigated American intervention in the Middle East — supporting dictators, overthrowing governments, imposing sanctions, and waging wars — have destabilized entire regions and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. This isn’t about the character of individual Americans, who largely embody the generous and democratic spirit our founders envisioned. This is about leadership that has abandoned the revolutionary ideals that gave birth to our nation.
This Memorial Day, I honor the memory of those who died believing they were defending American principles of liberty, justice, and self-determination. Their sacrifice was real, their intentions noble. But we cannot ignore the uncomfortable truth that many of these deaths served not to defend America, but to expand and maintain an empire that has brought immense suffering to peoples around the world — and ultimately corrupted our own democracy at home. Live by the sword die by the sword.
It’s not a coincidence that the US has such high levels of crime, domestic violence, suicide, homicides, etc. The message from the very top of our social and political structure is that violence is an allowed means to an end, and it is often glorified.
Our founders understood what Lord Acton would later articulate: power corrupts. They designed a system of checks and balances precisely because they knew that concentrated power, even in well-intentioned hands, inevitably leads to abuse. Yet we’ve allowed the rise of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, a permanent war machine that has made conflict profitable and peace politically dangerous.
The tragedy isn’t just what we’ve done abroad — it’s what we’ve lost at home. Every dollar spent on empire is a dollar not spent on education, healthcare, infrastructure, or addressing inequality. Every diplomatic solution rejected in favor of military force diminishes our moral authority and makes the world less safe. As I learned through painful research and reflection, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned about in 1961 has made conflict profitable and peace politically dangerous.
Too many Americans remain complacent about these realities, partly due to media that finds it difficult to cover the negative aspects of our policies, whether under Republican or Democratic leadership. The evidence of brutality, war crimes, and massive financial fraud has been documented extensively, yet we continue to repeat the same patterns. The mentality that led us into Iraq — the assumption that American military power can solve complex political problems — remains dominant in Washington.
We see this same tragic dynamic playing out today in Gaza, where Israel’s devastating military campaign has killed tens of thousands of civilians while being funded by American taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars annually (over $20 billion already in 2024 and 2025). Like Iraq, this is a war of choice that has produced massive civilian casualties, destroyed critical infrastructure, and generated deep resentment that will fuel conflict for generations. American citizens, many of whom oppose this funding, watch helplessly as their tax dollars finance another brutal campaign that violates almost all of the humanitarian principles we claim to champion.
On this Memorial Day, the most patriotic act may be to recommit ourselves to the ideals for which so many died: that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that all people are created equal, and that we should be a beacon of liberty rather than an enforcer of empire.
The revolution isn’t over. It lives in every generation’s choice to hold power accountable, to question authority, and to insist that our actions match our highest aspirations. That’s how we can truly honor those we’ve lost — by ensuring their sacrifice serves justice, not empire.
