I remember running toward downtown Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, like it was yesterday.
I was in the National Guard then and studying at Hunter College when I saw the north tower of the World Trade Center get hit on TV. Without much thought, I ran down Lexington Avenue to my armory. I wasn't sure of anything except that I needed to be there.
My fellow Guardsmen, many of whom were native New Yorkers like me, reacted the same way, showing up throughout the morning without being called in.
I didn't watch what was happening in Pennsylvania or Washington, DC. I was experiencing what was happening to New York – watching police and firefighters headed toward danger, people fleeing as quickly as they could and, eventually, feeling the rumble of the towers
collapsing.
As I stood guard at Ground Zero for the next two weeks, I was processing collective trauma and rage I still cannot put into words. America was at war, and I believed almost anything we did next was righteous and justified.
In the years that followed, I deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and was fully on board with what we were doing. More hawk than dove, I championed the wars and believed that we could eliminate the terror threat and give these nations democracy, and that all would be well.
We just had to keep going.
But over time, the mission became harder to explain, even to ourselves. What began as a mission to punish those responsible for Sept. 11 and prevent another attack became an effort to remake the Middle East in our own image. We were still getting shot at and blown up; we were just less sure of why.
As presidents waged war in the Middle East, Congress abdicated its duty
I came to recognize a pattern. Presidents warned Americans of danger, Congress increasingly ceded decisions about military action to the president, and soldiers were asked to pursue poorly defined objectives that were disconnected from an immediate threat to the United States.
Repeatedly, we seemed to assume that enough military force could produce the political outcome we wanted. President Donald Trump's war with Iran is the latest chapter in this story, but the problem is bigger than one president or one party. For 25 years, Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden continued the expanded use of American military power in the Middle East while Congress repeatedly avoided its own duty to decide when and why the country goes to war.
That has led me to a humbling conclusion. The certainty I felt after Sept. 11 – that military force was justified, and that enough of it could make us safer – was easier to sustain than the wars themselves. Our leaders kept asking the military to produce outcomes that military power alone could never deliver.
I blame presidents of both parties for stretching their authority, but I blame Congress more for letting them. The Constitution gives Congress responsibility to declare war. To someone who has been sent to war, that is not a procedural technicality.
A vote forces our elected representatives to take responsibility for the lives they are asking service members to risk, and for the objectives they are asking them to achieve. Yet Congress hasn’t voted to approve military action in the Middle East since 2002.
Lawmakers think they are avoiding accountability by not voting to authorize military action, but many are sealing their fate in the coming midterm elections. This newest war is wildly unpopular among Americans, and they are reminded of it every time they fill up their gas tanks. They cannot make the president pay for that in November, but they certainly can take frustration out on his party.
Congress can begin repairing our trust. Start with Iran.
I struggle with how to commemorate Sept. 11 every year. I want to honor the people we lost that day. But as the years have passed, I have found it impossible to think about Sept. 11 without also thinking about everything that followed. Thousands died in the post–Sept. 11 wars. Tens of thousands more post-Sept. 11 veterans have died by suicide.
Some service members who have died in the current conflict with Iran were not even born when the attacks of Sept. 11 set this era of American warfare in motion.
After enough years, the dead become statistics and wars become abstractions. But the people who bear their consequences are someone's sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends. Real consequences for Congress' inaction.
There is another cost to this pattern: Americans will stop believing their government when it tells them another military threat requires their sacrifice. What happens when a threat to our national security comes along that truly does?
Congress can begin repairing that trust now. It should debate and vote on the war with Iran, define what American forces are being asked to accomplish, and decide whether those objectives justify asking Americans to kill and die for them. If Congress believes they do, its members should be willing to say so publicly and put their names behind that decision.
If Congress decides this war is necessary, so be it. America's military will always answer the call. I know that because on Sept. 11, before anyone called me, I ran to my armory.
Twenty-five years later, I still believe in that willingness to serve. What I no longer believe is that the people we send to war should have to wonder why they are there, what they are expected to accomplish, or whether the elected representatives who sent them were willing to take responsibility for the decision.
The men and women who answer America's call deserve at least that much.
John Byrnes is strategic director at Concerned Veterans for America and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served at Ground Zero following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: I guarded Ground Zero and served in Middle East. Then I saw a pattern.
