By Brian Gilette
In March of 2003, as the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, a Gallup poll found that 72% of Americans supported military action. I was not among them. At the time, I wrote an essay called Bad War. I didn’t write it for publication. Instead, I wrote it for myself — to help myself understand how a country like ours decides to go to war, and whether this one met the standard such a decision demands.
I’ve spent my career in leadership — building organizations, making decisions that affect people’s livelihoods, and living with the consequences of those decisions. That experience shaped how I think about responsibility, accountability, and the weight of choice.
I believe in America. In our best moments, we have demonstrated how a nation should operate. In those times, America has been a force for good, using its power to make the world more stable, more just, and more humane. For these reasons, questions of war matter deeply to me, and they should matter to all of us.
In 2003, writing this essay led me to a simple yet difficult conclusion: No matter how it went militarily, the war was morally unjustified.
I didn’t come to my belief through ideology or the benefit of hindsight. Instead, I applied a basic set of questions. Questions that should be difficult to answer. Questions that force us to confront what war actually is, not the language often used to make it sound controlled, precise, and necessary.
More than two decades later, as the United States is once again engaged in conflict in the Middle East, I find myself returning to those same questions to see if that same reasoning I used then can help me understand this new situation today.
