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forever wars
With Help From Platner, Former Top Obama Official Admits 'Forever War Has Been Destroying America From Within'
"We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not," says Ben Rhodes.
Apr 22, 2026
Ben Rhodes, who served deputy national security advisor under former US President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, has done a fair number of mea culpas in the years since he left government service. But a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday punctuates with a fresh admission: "We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not."
Rhodes comes to this statement circuitously as he writes about recent time spent with Graham Platner, the US Army and Marine veteran who served tours in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as an infantryman who is now running as a Democrat for the US Senate in Maine to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Platner, who has recently opened up a double-digit lead against his primary rival, two-time Maine Gov. Janet Mills, has been an outspoken anti-war voice since putting his hat in the ring for elected office and Rhodes, who cut his teeth defending the forever wars during the Obama years, says Democratic Party leaders—and voters wherever they are—would be wise to listen to what he has to say.
"The forever war has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive, filling us with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another," writes Rhodes.
Most Democrats, observes Rhodes, don't talk about war the way Platner does, and that's not just a feature of his wartime experience compared to those in positions of power or paid to pontificate for think tanks or on the corporate news networks.
After traveling around with Platner on the campaign trail in Maine, Rhodes concludes that "Americans must change their relationship to war itself."
"One reason we have a hard time reckoning with the forever war is that it undermines our own story," he continues. "We like to think of America as a force for good, acting out of enlightened self-interest, our military fighting for freedom around the globe. Is that really what’s been happening?"
In their conversation, Platner explained that "most people get it," suggesting those who live and work in the real world, outside of DC or within media echo chambers, understand the costs of the nation's endless wars. “Do you think this country should spend more on schools and hospitals and less on bombs?" asked Platner rhetorically. "A lot of people are like, yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
When Platner had his epiphany that the wars he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake, Rhodes said he, still working for the White House in those years, was exactly the kind of person the soldier was thinking of when he said that the "people running the war didn’t even seem to know the point of the war," calling it "a self-licking ice cream cone" that could not admit its failures.
"Listening to [Platner] talk, I knew intuitively what he was saying," writes Rhodes. "I would have been one of those people back in 2011, believing that what we were doing was helping Afghans."
For someone so enmeshed in the politics of US war-making and defending the foreign policy of past US governments from criticism, Rhodes confesses the pitfalls of American exceptionalism and where it can lead. And again, he quotes Platner:
We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians. If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.
Such an argument directly implicates not just past presidents, but certainly US President Donald Trump, currently waging a new war of choice against Iran, as well as his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who openly celebrates the killing prowess ("lethality") of the US military while characterizing the laws of war as impediments.
Contextualizing why he has come to conclude that contemporary US wars lack virtue, Rhodes writes that the conflicts we have been waging abroad for most of this century have also done tremendous and lasting damage here at home. "They resemble," writes Rhodes, "a declining empire sowing chaos along its periphery as a matter of strategy: Economic and political elites profit while the Americans who fight suffer along with the places they attack."
As Platner told Rhodes, such admissions must be spoken about publicly in order for them to lead to meaningful change in the country. And voices like Platner's, argues Rhodes, must be listened to because the "visceral and moral reckoning he advocates is the only way to truly dismantle the forever war, change our priorities and detoxify our country."
"To save ourselves, we must stop this cycle of violence," Rhodes concludes. "We must find meaning not in our capacity to kill or control others, but in each other."
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Warnings of Iran Invasion Grow as US to Send Up to 5,000 Marines, Sailors to Middle East
"Bringing this war to an end," said one former US intelligence analyst, "requires recognizing it can still get much, much worse."
Mar 13, 2026
In what has been described as a potential "major escalation" of the Trump administration's war with Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly approved a request from US Central Command to move more warships and thousands of Marines to the Middle East following Iran's attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
Citing three US officials, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the US was sending "an element of an amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit, typically consisting of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors."
According to the Journal, the Japan-based USS Tripoli and its attached Marines are already headed to the Middle East.
While the Journal did not explicitly report that the operation was tied to the volatile situation in the Strait of Hormuz, it noted that "the move comes as Iran’s attacks on the strait have paralyzed traffic through the strategic waterway, disrupting the global economy, driving up gas prices and posing a major military and political challenge for President [Donald] Trump."
In his first address on Thursday, delivered by a news anchor on Iranian state TV, the country's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said that “the lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must definitely be used" to heighten economic pressure on the US.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has declared that "not a liter of oil" shall pass through the strait, and vowed to attack any ship linked to the US and Israel that may attempt to make the journey.
Iran has reportedly attacked at least six commercial ships in the area since Wednesday, including one marked with a Thai flag that still has three crew members missing. US intelligence sources have also accused Iran of laying mines in the Strait, which Iran has neither confirmed nor denied.
The blockage of the strait, through which about one-fifth of global oil shipments pass each year, has sent the global market into chaos. Prices of Brent crude have surged from under $70 less than a month ago to more than $100 per barrel on the global market, and US gas prices have leaped to $3.63 per gallon on average, up from $2.94 a month ago.
Prices have continued to climb even after the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced its largest-ever coordinated release of oil from nations' strategic reserves on Wednesday to combat what it called "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market."
Shashank Joshi, the defense editor at The Economist and a visiting fellow at the Department of War Studies at King's College London, said that a deployment of such a large Marine force seems to be "a key indicator of a potential ground operation" in Iran.
Trump said earlier this week that he was "nowhere near" sending troops into Iran even as it ramped up threats to block the strait. But privately, he has reportedly been mulling plans to put "boots on the ground" within Iranian territory to accomplish a number of objectives, though officials have characterized them as limited special-operations missions.
Administration officials have reportedly suggested a commando raid on Iran's nuclear sites to confiscate or sabotage its supply of uranium, according to Axios. They've also considered a plan to occupy Kharg Island, which sits 15 miles off Iran's coast and handles about 90% of its oil exports, serving as an economic "lifeline" for the battered nation.
But Trump has also said that if Iran blocks the strait, "the US Navy and its partners will escort tankers through the strait, if needed." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, has said the Pentagon is looking at "a range of options" to do this.
In an analysis published Tuesday by Zeteo, Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East/Africa Regional Center, suggested that the US may pursue an ambitious plan to "clear Iran’s coastline around the strait" to get tankers moving again.
Mann, who worked under the Biden administration but resigned in protest of its support for the genocide in Gaza, said this plan would require "an indefinite occupation–otherwise missile trucks could just get in position after US forces leave." Doing this, he added, would require "a full-fledged invasion, possibly beyond even the 10,000 or so rapid-response forces at Trump’s disposal."
"All of these ground operations risk high casualties while failing to accomplish their missions," Mann said. "That’s a feature, not a bug. Even if one of these operations met its objectives, troops in peril behind enemy lines demand resupply, evacuation, and revenge, which puts more troops in peril behind enemy lines, and so on."
The movement of more troops comes as the US public expresses strong disapproval of Trump's war with Iran. In a Quinnipiac poll published this week, 53% of registered voters said they opposed US military action against Iran, while just 40% approved.
About 74% said they feared that the war would cause oil and gas prices to rise, and 71% feared that the war would last "months" or longer.
Trump's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who remains one of his top allies in media, said on his War Room podcast that deploying such a large military force "sends a signal to Iran, but it also sends a signal to the American people: This is a major escalation."
Mann said that putting troops on the ground in Iran will only "ensure that Trump can't back out easily, which is exactly what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, [US Sen.] Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and their ilk need to fracture Iran.
"Bringing this war to an end," Mann said, "requires recognizing it can still get much, much worse, refusing to fall for the promise of 'small special ops raids,' and calling these courses of action what they are: a prelude to forever war."
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After 'Years of Neglected Oversight,' House Votes to Repeal Authorization Used by Presidents to Wage 'Forever Wars'
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
Sep 11, 2025
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as "years of neglected oversight" by Congress over the "steady expansion of presidential war-making authority."
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, "have been stretched far beyond their original purposes" by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
"These AUMFs," Weinstein said, "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as "long obsolete," saying they "risk abuse by administrations of either party."
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something "strongly opposed by the, I'll call it, defense hawk community." But, he said, "the AUMF was passed in '02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy's been dead... and we're now still running under an '02 AUMF. That's insane. We should repeal that."
"For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East," said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. "Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs."
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump's war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump's increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week's bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, "the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs" are "good to remove," but pointed out that it's "mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars."
"Not to mention, McCoy added, "we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela."
In the wake of Trump's strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless "a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties."
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers "to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism."
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