In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran that has continued unabated since, marking the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The conflict began with sweeping airstrikes targeting Iranian military and government sites, triggering a wider regional war that has already upended global politics, energy markets, and daily life here in the United States.
The effects have been immediate. Oil prices have surged, gas prices have climbed, and inflation is likely close behind as the war spreads uncertainty across global markets with trade pinched at the Strait of Hormuz.
The conflict has sent me looking back to a past I only hazily remember: the last time the United States mobilized for a war on this scale.
I was a fifth grader at Williams Valley Elementary in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003. My memory of those early days comes in flashes: cable news reports from embedded journalists, explosions lighting up Baghdad during the opening air campaign on television, and the deployment of the 131st Transportation Company of the Pennsylvania National Guard from their armory in my hometown of Williamstown.
I remember the parade in March 2004 when they came home after a year-long deployment. They were returning from a country already slipping toward chaos and the early stages of sectarian war.
Looking back now, I found these two editorials from the Pottsville Republican-Herald striking. One was written just days after the invasion began, full of certainty about what needed to happen next. The other came a year later, after the justification for the war had begun to unravel and harder questions were being asked: “So why did we invade Iraq?”
Reading them today is an exercise in stepping back from the immediacy of the present.
What will the Middle East look like a year from now? Will this war still be ongoing? If it ends, what kind of peace will follow – and at what cost? What will the long-term impacts be here in the United States?
Those questions aren’t answerable in the moment. But history reminds us they matter.
Reading back over the pages of the Republican-Herald from 2003-04 is a lesson in the consequences of war – intended and unintended – that shape the future. It’s inescapable what will come next: we will be living in the world shaped by the war in Iran for the next year, five years, and in the decades to come.
March 21, 2003 – Pottsville Republican Herald
U.S. must commit to future of Iraq
Power vacuum could be disastrous
The United States committed itself Wednesday night to a war against Iraq with the goal of overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.
If that happens, the nation will need to commit itself strongly to the future of Iraq.
For decades, fear of Hussein has been the glue holding Iraq together. Once he’s gone, if the United States simply packs up and goes home, it will leave a power vacuum for some other dictator to fill.
If no one fills it, the country could collapse into civil war and anarchy, which could destabilize the entire Middle East. The Kurdish nation in the north of Iraq may rise up, declare its independence and go to war with the rest of Iraq. This revolutionary spirit might spread to the Kurdish residents of neighboring Turkey and Iran, leading to further civil wars.
Thus, a bad situation will be made worse and, as the region collapses into anarchy, it will become like Afghanistan, a hive hiding who knows how many terroristic threats.
Instead, as it did with Germany after World War II, the United States must occupy Iraq, establish a democratic government and support it financially until the nation is on its feet. Once the missiles were launched Wednesday, there was no other choice.
It will cost us much, at a time when we are not in the best condition to be paying large bills, but it must be done and there is much to gain from a U.S.-backed Iraq.
A strong, democratic Iraq, backed by the United States, will be a stabilizing force in the region. It will serve as a buffer against more hostile, surrounding nations. It will be an example of success that other Islamic nations in the area may want to follow.
In this respect, it will be like Germany, which became the bulwark of American policy in post World War Europe or Japan and its former province, Korea, which were the wall of western democracy in the Far East.
A U.S.-backed Iraq would be an Islamic ally that could balance out our only other strong ally in the region, non-Islamic Israel.
Moreover, a commitment to democratic Iraq will help to mend fences with some of the countries around the world that opposed America for attacking Iraq without United Nations approval.
March 24, 2004 – Pottsville Republican Herald
Questions remain on Iraq year later
Weapons sought but never found
It has been a year since the the United States launched its war against Iraq. Now, 660 American soldiers are dead, most recently a young man from Shamokin.
Thousands are injured or ill. Many of the wounded have lost limbs or eyes. These are all facts.
It is also a fact that we were told that we would invade the country because its government possessed weapons of mass destruction. We made this decision in spite of warnings from United Nations inspectors, who were actually inside the country, that the weapons of mass destruction were not there.
Another fact is that now our government is admitting that the weapons of mass destruction might no longer have existed at the time of invasion, even though Iraq had them in the past.
So why did we invade Iraq? It couldn’t just be to promote the cause of democracy, otherwise we would be invading Haiti at the moment, or we would be putting more effort into building up a democratic regime in Afghanistan – 114 American soldiers have been killed there by the way, and we still don’t have Osama bin Laden.
We Americans are good people.
As a result, we don’t want to believe bad things about our leaders. We want to think that our nation of good people made a good decision and elected good people to govern us and deal with other nations in a just and fair way.
Moreover, a collective guilt for the lack of respect afforded in the past to our veterans who fought and died in Southeast Asia makes us want to give any military adventure the benefit of the doubt.
The suggestion that a president would allow a matter of private vengeance to guide his decision to wage war and kill hundreds or thousands of foreign civilians is difficult to swallow. The idea that we invaded Iraq and sacrificed the lives of young Americans so that big American business can be guaranteed a steady flow of oil is equally impalpable.
Nobody wants to think that the administration manipulated the pain and sorrow of 9/11, turning it into a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. Well, we must consider that oil is important. It is the main fuel for our industry and agriculture. Deprived of it for too long, our society would collapse.
Conservative think tanks have long maintained that the United States must gain control of a country in the Middle East so that it can control the oil supplies if it intends to maintain its level of influence in the world. If that is the case, and it is us or them, who would be angry with a government that puts the interests of its people first?
However, it doesn’t have to be us or them. There are alternatives to oil.
Moreover, even if we do get control of the oil, it will still run out some day – probably within the lifetimes of those Americans who are children at the moment – and then we’ll have to come up with alternatives without the luxury of time.
So we are only delaying the inevitable and that isn’t worth a single American life.
Featured Image: US tanks in Baghdad in 2003 – Department of Defense
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