How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience | Aeon Essays

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• Gray showed how the United States’ president George W Bush and the United Kingdom’s prime minister Tony Blair framed the ‘war on terror’ (which I was part of) as an apocalyptic struggle that would forge the new American century of liberal democracy,

• where personal freedom and free markets were the end goals of human progress

• Gray highlighted an important caveat to the phrase ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs,

• Gray’s caveat was: ‘You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelette.’

• There was no doubt that Iraq’s underexploited oil reserves were part of the US strategic decision-making, and that the initial mission in Afghanistan was in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the US

• the concept of the ‘responsibility to protect’ was developing, which included the idea that when a state was ‘unable or unwilling’ to protect its people,

• Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins delivered his eve-of-battle speech

• he opened by stating: ‘We go to liberate, not to conquer.’

• many troops feeling that the Iraqis were somehow ungrateful when they started to shoot at us for invading their country