WASHINGTON — In 2002, as the George W. Bush administration marched toward its invasion of Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney chose the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars to make his case for invasion and was greeted with thunderous applause.
This week, the V.F.W., like other major veterans organizations that once took positions on foreign affairs as seriously as health care and other veterans issues, was silent on President Trump’s order to kill a top Iranian general with a drone strike last week. “Any questions pertaining to the killing of the Iranian commander or retaliation from Iran should be forwarded to the Defense and State departments,” said Terrence Hayes, a spokesman for the organization.
Mr. Trump — and the Iranians — now have taken cautious steps back from escalating toward war. The president’s actions appear at least partly driven by a nation — and its veterans — frustrated by nearly two decades of conflicts and no longer rallying reflexively around a commander in chief.
“After 9/11, the country was unified behind our president and it was clear we had an enemy who wanted to harm us,” said Brian Stone, who served in the Navy as a petty officer third class.
“Even after the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a clear betrayal of the nation’s trust, I still felt I had a duty to serve and to repay my debt of gratitude to the nation, which has given us so much,” said Mr. Stone, who lives in Dearborn, Mich., a state where veterans helped put Mr. Trump over the line in some districts. “Today, with the situation in Iran, I can’t help but feel that this is the dark echo of Iraq.”
American skepticism about employing military force, once derided by some as unpatriotic, is much more on display, even among veterans who may have directly faced the lethal danger that Iran presents in the Middle East. While certainly as mixed in their views and influenced by partisan politics as other Americans, the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a much larger proportion of critics of interventions in the regions they once fought in.
And veterans services organizations, which have struggled to adapt to the younger and more diverse group of those who served in the military over nearly two decades of grinding wars, seem to be returning to their historical focus on veterans health care and housing have new concerns to address and seem less interested in overtly supporting conflicts.
“We can already anticipate that those who deployed this week will likely suffer toxic environmental exposure, grievous injury in some cases, mental health conditions, barriers to gainful employment, traumatic brain injuries and a host of other issues related to their military service,” said Sherman Gillums Jr., the chief advocacy officer of Amvets.
That rejection is driving bipartisan resistance to another military conflict, opposition that a decade ago would have been for most lawmakers political suicide. House Democrats, who for years joined Republicans in granting the executive branch broad war powers for fear of political reprisals, are pressing for a measure to limit Mr. Trump’s ability to wage war on Iran, one of several pieces of legislation Congress has passed over the past two years to increase its power over making war.
Even some Senate Republicans emerged from a briefing on the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who led the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, to declare they, too, might demand the president seek congressional approval for war.
“Veteran attitudes in the general public will likewise split along partisan lines more than along generational or cohort lines,” said Peter D. Feaver, a former National Security Council official under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who now teaches political science at Duke University. “Vet experience, especially in Iraq, will make the individual sympathetic to the idea that Soleimani was a legitimate target and the world is better off without him. But it is a big leap from that to supporting sustained armed confrontation with Iran.”
Naveed Shah had no idea that Congress had any role in military affairs when he enlisted in the Army when he was 18, inspired by the attacks on the Pentagon near his childhood middle school. He served in Iraq for a year in 2009, leaving the Army in 2015.
Mr. Trump’s campaign message of ending “forever wars” was “appealing to some veterans and civilians who have seen what the tolls has been,” said Mr. Shah, now a real estate agent in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. He described feeling despondent hearing Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper say in a recent interview that the Trump administration was “not looking to start a war with Iran but we are prepared to finish one.”
“With all due respect, we haven’t finished the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan yet,” Mr. Shah said. “We need to bring our troops home before we engage in Iran. I fully understand the commander in chief needs to be able to rapidly respond, but starting and engaging in a conflict that is going to be sustained needs to be authorized by Congress.”
The run-up to the strikes on Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks attracted few protesters. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 prompted protests, but few of them centered around veterans.
Now there are several veterans groups that are dedicated to ending future wars, including Common Defense and VoteVets on the left. VoteVets has teamed up with Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative group aligned with Mr. Trump on many policy issues, to oppose overseas interventions — including in Iran.
“I have dedicated my life to ending these wars as someone who fought in them,” said Jon Soltz, a founder of VoteVets. “And I wake up every day disappointed in myself.”
In 2016, resistance to continuing wars was a key factor in attracting many young veterans to Mr. Trump, who promised a policy of limited interventions. Now, the president’s inconsistencies on overseas military commitments are buoying Democrats and rallying more veterans to their side.
“Veterans have been extremely important to this entire effort,” said Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, the only member of Congress to vote against authorizing the president to use force to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks.
“We owe them a debt of gratitude,” added Ms. Lee, who has remained a leading force in reasserting the role of Congress ever since.
“There is just a different American mind set now,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, a state where hundreds of military families spent the holidays worried about redeployments.
Mr. Kaine has spent years trying to push for Congress to reassert its role in war powers, fruitlessly pressing to sunset the authorizations of military force passed in 2001 and just before the invasion of Iraq, and require presidents to seek new resolutions for new conflicts.
“I think the public is going to be very very engaged in this debate,” he said, noting the recent crashing of the Selective Service System website amid false rumors that the draft would be reinstated. “We are squandering money on wars that have not proven to do anything good for us.”