WASHINGTON — By the time Chris Deluzio first arrived in Iraq, the pretext for the war had faded away long beforehand.

It was 2009, years after the assertion that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction proved to be false. Deluzio — a Thornburg, Pa., native who’d resolved to join the Navy even before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when he was a high school senior — had graduated from the Naval Academy and already deployed twice at sea.

His first tour on the ground arrived after it was “pretty clear this was a strategic failure” — when the country he fought for, he believed, “had wasted American lives and money.”

“We used to joke before or after missions, ‘Did you find the WMDs? Anyone find the WMDs?’” said Deluzio, now a Democrat who represents all of Beaver and most of Allegheny counties in the U.S. House.

“People in those situations make jokes to get through it,” he said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. “But the fact that our government sent Americans to bleed and die and fight on the basis of lies absolutely shapes the job I have now. I thought it was my duty to do a good job with my unit as best I could, but there was always a source of frustration and anger.”

Deluzio is now among the hundreds of members of Congress with the authority to decide whether American service members will be sent into war.

As a 41-year-old father of four — with a dog named Yankee Doodle and an office filled with Navy references — he’s also among a cohort of young elected veterans tasked with immediately confronting the largest U.S. military intervention in the Middle East since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to attack Iran and kill its authoritarian regime on Feb. 28 has been celebrated and criticized largely among partisan lines.

Republicans, including Pennsylvania’s U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, have said Trump had the authority and justification to attack because of Iran’s decades of threats and continued pursuit of nuclear weapons. Democrats have said the administration has failed to make the case that Iran posed an imminent threat. Any war, as Trump has described it, also needs congressional approval, they’ve said. (Pennsylvania’s U.S. Sen. John Fetterman has become one of the major exceptions as the Democrat most emphatically supporting the move.)

Deluzio said he sees “strong parallels” between the Trump administration’s shifting reasons for the attacks and the justifications that sent soldiers like him to the region two decades ago. The situations aren’t the same, he’s quick to acknowledge. Iran has been widely condemned for decades as a state sponsor of terrorism. Its leaders helped arm and fund proxies to fight against Americans when he was deployed, Deluzio said.

But with the regime in a weakened position and facing mass public protests, now was the time to constrain it through other means — not by putting more service members’ lives on the line in a way that could stretch on indefinitely, he and others have said.

“I don't want to see another generation of Americans be sent to fight the war that we didn't have to fight,” he said after a new conference earlier this month in which he, for the second time in six weeks, raised concerns about Trump instigating another “forever war.”

‘Not much has changed’

With a pair of World War II veteran grandfathers and a childhood enthusiasm for "Top Gun," Deluzio reported to the Naval Academy in Annapolis as a 17-year-old thinking he might be a fighter pilot.

He would become a surface warfare officer instead — learning the different parts of ship operations and managing groups of sailors while at sea. He rotated through different jobs: electrical officer, boarding team member, ordinance officer. A stint as the damage control assistant was heavy with responsibility, charged with fighting fires or flooding if it ever happened. So were periods of serving as the officer of the deck, a position of command on the bridge.

“You're out there in charge, going in and out of Hong Kong or through the Strait of Malacca or anywhere else that can be stressful and terrifying just as a mariner, setting aside the military context,” Deluzio said. “That was a really awesome part of the job.”

His first two deployments were at sea, conducting joint exercises in the Pacific, defending oil platforms in the Middle East and more, he said.

“I remember going through the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranians were causing problems. Not much has changed,” he said in an interview two weeks before the U.S. attacks that threatened to cut off the critical shipping route.

Deluzio’s third and final deployment was as a Navy officer with Army Civil Affairs. On Iraqi soil for the first time, he spent about eight months stationed at a military base in Nasiriyah, a couple hundred miles southeast of Baghdad. He said his unit would accompany other Army units or special forces to collect civilian information and work with local Iraqi governments.

The unit never saw battle or encountered an improvised explosive device, he said. But the violence was still a risk — and a reality that would inevitably impact his thinking as he returned home, went to law school and eventually pursued politics.

“I’ve got classmates who died or lost limbs. Anyone who comes from some military family or culture probably has connections to someone in those wars who maybe lost their lives or really bore some costs,” he said. “And that absolutely shapes how I think about the questions of whether we ever send Americans to fight.”

Taking the lead in Congress

At the beginning of the current session of Congress, roughly 100 lawmakers were military veterans — an unusually high number after a steady decline since the mid-1970s, the publication Military Times reported last year.

McCormick, who served with the Army during the Gulf War, is among those. So are three other House members representing Pennsylvania: Republicans Guy Reschenthaler, of Peters, and Scott Perry, of York County; and Democrat Chrissy Houlahan, of Chester County.

A highly polarized Congress has meant almost every Republican and Democrat has fallen along party lines to support or oppose Trump’s military interventions — from the actions in Iran to the capture of Venezuelan authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro in January.

But some supporters, like McCormick, have also referenced the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to raise concerns about the potential deployment of ground troops in Iran. The Republican senator hasn’t ruled out supporting deployment, though he suggested in television interviews both before and after Trump ordered the attacks that neither he nor the public has the appetite for another prolonged U.S. engagement in the Middle East.

“We don’t want to (eliminate the threat of Iran and help its people) in a way that gets America entangled in some lengthy war, like what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan,” McCormick said in an interview with CBS News two days before the attack. “They don't want American troops coming home in body bags, that's for sure. So they're skeptical of long military engagement. But I also think President Trump's built some credibility with the way he's conducted military operations in Venezuela and earlier last year in Iran.”

Ryan Grauer, an associate professor and director of the University of Pittsburgh’s public and international affairs program, said the closer service members are to their experience in war, the more they’re aware of the consequences.

“Generally, when you look at the voting records of veterans in Congress, they tend to be … more reticent of rushing headlong into the use of force than those who haven’t served,” Grauer said, adding there are some clear exceptions.

The way veterans use their platforms to engage with the public about the use of military force has also changed.

For decades after World War II, the civilian-military dynamic was dominated for the most part by the idea that veterans wouldn’t necessarily speak out in the forceful way that, for example, John Kerry did when he opposed the Vietnam War after returning from active duty, Grauer said. As the fighting in Iraq dragged on after 2003, veterans who were widely celebrated by the public — and whose experiences abroad were more visible in the internet age — were presented with different opportunities.

“If we’re saying, ‘Every service member is a hero,’ that includes those who approve of that service and those who don’t,” Grauer said. “It creates space for veterans who were critical of how force was used to have their voices heard.”

Deluzio has positioned himself as a leader among those veteran voices on Capitol Hill since his election in 2022.

Last June, he launched an 18-member Democratic Veterans Caucus with a pair of colleagues concerned about everything from Veterans Affairs-provided health care to Trump’s handling of national security threats around the globe.

In November, he used an appearance on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart to highlight problems at the VA, military contracting and Perry’s recent comments that Democratic politicians who are veterans “hate the military.” Less than two weeks later, he joined a handful of other Democrats to release a video urging active duty service members to “refuse illegal orders” from the administration. Trump called the message “seditious” and behavior that was “punishable by death,” sparking a flurry of threats to Deluzio and his colleagues.

Refusing to be intimidated, as he’s said, Deluzio has since spoken out twice about what he sees as Trump’s reckless use of military force. Standing outside the Capitol in January, he told his colleagues to “grow a spine” and stand up to the president over his use of the military in Venezuela.

In the same spot after the attack in Iran, he reiterated what he’s often described as his straightforward standard for deciding whether to send Americans to fight abroad: Can officials look soldiers, and their families, in the eye and say it’s worth the ultimate sacrifice?

“When they were beating the drums of war, there was literally one colleague that I called to get his take throughout, and it was Chris,” said U.S. Rep. Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat and Army veteran who quickly bonded with Deluzio when they started in Washington around the same time.

Deluzio, he said, was a “natural leader” — someone who works diligently behind the scenes to build relationships with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, whether in the House Armed Services Committee or at the bipartisan Congressional Baseball Game. The latter may be recreational, Ryan said. But with many Republican veterans on the team, putting in the effort to build a rapport matters when issues like Iran and Venezuela come up, he said while pointing to the fact that some of the few GOP deflections on the recent war powers resolutions were veterans.

Ryan, who deployed for two combat tours in Iraq, also co-chairs the Democratic Veterans Caucus with Deluzio. He said they haven’t spoken in detail about their experiences while deployed — “There’s just a mutual understanding that’s almost unspoken” — but they speak frequently about how to use their platforms to make a difference.

“Since they initiated this war, we both felt and talked very regularly about how important it is to be strong and vocal right out of the gate,” Ryan said. “Speaking out on behalf of a huge set of veterans across the country who feel the way that we do and who, frankly, there weren't voices like that — that were at least able to break through enough — in the lead up to Iraq and Afghanistan. It's now an obligation and duty of ours to do that here in this moment.”

Though Trump has said the war could end “very soon,” he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have promised more intense fighting ahead. With the Republican-controlled Congress already voting against restricting the president’s efforts, skeptics like Deluzio may see their positions highlighted even more as the conflict goes on.

“Right now all signs are pointing to the eventual introduction of ground forces,” Grauer said. “When and if that happens, I think their voices are going to be amplified even more given their experience getting their boots dusty in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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