The Pittsburgh-area congressman has positioned himself as a leader among veteran voices on Capitol Hill since his election in 2022

By Sam Janesch

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

March 12, 2026 – 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. Mr. Deluzio — a Thornburg 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 Mr. Deluzio, now a Democrat who represents all of Beaver and most of Allegheny counties in the U.S. House. 

Sam Janesch

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“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.”

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