Iraq, non-violence, and responsibility.

The following letter responds to a blog from Spring 2007, my comments begin after the long dotted line:

I tried to add this as a comment to your post, but it was too long.

I realize my knowledge and understanding of the military, combat situations, and Iraq are limited. Therefore, this is not so much a firm statement of my opinion as it is a series of thoughts and questions that I hope will lessen my ignorance of our country’s current events. I am living and working in New Zealand where I’ve been impressed by the teenagers’ intelligent, specific and well-informed questions about Bush, US current events, foreign policy and presidential candidates that, in my experience, few people their age in the States would be able to pose. One could say that this is a consequence of the United States’ position in the forefront of world events. However, their knowledge, and even their evening news, extends to the major problems of countries all over the world in a way that CNN does not touch. Their awareness of the world around them, particularly at a young age, is quite notable. It is a shame that more Americans cannot take an active interest in the world we are so dramatically affecting. That being said, I have a few questions in response to reading your posts:

You site the SOPs and the Rules of Engagement for the Iraq theater to support your point that pulling the trigger is a rare event. At the same time you reference various literature to give an idea of life in combat. How do you reconcile the lack of shooting by American soldiers in Iraq with the horrible, bloody scenes in A Farewell to Arms and more so in All’s Quiet on the Western Front? Particularly in the latter, the trauma and inability to rejoin “normal” civilian life is attributed in large part to the endless and widespread bloodshed. Even in A Farewell to Arms, a major theme is desperation driven by the feeling that “everyone always dies.” I certainly don’t mean to diminish the PTSD of veterans from Iraq, or to imply that the experience isn’t utterly horrifying. I am just asking how, specifically, would you explain American military life in Iraq in terms of the literature you mention? I also confess that I have yet to read the other two books you mention; the local NZ library has yet to order them. This could be too literal an interpretation of your references, but I’d like to get a better idea of American soldier life in Iraq from a first hand source.

You indicate that first you thought we should clean up the mess we made in Iraq, and now you feel we should get out. What brought about your change of heart with regard to our status in Iraq?

From your experience, what are the ratios of those who wanted to serve and those who joined the military in response to the pressures of poverty? You say people join because of a “desire on the part of young Americans from the underprivileged demographic to do something positive and to contribute to global society.” Do you attribute their actions more to their demographic, or to their desire to do something positive? Are you implying interplay between poverty and desire to serve, or do you think that the military is just the best way out of a bad situation?

A friend who just graduated from the Naval Academy is now based in Japan, where she has been stationed for almost a year. She promotes the Navy as more than just a branch of the military, but also as a place to meet incredible people, and as a community service and international relations organization. One example she gives is her fiancée (also in the Navy) handing out backpacks and books to underprivileged children as part of his duties. What’s more, she argues that the military can be significantly more effective than most Not For Profits because of the government’s massive financial resources. She is also someone who I respect for her independence of thought, and therefore was impressed that she has found herself more content to comply with orders unquestioningly as she has seen more of the Navy and how it works. Through experience, she has gained respect for the system and the intelligence of the institution. Obviously her experiences in the Navy are completely different from yours, particularly given that she has never been in a combat situation and she went through the academy. That understood, what is your opinion of this perspective? Are the desire for adventure, personal growth, interesting company and work, and travel legitimate reasons for going to OCS?

Thanks for your well thought out essays and a forum for discussion. Hope you are well.

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Okay. So I am going to try to respond to your questions point by point. Again, apologies for the time delay fuse.

First, I share with you a frustration in the national level of global and domestic awareness, not just among youth but also among Americans in general. I was walking down the street last night and I overheard a male college student say to his girlfriend “I just don’t like reading. It makes my brain hurt.” She replied “I know it. But couldn’t you just try, like Harry Potter or something?” He responded in the negative, quite fervently. This young man is a student at one of the nation’s finest public institutions, but he hates reading. What does that tell you? The availability of quality information on domestic and global issues at the newsstand or in the living room is deplorable. Sure, there are plenty of excellent journals, ‘zines, and blogs around, and there will always be C-Span and PBS, but let’s face it: information in the USA = an entertainment industry. If it’s not jumping out at you and making a really loud noise you just don’t pay attention (of course I refer to the proverbial “you”). Paying attention to the information that matters “hurts the brain,” causes depression, inspires a guilty conscience, and might even require the effort of effortless research. But: I try not to ask too much. Foremost I hope that people will begin to care more about the issues that face our nation and our communities. I guess that’s asking a lot, but only when personal investment in these issues reaches a palpable pitch will productive discourse begin.

One thing you might think about re: the level to which young people in NZ are very “globally” informed: there’s not that much going on in NZ. The United States provides a significant amount of news to just about every country that is not the United States. And we’re easy to criticize.

Now on to your questions:

1) How do I reconcile the lack of shooting by American soldiers in Iraq with the horrible, bloody scenes in [literature of WWI/WWII] re: PTSD, the shock of readjustment, etc.?

It’s true that combat soldiers in WWI and WWII saw, esp. in trench warfare and large conventional battles like Omaha Beach, Guadalcanal, and the Battle of the Bulge, more friendly casualties and inflicted more direct violence on the enemy. The sheer scale of these conflicts has much to do with this fact, as does the nature of conventional warfare, in which two opposing forces hurl bodies at one another until one side runs out of bodies or bullets. Obviously that’s not what we’re up to in Iraq and that’s not what we were up to, for the most part, in VN. Still, killing occurs on both sides in Iraq. The soldier’s life is constantly jeopardized, above all by the prevalence of roadside bombs and other Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). When soldiers are forced by the constraints of a combat situation to kill an insurgent, the Rules of Engagement generally protect that soldier from recrimination. However, ROE does nothing to protect the soldier from flashbacks, nightmares, or lifelong guilt, the result of what Iraq veteran author John Crawford calls “the ultimate moral sacrifice.” Of course there are those soldiers who – at least as far as we know – kill without remorse. There are those who seem to bounce back from deployment as if they just returned from a year in the Bahamas. Beware the act of the brave man. There is always more to the story. I think All Quiet on the Western Front does an excellent job of conveying a soldier’s deep frustration with the senselessness of violence, and of violent nationalism. I think the main character’s deepest sadness comes not when he loses his best friend in “No Man’s Land,” but when he returns to his native town on leave and sees his old teacher drilling propagandistic rhetoric into the impressionable minds of his young students. Can you find a similarity here? Imagine what it’s like to serve a combat tour and then return, only to see someone like Bill O’Reilly or George Bush himself corrupting the minds of Americans with hateful, erroneous, sentimentalist rhetoric that entirely misses the truth of the situation. For many veterans – myself included – this experience is a source of constant frustration. Other returning veterans have a different experience: they return even further cemented in a worldview that posits violence and domination as the solution to all international problems. Such a worldview is hard to shake. I know guys who’ve returned to Iraq two or three times because they can no longer function in civil society. They actually prefer the war zone, where life’s responsibilities are incredibly immediate, where bonds between coworkers and friends have dire importance (at least they seem to), and where the social responsibilities of the “world” are non-existent. Add into the mix thousands of ruined marriages, foreclosed homes, failed careers, life-altering wounds, etc., complicating the readjustment process for all soldiers and their families. It’s not always pleasant to return home. It’s often bittersweet.


2) You indicate that first you thought that we should clean up the mess we made in Iraq, and now you feel we should get out. What brought about your change of heart with regard to our status in Iraq?

This question is a lot easier than the last, the last being one that I could probably (and probably will) use as the basis for a book someday. I landed in Iraq in March 2004, pretty close to the one-year anniversary of the invasion. When I arrived, the future of Iraq was very uncertain, but no one thought it would get as bad as it has. We still thought that we could “win” somehow, or that Iraq would embrace the opportunity to inculcate a new political system with the help of American security and bureaucratic assistance. I never agreed with the invasion of Iraq. I thought it was a terrible foreign policy decision. Still, once there I began to hope that “something good” could come out of the US involvement. New money had been minted, the elections were coming, the constitution was under construction, and the word on the street was “Allahu akhbar, Saddam is gone.” No one – and I mean NO ONE – foresaw the extent to which the Sunni insurgency would gather strength and make war against the burgeoning Iraqi state. Political theorists were not surprised by the development of the Sunni insurgency, and even less surprised by the Shi’a power grab (they’ve been politically repressed in every Arab state since 632), but no one envisioned the horrific violence Muslims were willing to inflict on one another. Perhaps such a failure to predict the extremity of sectarian conflict was naïve. In April 2004 the Fallujah offensive successfully secured large tracts of hotly contested Baghdad suburbs and satellite cities in which Sunni insurgents were pooling their resources and mounting a power base. The combined effort of the Army and Marine Corps did not result in the killing or capturing of every Sunni insurgent, nor did the putsch destroy networks of insurgents. Rather, the insurgents fled to the North, South, and West. Suddenly cities like Mosul, Tal-Afar, Basra, Ramadi, Najaf, and the villages of al-Anbar province ignited with insurgent activity. The insurgents had arrived on fresh soil, and for the first time nearly the entire country – excepting the Kurdish regions to the North and the barren regions of the eastern borderlands – was a hotbed of anti-US insurgent activity. If we had hoped to begin the sort of Civil Affairs work necessary to fight a productive counter-insurgency, to rebuild the regional governmental infrastructure, and to begin rebuilding the economy at the local level, we quickly realized we were too late. As of summer 2004, the majority of military resources were invested in conducting counter-insurgency operations and patrols. We couldn’t afford not to. Now, three years later, our tenuous control over Iraq has slipped even more. Baghdad is completely out of coalition control. The southern insurgency is gathering strength because the British – awaiting full redeployment – are hunkered down in their Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), on orders to avoid violent interaction at all costs. The British voting public will not tolerate any more.

The surge offered a brief respite of violence in certain areas of Iraq. The same thing happens in very dangerous American city neighborhoods when police departments temporarily increase police presence drastically. Yes: putting “a cop on every corner” cuts down crime. Unfortunately, cops cannot solve the underlying structural problems that undermine all efforts to help Iraq become a stable democracy. Cops cannot build democratic institutions. They can protect them, but they cannot make people use them. They cannot inspire democratic political culture, nor can they fully protect the citizens who wish to exercise their right to political participation. Cops cannot control the decisions of political and military elites. Cops cannot control ideology.

“Cops,” by which I mean US troops, can provide a constant reminder of deep underlying structural problems and an easy target for taking out frustration caused by the glaring inconsistencies, injustices, and violence that are at least partially linked to the American presence in Iraq (fires which were, if not caused, at least kindled, by the American invasion and failures of American policy in Iraq since well before March 2003).

There is a civil war going on in Iraq that is as complex as civil wars get. Reductionists like to imagine the problem as rather simple, if well entrenched: Sunni v. Shi’a. “A battle that has raged since the death of the prophet and will rage until judgment day,” they say. Well, the reductionists are wrong. Shi’a of southern Iraq do not identify culturally with the Shi’a of Baghdad. Sunni Kurds certainly do not identify with Sunni Arabs. Militias rivaled other militias, even when religious and political affiliations are superficially shared. There are Assyrian Christians. There are Yazidis. There are also several million people who just wish it would all stop so they could go back to life as normal. Unfortunately the latter group must choose sides on a day to day basis, and even switch sides from time to time, to avoid the personal consequence of becoming an enemy of one or another violent group. It’s important to remember that the Iraqi state itself is a violent group, that police and Iraqi National Guard (ING) troops are not under the control of the government or the Coalition, but in fact quite autonomous in many cases. Sometimes the Army fights the police. Sometimes the police fight the militias. Sometimes policemen use their power and their uniform to serve the interest of insurgent groups. It’s a mess. The rule of law has no quarter in Iraq. Worst of all, from a foreign policy perspective, is the fact that the US troops are considered one of the many “sects” involved in this civil war. We are not to be trusted. We are killing. And we are killed. And we are helping others kill. All of this makes sense. We have not restored electricity. We have not cleaned the streets or removed the trash. We have not rebuilt hospitals. We have not built schools. You may as well take it as a general statement of purpose when you see scrawled on a soldier’s helmet “Fuck Hearts and Minds.” Even if the soldier doesn’t mean it, it’s the end result of all of our failed policies in Iraq. We have fucked the hearts and minds of a nation. Two nations actually, ours and theirs. Perhaps many more.

So: the idea that we are still an efficacious force in Iraq is laughable. We are holding back the floodwaters, and we may as well release the deluge while we can still get away from it. I do not propose immediate withdrawal, but I do propose a timeline with “hard targets.” I hope – note, I do not say believe – that a timeline and the consequent first steps toward American redeployment will force Iraqi political elites to the drawing board and the conference room. And I hope they will try to incorporate the violent groups who are derailing the government into their plans. Stranger things have happened. We gain nothing by staying with no commitment to return. This could drag out for a very long time if we do not terminate our involvement, and the weakness of the American presence in Iraq – crippled by a lack of funds (or a severe mismanagement of funds – thanks Halliburton/KBR/Paul Wolfowitz) and a logistically broken military – only maintains an idling civil war. I say let it burn out and fade away. Especially since we’re going to have to let it happen someday. We can’t keep selling our war debt to China (they already own about 30% of our 9 trillion USD debt). Suffice to say that the Democratic Congress will not long continue to throw blank checks or Surge Troopers down the desert drain that is Iraq today.

3) I am not going to answer this question because I think you’d be better served by looking up the Harper’s article to which I refer. The basic idea is exactly what your friend from the Naval Academy says, so I’ll just skip straight to that.

What is your opinion of this perspective? Are the desire for adventure, personal growth, interesting company and work, and travel legitimate reasons for going to OCS?

My opinion of “this perspective” is not terribly complicated. I pretty much agree: the military offers an excellent opportunity to surround oneself with ambitious, courageous, and high tempo people. Barring voyages to Iraq and Afghanistan, there are some good travel opportunities as well. You could live in Germany, Japan, Italy, Alaska, Guam, Cuba, Spain, Ireland, etc. Or you could live on Ft. McGwire, NJ, which isn’t so bad I guess. It’s not far from NYC. There are certainly better ways to travel, if travelling’s what you’re after (and given that you’re in NZ right now, I think you’ve secured a pretty good trip already). Just remember that the Officer Corps and the Enlisted ranks are different animals altogether. Officers are all college graduates. Almost none of the Enlisted are college graduates, though many are college students (less now that the cost of combat significantly outweighs the cost of college loans). What the military offers to Enlisted personnel is incredibly significant: work experience in the oldest and most successful meritocracy in the United States. Harry Truman integrated the Armed Forces in 1948, and since then the percentage of minorities serving in each branch is roughly equivalent or even surpasses the percentage of “white” service members. People come to the military for a lot of different reasons and from a lot of different places, and when they get there – as we say in the Army – they “all wear green” (or blue, if you’re a squid). For me, the Army offered a place to get to know a demographic of the American society that I probably never would’ve encountered had I gone “the college route” successfully on the first try, like most young people from “where I’m from.” In the Army I worked alongside self-proclaimed hillbillies and self-proclaimed gangstas, suburban kids whose fathers had breathed hellfire down their throats since they were small, who could not even conceive of the idea that the President might “lie,” farm boys who wore cowboy boots and boleros and cowboy hats when they went on pass, “conservative” soldiers who voted for John Kerry, “liberal” soldiers who liked treating Iraqis like dogs, and a whole lot of young men who were just kind of floating along. All of them are heroes to me, because we did what we did together. I hate some of them, but I respect them. I worked with a lot of honest, good people, whose generosity could have – and in some cases did – cost them life, limb, or sanity. And I worked with a lot of bad people. I worked with people who genuinely hated the Iraqi people. Sometimes I saw the most aggressive American soldiers, the most despicable, hateful, and downright mean among them, toss stuffed animals and candy out to a crowd of children surrounding the convoy. Sometimes I saw the hardest ones cry. I tried to understand as much of it as I could, or at least to save it for later. But I also turned mean for a time. I turned on the men in my unit who called me a “liberal, tree hugging pussy,” even while I stood next to them with a rifle in my hands. As far as I could tell, it was guys like them who got us there.

But then again it wasn’t guys like them who got us there, because they’d taken a selfless step that none of the Bush administration ever took: they swore to defend and protect the United States of America from all enemies domestic and foreign. And they paid for that promise without, in most cases, asking for anything in return, anything other than “three hots and a cot” that is.

So: if your friend thinks that the Armed Forces of the United States are better “community service” and “international relations” organizations than most NGOs, I think she is conveniently misled and might benefit from removing her rose-colored lenses. The Armed Forces have one ultimate mission: the maintenance and use of violent force in the interest of American national security. Throwing out a few schoolbooks here and there is not about community service. It’s about counter-insurgency. That’s all fine and good to me, and it paints a pretty picture, but remember that sometimes the insurgents we fight with weapons and with “hearts and minds” campaigns are working to violently overthrow regimes that are the structural cause of a given nation’s development retardation. We stand in the way, holding a backpack and a textbook and claiming moral high ground. I’ll give you an example you may be familiar with: the US Army and Navy were two of the first responders to both the Tsunami of 2004 and the earthquake in Kashmir of 2005. They did not rush to the aid of the dying thousands in order to fulfill a commitment to “community service,” they went because they were already in the area. Gathering intelligence. “Winning hearts and minds” is the key tactic of counter-insurgency. One day’s backpack is another day’s rifle. I don’t have a problem with that, in principle. I strongly believe that America should maintain a powerful national security posture. I happen to think that hearts and minds campaigns are critical to our national security. But I know that there is a thin red line between hearts and minds and blood and guts. I tend to hope that our national leaders will respect that line and keep private agendas out of international affairs. Historically, they have not always done so. Think of Latin America. Or, if you want, think of Iraq under Saddam Hussein before 1991. Where does your USNA friend think Saddam got the materiel and financial support to win the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s? US. U.S. Us. He used some of that money to kill a quarter-million of his own people. We were deaf to the protests in 1989, and yet 18 years later we still claim to be “avenging an evil dictator.”

I love the military. I think the US Military is one of the greatest institutions the world has ever seen. I think that for a number of reasons, mostly because of the people I know who have served in the military and the people with whom I served. But I never forget that when I signed on the dotted line on 26 July 2001, I agreed to act as a killing agent – should the need arise – for the United States of America for 8 years. If you are not a combat soldier, if you are a sailor, for example, or a linguist, or a clerk, or a pathologist, or a veterinarian, you are still part of the machine that kills, and you are still responsible. That said, the military needs good people now. Perhaps now more than ever. I frequently consider returning to active duty. Every bone in my body wishes that I were back in Iraq, but frequently a little more than half of my heart wants to stay at home. I do not wish to return to Iraq to do the business of the military, but to be with my friends and my fellow soldiers as they undertake the Herculean task of enduring this lost war. If that’s the kind of commitment to service you’re looking for, head to the recruiter as soon as you can. If not, stay on the sidelines and think very carefully about your relationship to the military as a civilian. Think about what you say, but please say something. After all, the greatest fact about the US Military is that it is an extension of the American body politic. You’re responsible for the military’s actions even as a civilian. Exercising the right to vote, speaking publicly in support or dissent of specific foreign policy, paying close attention to various forms of media, criticizing, thinking, and hoping, are all important parts of affecting a positive change in our national direction.

Albert Camus wrote in Le Combat, a resistance newspaper, that pacifism is not an option for citizens of a country engaged in war. But the opposite of pacifism, according to Camus, is not violent ideology, but resistance. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi thought the same thing. The latter two called their efforts “non-violent,” and indeed they were, but they accomplished an effect better than the effect that violence could have produced: they won hearts and minds with peace and faith in civic virtue. Albert Camus argued that every citizen of a country engaged in war must find a way to bring an end to the war and must make an effort to pursue whatever means s/he discovers. The pacifist lies down and lets the authoritarian run amuck. The non-violent resister writes, carries documents, engages people in challenging conversation, and – above all – never stops seeking out injustices to correct. Every American has a responsibility to think long and hard about where our nation is headed, not just with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, but also with regard to our comprehensive national purpose. In recent years, our national purpose has been institutionally corrupted by careless and violent foreign policy. I have chosen to resist, following my period of service with still more service in a new, non-violent form. I urge every American to do the same.