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Material
World
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IRAQ:
VIOLENCE WITHOUT END OR PURPOSE?
Every ten years
or so, the United States needs to pick up some small
crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the
world we mean business.
Michael Ledeen (American Enterprise Institute) |
Last month 100 U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan held
hearings in Washington to describe their experience. Named Winter
Soldier after a similar meeting of Vietnam veterans in 1971, the event
was ignored by the major corporate media outlets. In contrast to
Vietnam, media coverage of these wars is sanitized. Viewers see no
scenes of carnage, hear no cries of pain. No publicity accompanies the
coffins on their return.
On the internet, however, there is uncensored testimony, including
videos and personal blogs (e.g.: ivaw.org, indybay.org,
therealnews.com, 5yearstoomany.org, aliveinbaghdad.org). These are the
sources on which I draw here.
The recruiter’s lament
Let’s start with the army recruiter who inveigles the naïve
youngster into the inferno. A sinister figure? Or just another victim?
After all, he didn’t seek transfer to the Recruitment Command. Now he
has to make his quota or else endure constant humiliation, weekends in
“corrective retraining” and the threat of the sack. So he works himself
to exhaustion, answers the kids’ questions with lies, and recruits
anyone he can, whether or not they meet official standards of health,
education or “moral character” (i.e., no criminal record).
Few now join for “patriotic” reasons. Most are bribed with the promise
of financial benefits, often payment of college fees. Many foreign
residents sign up as a way of becoming U.S. citizens. Over 100 have
been awarded citizenship posthumously.
Destroy the enemy
A few weeks of basic training and the new teenage soldier, who has
probably never been abroad or even in another region of the U.S.,
suddenly finds himself in a strange, uncomfortable and disorienting
environment. He does not understand the language, nor can he decipher
the Arabic script. He has been taught to fear every haji -- the term
used to dehumanize Iraqis – as a possible enemy. He starts to kill and
goes on killing, usually with the connivance of his superiors, often
with their open encouragement. He kills in blind fear, or on orders, or
even out of boredom. Most likely he feels no shame: his mates take
souvenir photos of him standing by his “trophies.”
It is not necessarily only Iraqis who he kills. When Marines find their
forward movement blocked, one blogger tells us, they “start using their
training ‘to destroy the enemy’ on civilians or other Marines.”
Violence and degradation pervade relations not just between the
military and Iraqi civilians but also within the military. Soldiers are
abused and humiliated by officers. Rape is commonplace.
To what purpose?
It is hard to see what purpose all this violence can possibly serve.
The U.S. government would like to suppress all resistance to the
occupation and stabilize a client regime that can be trusted to keep
Iraq open to plunder by Western (mainly U.S.) corporations. But the
more people are killed the more of their relatives and friends will
take up arms to avenge them. Various militias temporarily ally
themselves with the occupation forces in order to eliminate their
rivals, but later they too will fight the Americans (as well as one
another). And the persisting “instability” and destruction of resources
make Iraq less appealing to corporate investors.
So the chances are that the U.S. will cut losses and give up, although
the process will no doubt drag on for years. Otherwise the fighting
will continue until the whole population is dead or has fled the
country. In that case there will be no one left to run the puppet
government or work for the corporations. Of course, the chore of
administration could be dumped on the UN and workers brought in from
abroad.
The sanctity of property
Amid the bloody mayhem, measures are still taken to preserve the
sanctity of property – or at least of American property. One soldier
tells of being sent with others to guard a military contractor’s truck
that has broken down on the highway. After hours of warding off hungry
Iraqis who want to take the food stored inside, they received the order
to destroy the truck together with its contents. On another occasion
they were ordered to destroy an ambulance.
When capitalists are forced by circumstances to abandon their property,
they evidently prefer to have it destroyed rather than permit its use
to satisfy the needs of desperate people. That is the true face of the
real enemy – the class enemy.
The cost to American
society
The cost of this futile war to American society can hardly be compared
with the damage inflicted on a devastated and shattered Iraq. It is
quite substantial nonetheless. As always, the working class pays by far
the highest price for their masters’ insane adventures.
Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far. This may seem
quite modest in view of the 50,000 killed in Vietnam. However, the
number killed is a misleading indicator of the amount of suffering. Due
to medical advances, the ratio of wounded to killed, which was 3:1 in
Vietnam, is 7:1 in Iraq. Many soldiers who in previous wars would have
died of severe brain injury, loss of limbs or extensive third-degree
burns have been “saved” – not restored to health, but salvaged to live
out the rest of their lives in pain and
discomfort.
Brutalized and traumatized
Even more numerous are the psychological casualties. Apart from those
who serve in office jobs and rarely if ever leave the Green Zone (the
specially secured part of Baghdad where the U.S. embassy and military
headquarters are located), there can be few who return from Iraq free
of psychological trauma -- “post-traumatic stress disorder” as the
psychiatrists call it. (Over 100,000 are seeking treatment, but there
must be many more who do not seek treatment – and, indeed, it is
doubtful whether any effective treatment exists.)
Many veterans feel unbearable guilt for what they have done, although
it is those who sent them who are mainly responsible. So it is not
uncommon for a young soldier to return home “safe and sound” only to
hang himself the next day. Besides suicide, the veterans are prone to
alcoholism and depression, homicide and domestic violence.
And there are so many of these brutalized and traumatized veterans!
While “only” about 175,000 troops are deployed at any one time
(currently 158,000 in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan), at least
1,400,000 soldiers have fought at some time in one or both of these
wars. The damage to the social fabric is therefore enormous -- in the
same way that the social fabric in Russia, for instance, has been torn
by its wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. And a new
war against Iran is still on the cards. Nor can we exclude a U.S.
military intervention against pro-Taliban forces in northwestern
Pakistan.
STEFAN
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