Young American men in their late teens and early twenties are shipped far from home to a country where they not only do not speak the language but they cannot even read a single street sign or storefront. They were trained to kill and not get killed themselves, not to police. The two skills couldn’t be more different.
Of course the individual soldiers themselves, if guilty, should spend the rest of their lives behind bars, but Rumsfeld and Cheney, the architects of the war yet two men who never knew war themselves, guaranteed not only the failure of the mission but also the slaughtering of civilians.
According to a Zogby poll of servicemen, 90% of U.S. soldiers still think that they were sent to Iraq to punish Saddam for his “involvement” in 9/11. Only 58% think they have a clear mission, 42% aren’t exactly sure what they the hell they are doing over there. Their tragic confusion, ignorance and misinformation comes down directly from the top. Rumsfeld and Cheney refused to even acknowledge the existence of an insurgency for the first two years of the war. To this day they still have not formulated and passed down a plan for effectively combating them. I’ve written this before but George Packer’s New Yorker article on the subject is an absolute must-read. Here is a an excerpt:
“The Pentagon’s strategy in 2003 and 2004 was to combat the insurgency simply by eliminating insurgents—an approach called “kill-capture.” Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer, who now teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said of the method, “It’s all about hunting people. I think it comes directly from the Secretary of Defense—‘I want heads on a plate.’”
Or as a sergeant recently told Newsweek, "You can have my job. It's easy. You just have to drive around all day and wait for someone to bomb you. Thing is, you have to hate Arabs."
This doctrine of “kill-capture,” or what another soldier described in The New Yorker as, “breaking down doors and hauling people in,” has failed absolutely. What seems to be having at least a limited success is a more holistic approach to the Iraqi people as practiced by Col. H.R. McMaster in Tal Afar. Yet his way of actually getting to know the people you are supposed to be defending seems to be in a minority in Iraq. More and more of our troops are being cloistered within our permanent super bases (“Forward Operating Bases” or “FOBs”). When these “fobbits” do finally venture out to patrol it is logical that they will be more trigger happy, seeing every Arab face as an enemy.
The saddest irony, as Arianna has mentioned, is that the slaughter at Haditha probably won’t incite the same kind of worldwide scandal as the Abu Ghraib tortures. By now, thanks to the disastrous prosecution of this misguided war, our army is already infamous around the world for its gruesome brutality. Haditha, or the two other open investigations, or the pregnant woman who was just shot at a checkpoint killing her and her unborn child, or the Italian special agent who was shot at a checkpoint while rescuing an Italian journalist, or the new Iraqi ambassador to the U.N.’s cousin who was hauled out of his house in Haditha and shot, have numbed the world to American misdeeds.
Only by pulling out of Iraq can we begin to rebuild our standing around the globe.
