Hullabaloo

Sunday, May 06, 2007

 
Landmines

by digby

I have long been concerned about the effects on society at large when a government openly endorses torture. It would appear that we will get a first hand look as some of the troops who fought in the Iraq war come home for good. It's hard to believe that they will easily shed these views and may even find themselves hardening them in order to defend their actions abroad.

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

"It is disappointing," said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. "But anybody who is surprised by it doesn't understand war. ... This is about combat stress."

The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

"I don't want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military _ look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in," Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said of the mission in Iraq. "There's a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk."

The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.

Officials said the teams visited Iraq last August to October, talking to troops, health care providers and chaplains.

The study team also found that long and repeated deployments were increasing troop mental health problems.

But Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the Army's acting surgeon general, said the team's "most critical" findings were on ethics.

"They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at," said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health.

Findings included:


_Only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.

_About a third of troops said they had insulted or cursed at civilians in their presence.

_About 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property when it was not necessary. Mistreatment includes hitting or kicking a civilian.

_Forty-four percent of Marines and 41 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or Marine.

_Thirty-nine percent of Marines and 36 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to gather important information from insurgents.


Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a Marine Corps spokesman, said officials were looking closely at the ethics results, taken from a questionnaire survey of 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines.

[...]

Pike contrasted Iraq's campaign to World War I, saying: "The trenches were pretty stressful, but a unit would only be up at the front for a few months and then get rotated to the rear. There's no rear in Iraq; you're subject to combat stress for your entire tour."

Obviously, war is hell and the amount of stress they are putting on these guys is quite inhumane. The mission is a mess, they don't know who the enemy is and they likely feel they are under seige from every direction, even from the US, although I don't think anyone actually holds them responsible for what has happened. If there was ever a reason to remind the chickenhawk "300" afficionados that the real thing is something other than a video game and should not be undertaken for anything less than vital purposes, this should do it. (But it won't --- the quest for martial glory is embedded in the human DNA, I'm afraid, only in the past it was required that you join up to prove your manhood rather than shake your pom poms from the sidelines dressed in a warrior's costume.)

But even with all that, 40% of the military believing that torture is acceptable is more than alarming, particularly in an elective occupation like Iraq. This is the mightiest military on earth we are talking about, not some fourth rate militia that doesn't understand that even aside from moral considerations, torture is not worth the price in bad information, wasted time and the dehumanization of those who perpetrate it. (Of course, those in our government who use "24" as their moral and tactical guideline might disagree.)

Even more shocking to me than the torture numbers,however, is this:

47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect

Noncombatants are the very people we "liberated." I'm hard pressed to find any reason other than rank racism or a very serious misunderstanding of what the American mission is supposed to be to explain this. I suspect it is both. Even without all the other considerations that is a clear indication that the American military can no longer effect positive change in Iraq. It has, in some very important respects, lost its honor.

That's a problem that's going to bite all of us. At some point these people will be bringing home these attitudes and all the confusion inflicted upon them about "enemies" and "liberation" and whether torture is moral and whether the Iraqi people deserved to be treated with respect will manifest itself in post-traumatic stress syndrome and many broken lives. It is going to be very difficult for these people to reconcile all this.

War can do that, even the "good" ones. There was plenty of "battle fatigue" after WWII and a whole lot of "shell shock" after WWI. But this is actually a magnitude worse, as Vietnam was, because when a failed and disasterous war is based on lies by powerful people for murky political ends, the people who fight it pay an unusually steep price with the guilt and confusion and life-long struggle with the fact that the people who put them there really didn't give a damn. They react to it in many ways, some with deep anger at those who spoke out, others with a lifetime of resentment toward authority, but virtually none of them without serious damage to the psyche. I'm not sure what the effects of having two such wars in a single generation will be, but it's bound to be very, very serious. It was bad enough the first time.


* And then there's this ---- sheer, bureaucratic ass-covering masquerading as leadership. No wonder those grunts think what they think.


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digby 5/06/2007 04:00:00 PM |