The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

The Nation, in  it's July 30, 2007 issue, has an article  Why the US Military Loves Ron Paul on the antiwar Texas Republican's  pulling more campaign contributions from the military than John McCain. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/engelhardt

It examines  recent polls on  Americans views of the war as well as  campaign contributions to various candidates from different groups. It discusses the various contrasting  media interpretations of Ron Paul's  success in  gaining support from the military.  It concludes : 

 But let's also keep history in mind--at least the history of our country's last disastrous war of this sort. Don't forget that, Col. Robert D. Heinl, author of the "definitive history of the Marine Corps," wrote in 1971 when a withdrawal from Vietnam of US troops but not advisors or air power was well underway, that the armed forces were already in a state that had "only been exceeded in this century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917."

Present US forces are, of course, all-volunteer, not draftees (or not exactly anyway, given recent tour extensions in Iraq and other kinds of forced call-ups), but why should they want to be endlessly redeployed to a lost war in a lost land? By the time the Bush Administration is done, the Paul campaign may be swimming in military money. " 

American and British politicians have consistently hailed their armed forces in Iraq as 'our finest men and women', despite a consistent flow of evidence to the contrary. Haditha and Abu Ghraib. There are the photographs of hideously destroyed Iraqi corpses posted by US soldiers on a porn site, accompanied by joking comments. Testimonies from US veterans describing how military patrols routinely carry 'throwaway' AK47s and shovels to plant on unarmed civilians they shoot.
 
In its July 30, 2007 issue, The Nation publishes the most comprehensive series of interviews with US Iraq war veterans carried out to date.   Conducted by war correspondent   Chris Hedges and Palestinian-American journalist Laila al-Arian, the interviews offer  insights into the attitudes and behaviour of the US military in Iraq. Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges
 
 War veterans describe the routine killing and terrorising of Iraqi civilians .  They tell of  convoys running over children, trigger-happy soldiers blasting entire families to pieces at checkpoints, the desecration of Iraqi corpses. The war that emerges from these interviews is a brutal neo-colonial occupation, characterised by fear, confusion and a callous indifference towards Iraqi civilians regarded only as 'hajis', 'camel jockeys' and 'Jihad Johnnies'.
 Some veterans are clearly appalled by the behaviour of their former comrades and angry at the disparity between the presentation of the war and its brutal reality.

Thus disparity is not new. During the 1954-62 Algerian war, the French government described its military as a civilised army fighting a  barbaric  enemy. When French soldiers began to write war memoirs describing how they had cut the throats of civilians, disembowelled pregnant women and committed numerous other atrocities, the French public generally refused to acknowledge that its soldiers were capable of sinking to the same level as the natives.There was a similar denial  of the behaviour of the British Army during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the many atrocities of the Vietnam war.

When uniformed soldiers fight a clandestine enemy supported by a civilian population, the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant easily disappear and the Geneva Convention is often discarded, especially when the enemy population is considered racially or culturally inferior.  Train young men for   violence and send them to carry out an  unwanted occupation and they will slip into illegality and immorality. Give such men power over people they do not understand and frequently despise, and they will abuse that power, particularly when such abuses are not properly investigated.
 
A few of the comments from the American soldiers which apppear in The Nation :

You don't want to shoot kids, I mean, no one does, but I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK47 and just decides he's going to start shooting. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds - Sgt Patrick Campbell

You can't tell the difference between these people at all. They all look Arab. They all have beards, facial hair - Sgt Matt Mardan
 
  As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky. That means
stop to most Americans, and that's a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop... That's a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, 'Hello, come here'. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they're saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they're saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you're shooting pregnant women - 1st Sgt Perry Jefferies

In Iraq a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want - Spc Josh Middleton

I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi - Spc Jeff Englehart