If you haven’t read it yet, this is your weekend assignment:
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. [These combat veterans] described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.
One author of the piece also has an OpEd in today’s LA Times:
We need to muster the moral courage to face the reality of the war. To wallow in a myth that trumpets our goodness, denies our irresponsible rules of engagement and demonizes those who oppose us will leave us unable to end the occupation and begin the long, slow process of reconciliation.
An assortment of quotes from the (long) Nation report below the fold:
"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi"
"And this baby looked at me, wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything, it just looked at me like–I know she couldn’t speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?…"
".. they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, ’cause it’s
doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots
it. And he didn’t–motherfucker–he shot it and it went in the jaw and
exited out."One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.
"So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."
"I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, …"
"It was just soldiers being soldiers …"
"The Geneva Conventions don’t exist at all in Iraq, and that’s in writing if you want to see it."
"Life is just knocked down to this primal level."
"It becomes this racialized hatred towards Iraqis." […] "By calling them names," he said, "they’re not people anymore. They’re just objects."
"Well, one of the bullets happened to just pierce the windshield and went straight into the face of this woman in the car."
"We’re using these vulnerable, vulnerable convoys, which probably piss off more Iraqis than it actually helps in our relationship with them," Flanders said, "just so that we can have comfort and air-conditioning and sodas–great–and PlayStations and camping chairs and greeting cards and stupid T-shirts that say, Who’s Your Baghdaddy?"
While many veterans said the killing of civilians deeply disturbed them, they also said there was no other way to safely operate a patrol.
The killing of unarmed Iraqis was so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape.
".. the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don’t have to kill them back in Colorado"
"I mean, I guess I have a moral obligation to say something, but I would have been kicked out of the unit in a heartbeat. I would’ve been a traitor."
.. veterans said fear often clouded their judgment
"It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged 3."
"And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, ‘If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.’"
"Someone could look at me the wrong way and I could claim my safety was in threat."
"I even specifically remember being told that it was better to kill them than to have somebody wounded and still alive."
"The guys got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they shot up the car."
"It’s not individual atrocity. It’s the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."
"I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?"
"Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…."
"The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned."
Read it and talk about it …