The
Good American
By Scott Ritter
12 May, 2007
Truth
Dig
I
joined the American Legion a few years back. As a veteran of the Persian
Gulf War in 1991, I was eligible to do so for some time but always hesitated,
perhaps out of a sense of trying to deny that my days as an active-duty
combatant were long past. Every year, on Memorial Day, my fellow firefighters
and I would gather in the basement of the local American Legion hall
before we paraded before the town we protect. I would look around at
the uniforms and faded patches and ribbons worn by the veterans who
joined us in the hall and realize that they, too, were deserving of
a great deal more support than simply being wheeled out once a year
to participate in a parade. So I sent in my application and was accepted.
One of the fringe benefits
of membership in the American Legion is a subscription to its monthly
journal, The American Legion, billed as “the magazine for a strong
America.” It quickly became apparent that The American Legion
magazine was a sounding board for many holding quite militaristic and
jingoistic opinions based on their rather limited personal experiences,
many dating back to World War II. The war in Iraq, together with the
overarching “global war on terror,” seems to be viewed by
many in the American Legion as an extension of their own past service,
and much effort is made to connect World War II and the Iraq conflict
as part and parcel of the same ongoing American “liberation”
of the world’s oppressed.
It’s a shame for these
Legionnaires that the Iraqis couldn’t have turned out to be blond,
blue-eyed Germans who looked like us, and whose women could be wooed
with chocolate and nylon stockings by the noble American liberator and
occupier. Or, short of that, passive Japanese, who freely submitted
their women to the massage parlors and barracks of their American conquering
heroes while their men rebuilt a shattered society. The simplistic approach
of many of the American Legion’s most hawkish advocates for the
ongoing disaster in Iraq seems to be drawn from a selective memory which
seeks to impose a carefully crafted past experience dating back to the
last “good war” (i.e., World War II), expunged of all warts
and blemishes, onto the current situation in Iraq in a manner which
strips away all reality.
It turns out that the Iraqis
aren’t like German or Japanese people at all, but rather a fiercely
independent (if overly complex) nation deeply resentful of a so-called
liberation which has brought them nothing but pain and agony, primarily
at the hands of those who have, unbidden, “freed” them from
their past. The fact that the Iraqis resent the ongoing American occupation,
and choose to express this resentment through violent resistance instead
of submissive passivity, is in turn resented by many of the Legion’s
membership. “War has been declared on the United States by those
who are envious of our freedom, and they won’t stop until we are
under their heel,” writes one Legionnaire in a letter published
in the May 2007 issue of “the magazine for a strong America.”
The juxtaposition of Iraq with those who perpetrated the events of Sept.
11, 2001, implied in this statement is reflective of a level of ignorance
that boggles the mind. Iraq never declared war on the United States,
the salesmanship exhibited in our promotion of “freedom”
in Iraq leaves nothing to envy, and the Iraqis will stop resisting when
we leave their country. Don’t try telling that to the blustery
former Marine who authored the letter in question, however. He, like
the majority of the Legion, is tired of hearing about “Bush’s
war.”
“Death, Not in Vain”
is the title of the feature article of the May 2007 issue. The story
revolves around how the parents of one Marine who died in Iraq seek
to define their son’s sacrifice. “People may not agree with
the reason we went to war,” the mother of the fallen Marine is
quoted as saying, “but while our troops are over there, we can’t
be telling the world what they are doing is wrong. If we say we support
them, we have to support what they are doing.” Of course, the
nature of the “disagreement” surrounding the Iraq war is
never fully articulated in the article. There is no mention made of
the discredited claims by President Bush and other war advocates about
weapons of mass destruction or connections between Saddam Hussein’s
government and al-Qaida. Instead, the reader is told repeatedly about
how fallen American service members gave their lives for America and
a “free Iraq.” Quoting their fallen sons, the families of
Marines killed in Iraq speak proudly of bold statements such as “We
need to be there, but it’s going to be hard, and it is going to
be a long time.” Yet they never explore the actual “need”
cited.
“We’ve got to
support the troops and the mission,” the article quotes one family
member as saying. “The two are dependent on each other.”
I’m all for supporting the troops. But blind support for a mission
of such nebulous origin? This is a much different matter, one requiring
more introspective investigation. I don’t think it was the magazine’s
intent, but a foundation of such an investigation was laid in the very
same issue. In his article “Minimizing the Holocaust,” Harvard
Law School professor Alan Dershowitz slams those who seek to dismiss
Nazi Germany’s effort to commit genocide against Europe’s
Jews. It is a very difficult article to digest, not because of the legitimate
premise that those who seek to deny or minimize the Holocaust are deserving
of condemnation, but rather for the ease with which the moralistic Dershowitz
explains the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as a “legitimate act of
belligerent reprisal for the relentless bombings of civilians in London
and elsewhere,” or the dismissive waving-off of the systematic
starvation of 1 million German prisoners of war by the United States
after the surrender of Germany as an inconvenient result of a “food
crisis across Europe, a result of the continent’s decimation,”
and being a “far cry from the 6 million innocents who perished
at the hands of the Nazis with absolutely no military justification.”
I would be curious to know
how Dershowitz would judge how the families of German soldiers deployed
in combat operations should have viewed the Second World War. What if
a mother of a young panzer grenadier fighting on the Russian front was
to say, “The troops are the mission, and we cannot separate our
support for either”? Should blind support for the fighting men
likewise have blinded the families of German soldiers to the illegitimacy
of their cause? Certainly Dershowitz would favor the “good German,”
one who would have sought to deny facilitation of the Holocaust by refusing
to support the war which empowered it. Would he so favor the “good
American,” one driven by a sense of moral responsibility to speak
out against acts perpetrated in Iraq and elsewhere by American fighting
forces ostensibly in support of freedom, but in reality an extension
of illegitimate policies reeking of global hegemony and American empire?
Or would he choose to explain away Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram,
the CIA’s secret gulag of torture as “legitimate acts of
bellicose reprisals” for the events of Sept. 11, 2001? In Dershowitz’s
tortured legal brain the events at Haditha and elsewhere, including
the Marine massacre of civilians in Afghanistan, likewise assume legitimacy
in this newfound legal defense of “legitimate bellicose reprisal.”
In the end, Dershowitz’s
opinions are irrelevant. The disturbing reality, however, is that his
mind-set is not limited to the soap box he enjoys as a teacher of jurisprudence
at one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning but
rather is increasingly embraced by American service members deployed
in harm’s way. A recent U.S. Army survey shows that some 40 percent
of American soldiers and Marines support the use of torture as a means
of gathering intelligence. Some 66 percent would refuse to turn in a
fellow soldier or Marine for abusive actions against civilians, and
less than 50 percent believe that noncombatants should be treated with
dignity and respect. Ten percent of those surveyed actually admitted
to abusing civilians and their property for no reason whatsoever. While
acknowledging that this mind-set is at complete odds with official policy
concerning the conduct of military personnel in a combat zone, the Pentagon
did its best to portray the survey results as clear evidence that there
was, in fact, “good leadership” in place, since the desires
of the troops had not manifested themselves in large-scale acts of abuse
or torture. True, but the survey is also clear evidence that when such
abuse or torture does occur, it is not the result of a few “bad
apples,” so to speak, but instead indicative of a trend that could
easily spiral out of control on any given day.
The survey results should
not come as a surprise to anyone. The innumerable home movies shot in
Iraq and Afghanistan, some immortalized on YouTube, some in documentary
film, some simply shared with friends and family, all show the same
disturbing trend. Whether it is a Marine singing the lyrics to the self-written
“Hadji Girl,” or soldiers speaking disparagingly about “ragheads”
or “sand niggers,” or any other dehumanizing remark imaginable,
the reality is our troops aren’t in Iraq to liberate the Iraqi
people. We’re there to kill them and we do an extraordinarily
good job. The British government recently certified as “sound”
the methodologies used by the study published in the medical journal
The Lancet which estimates the number of deaths (as of 2006) that can
be directly attributed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath
at 655,000. If anything, this number has grown by leaps and bounds since
the study was conducted.
One can point to sectarian
violence as a major contributor to this total, but as an American I
tend to reflect on the American-on-Iraqi violence, such as the barely
mentioned deaths of Iraqi children in a recent air-delivered bomb attack
against suspected Iraqi insurgents. I’m sure Dershowitz and those
American service members desensitized to their own acts of depravity
can explain the deaths of these innocents as “legitimate acts
of bellicose reprisal.” I call it murder, even if these deaths
occurred in time of war.
Every mother and father of
every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine deployed in Iraq should reflect
on this as well. “Little Johnny” may write home about what
he says is a “just war” that “needs to be fought,”
but before one embraces the words of someone in harm’s way in
desperate need of self-justification for the things he has seen and
done, re-examine the area of operations your loved one is serving in
or, worse, has perished in. Are they “living among the Iraqi people,”
as some would have you believe? Or are they sequestered away in base
camps or fire bases, forced to conduct patrols out among a population
that for the most part hates them and wants them gone from Iraq? Does
“Johnny” himself call the Iraqis ragheads? Does he give
a frustrated kick at the Iraqi male he just apprehended, not because
of any crime or offense committed, but simply because he was there?
Does he point his rifle and scream expletives at the mother or wife
or daughter who cries out for a loved one? Does he break a lamp or table
to emphasize his point? Or does he do worse, allowing his emotions and
frustration to break free as he beats, shoots or rapes those he now
hates more than anything else in the world? Freedom? Get real. The mission
of our military in Iraq is survival, and that is no military mission
at all.
The war in Iraq is as immoral
a conflict as the United States has ever been involved in. Past wars
were fought in a day and age where information was not readily available
on the totality of issues surrounding a given conflict. One could excuse
citizens if they were not equipped with the knowledge and information
necessary to empower them to speak out against bad policy. Not so today.
For someone today to proclaim ignorance as an excuse for inactivity
is as morally and intellectually weak an argument as can be imagined.
The truth about those who claim they simply “didn’t know”
lies in their own lack of commitment to a strong America, one founded
on principles and values worth fighting for, and one where every American
is committed to the defense of the same. Ignorance is bad citizenship.
In this day and age, bad citizenship carries ramifications beyond the
environs of our local communities. Given America’s dominant role
in the world, bad American citizenship has a way of manifesting itself
globally.
I’m not calling the
parents of those who have fallen in Iraq and who continue to voice their
blind adherence to the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq
bad citizens. I understand their need to come to grips with their loss
the best way possible, which is to try and extract some meaning from
the sacrifice their family has had to make. But I draw the line when
these families allow their suffering to translate into blanket suffering
for others. As The American Legion magazine quoted one such individual
who advocated in favor of the Bush administration: “Are more servicemen
and women returning the way my son did, in a casket, as a result of
our words and actions? I believe the answer is yes. The perception of
a weak American military, should we lose, will make our enemy stronger
than we ever imagined. Because we don’t want to be at war any
more doesn’t mean the war is over.”
Thus, in a blind effort to
find meaning in her son’s death, this mother is willing to inflict
suffering on other American families. This may sound like a harsh indictment,
but she indicts herself. The same mother concludes the article with
the following quote: “I told President Bush last summer that the
biggest insult anyone could hand me would be to pull the troops out
before the job is complete. If we’re going to quit, at that point
I’ll have to ask, ‘Why did my son die?’ ” The
question she should have been asking long before his death was, of course,
“Why might my son die?” That she failed to do so, and now
seeks to send others off to their death in a cause not worthy of a single
American life, is where she and those of her ilk stop receiving my sympathy
and understanding.
The American Legion magazine,
in its May 2007 issue, belittles those who speak out against the war.
“While our forefathers gave us the right and privilege to challenge
our leaders,” one father of a fallen Marine writes, “the
manner and method that some people have chosen to use at this time only
emboldens the enemy.” Reading between the lines, freedom of speech
is treasonous if you question the motives and actions of those who got
us involved in the Iraq war. Alan Dershowitz can only wish that there
had been more “good Germans” speaking out about the policies
of Adolf Hitler before the Holocaust became reality.
I yearn for a time when “good
Americans” will be able to stop and reverse equally evil policies
of global hegemony achieved through pre-emptive war of aggression. I
know all too well that in this case the “enemy” will only
be emboldened by our silence, since at the end of the day the “enemy”
is ourselves. I can see the Harvard professor shaking an accusatory
finger at me for the above statement, chiding me for creating any moral
equivalency between the war in Iraq and the Holocaust. You’re
right, Mr. Dershowitz. There is no moral equivalency. In America today,
we should have known better, since we ostensibly stand for so much more.
That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq
makes us even worse than the Germans.
Scott Ritter
was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United
Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author
of numerous books, and his latest is “Waging Peace: The Art of
War for the Antiwar Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007).
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