What Will They Be Thankful For?

The biggest risk we now face is that, if the United States withdraws from Iraq, the withdrawal will trigger a regional collapse. Iran will be sucked in from the east, as Iraq succumbs to a Sunni on Shi’ite civil war that threatens Iran’s own western population. Sunni insurgents trained in Iraq will flood the region as a whole, threatening to destabilize the weaker Arab regimes (Syria and Jordan) and to undermine the stronger ones (Egypt and Saudi Arabia). The Iraqi Kurds have both oil and an ethnic identity that is deeply threatening to the Turkish state, not least due to their implicit claim on a large swathe of Turkish territory, and it is likely that the existence of an independent Kurdistan will provoke civil repression, ethnic cleansing, or even outright war on the Turkish border.

The continuing US military presence in Iraq is, I would contend, a bad thing — occupation is brutalizing, both to the occupying garrison troops and to the nation under occupation. That Iraq has been badly damaged is beyond question; what may be less obvious is that, politics aside, the criminological blow-back when the troops come home will harm American society for a generation. (Consider: a whole generation of deliberately violence-desensitized soldiers are being given free rein to experiment with their sickest pet obsessions, and some of them are going to bring their taste for killing and torture home with them. And replacing troops with “private security contractors” is even worse — these are civilians who are happy to go places and earn money in return for shooting people. When they’re not working for the government we have a technical term for these people: “serial killers”.)

That’s an extact from a short essay Charlie Stross posted today, in reaction to this piece at the NYTROB.

While I do, sadly, agree with Charlie’s gloomy forecast for the region–and frankly it’s so bad that there isn’t even any fun left in saying “I told you so” to the people who supported the invasion–that’s not the point I want to pick up on. I’m more interested in that second point.

Whenever it happens, a time will come when the U.S. servicemen will come home from Iraq, and I wonder what that time will look like. By the time they do come home, will they get the same kind of reaction that Viet Nam era soldiers got? And as Charlie alludes above, what effect will they have on the societies into which they are introduced?

My judgemental side almost wants to say “you, Mr & Mrs America, deserve it–you shouldn’t have put them there in the first place, and now you have to pay the price of bringing them home, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the price Iraq’s civilians have paid”, but that’s not a useful attitude. A more useful one would be an attempt to understand exactly who these servicement (and women) are, and how to help them reintegrate.

These are not heroes. They are kids. Kids who have been careful and scientifically trained to dehumanize their opponents, and then placed in a continuing high-threat, high pressure situation that reinforces that training to the nth degree.

But I loathe the tendency — by politicians and pundits, liberals and conservatives — to dreamily speak of the great sacrifice, magnificent courage, inspiring intellect, and extraordinary characters of our troops. It’s bullshit. And it’s bullshit designed to make us feel better, so we don’t have to face what we’ve done to these young people, and don’t have to imagine the toll a warzone takes on real humans, rather than imagined supermen.

They’re not doing a magnificent job. They’re not approaching each day with stoic courage and endless optimism. They’re doing their best. These are kids. I knew them in high school. They entered the military because they sought discipline, or loans, or redemption, or very occasionally, honor. They were not a wiser breed, or a braver strain — they were just kids, they made a decision that seemed right at the time, and now they’re doing their damnedest to survive. It comforts us to speak of them all as Rhode Scholars, automatons who run on courage and faith and perform with grace and cheer. It comforts us to speak of them like that because it allows us to deny the image of twentysomethings lying terrified in the desert, straining to make it through that day, and the next, and the one after it. By so lavishly honoring them, we transform our mental picture of who fights in this war, and we allow their imagined stoicism to ease our onrushing guilt.

That’s Ezra Klein, via Making Light.

You remember Abu Ghraib, right? You remember service people smiling in photos? You think they were “a few rotton apples”?

What about these guys, also from Making Light:

A few more bad apples?

What about these guys, who are complaining that they aren’t allowed to kill children that throw rocks? There is no awareness at all in this guy’s monologue that there might be a reason not kill kids….

These aren’t a few problem cases–this is the result of teaching kids that “the other” is not human, not valuable and alive and worthy of life in the same way we are, and then using high-danger situations to drive the lesson home. Of course not every soldier turns into a monster, or even into a fundamentally broken person. Still, history should teach us that a significant number will, and that there will be lower magnitude after-effects on the rest.

While I don’t see any realistic options for any kind of positive resolution for Iraq, I don’t even see any discussion about what’s going to happen with these guys when you bring them home. It’s not like this is a problem with no precedent in living memory–I could probably grab a dozen mysteries off the shelves in this room that make use of the common “Viet Nam vet turns to drugs / crime / psychotic violence” chestnut.

Maybe America’s Thanksgiving Day is a good day to start thinking about what life is going to be like for these people when they are brought home, and what they will have to be thankful for–beyond making it home alive, of course. It’s a problem that will affect fewer lives than resolving the stability of Iraq (just as the American casualties have always been outweighed by a couple of orders of magnitude by the Iraqi casualties), but it is one that will need attention, and effort, just the same.