Iraq 

Iraq

The Pentagon now says there is a "very dynamic situation" in Iraq. I've never been fluent in Pentagon-speak, but I believe this is a fairly chilling way to describe something pretty bad.

If you survey a wide range of sites, there seem to be two Iraqs today. The one directly occupied by U.S. (and coalition) forces is a hostile, frightening place with plenty of random violence--directed not just at coalition soldiers and administrators, but at anyone who is known to be working with them.

MSNBC has a blood-curdling story about a cab driver in Baghdad who claims he spends time "[killing] whores, women who go to the Green Zone and have sex with the Americans." And he has the bloody knife to prove it.

From the Times of London via Hit and Run: "insurgents in Iraq may outnumber U.S. and coalition forces--and many of them are embedded in the Iraqi National Guard.

Via Kevin Drum: there are only four provinces in Iraq where it will be difficult to hold an election on January 30; unfortunately, those provinces contain 50% of the population.

The other Iraq is getting on with life post-Saddam: making money, getting an education, preparing for an election. See this site, which I think it's fair to say puts things as positively as possible.

The bad: From YES! magazine: Editor Sarah Ruth van Gelder interviews Chris Hedges, "veteran New York Times war correspondent":

CHRIS HEDGES: Iraq is a particularly bad situation for combat soldiers and Marines because it is classic insurgency warfare. It's very similar to what soldiers and Marines experienced in Vietnam, what Israeli soldiers experience in Gaza and on the West Bank, and what the French experienced in Algeria.

You have an elusive enemy. You're not fighting a set organized force, the way we were, for example, in the first Persian Gulf War. So you very rarely see your attacker, and this builds up a great deal of frustration. This frustration is compounded by the fact that you live in an environment where you are almost universally despised. Everyone becomes the enemy. And after your unit suffers--after, for instance, somebody in your unit is killed by a sniper who melts back into the slums where the shot was fired from--it becomes easy to carry out acts of revenge against people who are essentially innocent, but who you view as culpable in some way for the death of your comrades.

Robert J. Lifton, who did a lot of studies on the Vietnam War, called these "atrocity-producing situations." It became very easy in Vietnam to shoot down a woman in a rice field as revenge for a comrade who may have stepped on a mine a few hours before.

War always creates trauma. But in counter-insurgency wars, you are constantly on edge. Going down to a corner store to buy a Coca-Cola creates tremendous amounts of anxiety because somebody could come up behind you and put a gun to the back of your head and kill you.

That's what we're seeing in Iraq. The psychological cost--the emotional cost--that we're inflicting on our soldiers and Marines is devastating.

SARAH: We tend to think of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a medical or psychological condition. But your book suggests that there are also issues of morality and identity involved.

CHRIS: I think you raise a good point. Morality does play deeply into that sense of trauma, because when you're in a combat situation (and I think you have to go there to understand), your reactions have to be instantaneous. If you hear a sound behind a door, you don't have time to ask questions, so often you shoot first and ask questions later. And this we have seen in Iraq, where soldiers and Marines at road blocks have fired on cars filled with children and families that they initially feared were hostile.

When you are in a combat situation like that, you realize how easy it is to commit murder, how easy it is to commit atrocity, because you are so deathly afraid--and with good reason. But the consequences are devastating, because what you have done is to shed innocent blood, and often the blood of children. So you bring back not only the trauma of the violence, but that deep darkness that you must carry within you for the rest of your life--that you have been responsible for the death of innocents.

So it isn't just an issue of trauma; it is, as well, an issue of morality. This is a horrible burden to inflict, especially on a young life. It's why war should always be waged as a last resort, because the costs are so tremendous, not only to families who lose loved ones and will spend the rest of their lives grieving, but for those who return and for the rest of their lives bear these emotional and psychological burdens.