Inspired by a conversation with my 17 year old son yesterday about the events alleged to have occurred in Haditha, Iraq last November.
This is an essay both long, and long in the making. The recent and ghastly news regarding the deaths of Iraqi men, women and children at the hands of Marines in Haditha is the immediate trigger which has led me commit these thoughts and reflections on war to written form, but it is not the sole cause, nor even necessarily the most important one.
Indeed, it is the very nature of war itself which is my subject. The war in Iraq is only the most recent example of what has been a long history of folly and evil deeds which are the inevitable result of “politics by other means.”
(cont. below the fold)
Cross-posted at Daily Kos and My Left Wing
I’ve Never Served in the Military
I want to say that straight out so it’s clear that what I’m about to say is not based on any personal experience. Like most things I write, it’s based on what I’ve read, or people I’ve talked with; stories and anecdotes related second hand or mere “book knowledge.” So my credentials to speak on this subject are no better than the vast majority of Americans who have never served in our armed forces during “major (or minor) combat operations” or who have never lived in another country torn asunder by the pervasive violence, death, fear and despair that defines modern war, as we have come to know it.
I have been a victim of violent crime, but that is not the same thing. Those were random assaults, which did not occur amid a climate of anxiety, of grief, of constant dread. For what happens in a war is not merely the sum of the violent events that punctuate each hour of each day while it lasts. It is so much more than that.
What War Requires
It’s not difficult to ascertain. Two very strong emotions must be generated in the populace of any nation for war to thrive: fear and hate. This is not just my imagination speaking. Think of any war which has been fought in the course of history. Has any nation been led to fight a war in which these emotions did not come into play? I’m not speaking about those leaders who planned and executed wars, though often enough such emotions played a part in their thinking as well. I’m talking about the great mass of people who come to agree with their rulers that war is the only answer to resolve conflict.
The words of Hermann Goering on the matter are so well known that they have entered the realm of cliche, but I will repeat them here anyway:
Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Create the sense of danger from a foreign adversary, the idea that an attack could come at any time, and fear will drive people to your side. And what follows fear? What accompanies it in every case in which a war panic is produced? Anger and then hatred of the enemy who threatens you. For who cannot be aroused to hatred at those who cause you to quiver in fear?
During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.
But perhaps our President is the best example of this principle in action:
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. […]
[T]he only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.
Making Killers Out of Ordinary Men
There’s a myth in our country; indeed, the same myth exists in most countries. It is the myth that true patriots will always arise in time of war to defend their country. The myth that young men, imbued with courage and love of country will come forward in time of need to do what they must, to assault the trenches, to slaughter the enemy, to bravely fight and die for the greater good.
And there is some truth to that. For there are always young men who will seek out the excitement and danger war brings, or the chance to obtain the glory which they perceive attaches to soldiers in a time of war. But very few men, or women for that matter, are natural born killers. And it is killers which the military requires.
It’s a little known fact that during the First and Second World Wars, the most soldiers did not take easily to killing their fellow human beings, even though they were the enemy, and even in circumstances where they had been demonized in propaganda along racial or ethnic lines. Here are a few excerpts from An Intimate History of Killing, by Joanna Bourke, which illustrates this (to military leaders of the time) unpleasant truth:
[Cmmdr.] B.W. Hogan observed the difficulties that pilots experienced during an attack on Guadacanal. Men . . . were profoundly shaken when forced to [strafe] “. . . running human beings, opening up all the guns, and bullets spraying, killing and maiming many of those unknown individuals.” (p.53)
* * *
During the First World War, it was widely believed that only 10 percent of soldiers could be called brave, and many military commentators deplored the “live and let live” principle in which [British and German soldiers] came to agreements not to shoot if the other side restrained themselves too. […]
By the Second World War, concern over “passive combat personnel” had reached hysterical levels [among senior officer] largely due to . . . shocking statistical information which made it apparent that many [soldiers] simply did not kill. . . . [Lt. Col. Cole] (the man in charge of the 502nd Parachute Infantry which was considered to be one of the best units in the U.S. Army) was horrified to find that when his men were being attacked along the Carenton Causeway on 10 June 1944 it was impossible to make them fire back. “Not one man in twenty-five voluntarily used his weapon,” he lamented despite the fact that they could not dig in or take cover so their only protection was [to fire back] to insure that the enemy kept “his head down.” . . . They knew [they had to do this], Cole continued, but
[T]hey could not force themselves to act upon it. When I ordered the men who were right around me to fire, they did so. But the moment I passed on, they quit. I walked up and down the line yelling “God damn it! Start shooting!” But it did very little good. The fired only while I watched them or while some other soldier stood over them.
Passivity was not a vice unique to land forces. A study of the famed 51st Fighter Wing (known as the “MIG-Killers”) in Korea revealed that half of their F-86 pilots had never fired their guns . . . In the words of one pilot, Hugh Dundas: “When it comes to the point, a sincere desire to stay alive [overpowered any incentive to] engage the enemy.”
The US military quite naturally was concerned about the studies and anecdotal evidence coming out after WWI and WWII which demonstrated the failure by many soldiers to take a more active role in combat. As a result training methods were revised in the years leading up to the Vietnam war with an emphasis placed on training men to inhibit their typical response to combat situations and more readily use their weapons and training to kill the enemy.
American military leaders have been very successful in their task to create combat-effective units. In response to the War Department’s World War II research that revealed that less than 25% of riflemen fired their weapons in combat, the military instituted training techniques–such as fire commands, battle drills, and realistic marksmanship ranges–that resulted in much improved combat firing rates. In the Korean War, 55% of the riflemen fired their weapons at the enemy, and by the Vietnam War that rate had increased to 90%.
We now have soldiers who are much more willing, when placed in combat situations, to fire their weapons and kill, without reservation (at least while actively engaged in combat situations):
In an interview with CNN/Frontline, Ranger Private First Class Jason Moore described his willingness to kill in these words:
I just started picking them out as they were running across the intersection two blocks away, and it was weird because it was so much easier than you would think. You hear all these stories about “the first time you kill somebody is very hard.” And it was so much like basic training, they were just targets out there, and I don’t know if it was the training that we had ingrained in us, but it seemed to me it was just like a moving target range, and you could just hit the target and watch it fall and hit the target and watch it fall, and it wasn’t real. They were far enough away so that you didn’t see, or I didn’t see, all the guts and the gore and things like that, but you would just see this target running across in your sight picture, you pull the trigger and the target would fall, so it was a lot easier then than it is now, as far as that goes.
Clearly, modern military leaders are doing half of their duty–they are training their soldiers to fight effectively on the battlefield. They are doing so by utilizing techniques that enable soldiers to fire their weapons at the enemy despite the natural moral reservations that they may harbor. By conditioning combat soldiers to reflexively engage targets and by giving them leaders who issue fire commands, military leaders greatly reduce moral deliberation for the soldier in combat.
Such training, however comes at a cost.
Training which drills soldiers on how to kill without explaining to them why it is morally permissible for them to do so is harmful to them, yet that is the current norm. Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli–such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a “target”–and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. In and of itself, such training is appropriate and morally permissible. Battles are won by killing the enemy, so military leaders should strive to produce the most efficient killers. The problem, however, is that soldiers who kill reflexively in combat will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely–and understandably–suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.
Indeed, the success of our armed forces at training soldiers to follow orders reflexively and to increase the lethality of their response certainly has played a part in those terrible atrocities which have been committed by American troops in Vietnam, and now, apparently, in Iraq. But it alone does not explain these events which those of us who are not at risk of sudden, violent death are so quick to condemn. And war atrocities are not limited to ground combat situations where soldiers’ anxiety and fear for their lives is so extreme. The torture practiced at Abu Ghraib cannot be justified by the stress brought on by combat, nor can the aerial bombings of civilians or the use of weapons, such as white phosphorus “shake and bake” munitions fired from great distances at buildings and residences in Fallujah for the purpose of killing human beings with incendiary chemicals.
No, we have to look deeper than the training soldiers receive to discover why such atrocities occur.
War Atrocities: The Norm, Not the Exception
We are all quite rightly sickened and heartbroken by the news regarding the Haditha massacre, as Booman points out. Yet, we are urged to view the crimes which occurred at Haditha as exceptional, as something which was committed by a few amoral rogue Marines, something which has nothing to do with the manner in which we have waged war in Iraq:
Marine General Peter Pace tells CBS it’s critical to show that if troops committed atrocities, their actions contrast with “99-point-nine percent of their fellow Marines.”
I don’t doubt General Pace’s sincerity. However, its wrong to dismiss Haditha as an aberration. American troops have been killing Iraqis in great numbers ever since we began this “operation.” Most instances we have justified these actions as pursuant to legitimate combat, or as “collateral damage” which was an unfortunate consequence of our pursuit of terrorists/insurgent forces. Yes, most of what our troops do each day in Iraq does not involve the killing of innocent civilians, but to claim it is a rare or unusual experience is to minimize what war is: the slaughter of other human beings.
Because all wars inevitably result in atrocities, and atrocities are committed by all sides in war. Iraq is no exception. Nor are any of the other wars Americans have fought in the last 100 years.
Vietnam had it’s signature atrocity in the massacre at My Lai, but it was hardly unique; it was only the most infamous instance of the horrors we perpetrated on the Vietnamese in that conflict. Former Senator Bob Kerrey just recently confessed 2 years ago of the massacre he took part in as a member of a Navy Seal unit, and other soldiers have recounted their haunting stories of war crimes committed by US soldiers for many years, since before the war itself had ended. From “free fire zones” to the use of napalm, Vietnam was one long litany of horrors.
Yet the horrors of Vietnam were far from the worst atrocities attributable to American Forces. In World War II, the so-called “Good War” American bomber pilots in the Pacific and their commanders were responsible for some of the most horrific acts ever committed in wartime: General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign of Japanese cities in 1945 after Japanese military forces had been largely defeated:
The testing of the new tactics began with the bombing of Tokyo on March 9. 334 B-29s took part flying far lower than ever before on a bomb run. Pathfinder planes dropped napalm bombs every 100 feet to make an “X” on the ground, a target for the rest of the planes to attack. The attack itself took over three hours.
The Japanese later listed over 83,000 dead in the attack; over 40,000 wounded and a total of 15.8 square miles of the city were burned to ashes with the destruction of 265,171 buildings. The intensity of the fire was so much that the water in the rivers reached the boiling point.
The bombing was continued and within ten days 32 square miles of Japanese cities basically ceased to exist. Bomber losses decreased during the process. By the end of April, 11 more square miles of cities had been destroyed. One and a half square miles of Yokohama, three and a half square miles of Kawasaki joined the areas destroyed. […]
In May Nagoya became a target with the loss of four square miles of the city. Tokyo lost seventeen more square miles. Nine square miles of Yokohama were wiped out towards the end of May. Osaka faired no better with the loss of over 136,000 homes, 4,200 factories and almost 4,000 casualties.
. . . From May to August , U.S. planes firebombed fifty-eight Japanese cities. . . .
The firebombing went so well, in fact, that the military was actually running out of reasonable targets to firebomb and an estimate by General LeMay said they would run out of targets by Christmas of 1945.
From the June 4, 1945 issue of Newsweek, a report on the firebombing:
“Six weeks ago Tokyo had a population of nearly 7,000,000. Last week the Japs cried that Tokyo no longer existed as a city. Using new techniques and new bombs, the largest fleets of B-29s ever to take the air and turned most of the Japanesae capital into ashes in two great strikes on May 24 and 26….For 105 minutes the Superfortresses filed over and dropped 700,000 incendiary bombs. … Two nights later a force of more than 500 B-29s struck the Marunouchi district, the business heart of the Japanese Empire. … On a target area of approximately 9 square miles the B-29s dropped 4,000 tons in one hour. The wind did the rest.”
From the June 11, 1945 issue of Newsweek, another summary of results:
“On the morning of May 28, more than 450 B-29s, escorted by about 150 P-51s from Iwo Jima, roared in on he familiar trail over Tokyo Bay. Reconnaissance photos showed that 51.3 square miles of Tokyo had been burned out. … the B-29’s smothered Yokohama with 3,200 tons of incendiaries.”
In July of 1945 the U.S. dropped leaflets on some Japanese cities, warning them that they could end up being firebombed. The next day six of the cities were. This was repeated. . . .
All told, it is estimated that between 300,000 to 1 million civilians died as a result of LeMay’s campaign to burn out the Japanese cities. The total number will probably never be known. And let’s not forget how they died. In the words of General LeMay himself, they were literally “scorched and boiled and baked to death,” as horrid a manner of death as anyone can imagine.
The list of such horrors could go on for days. Of course, we were not alone in committing atrocities during these wars. Far from it.
Japan and Nazi Germany committed terrible war crimes in WWII, arguably the greatest atrocities on record. The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong murdered and mutilated American and South Vietnamese soldiers and terrorized ordinary villagers. Iraqi insurgents have kidnapped and beheaded hostages, and employed explosive bombs to murder soldiers and civilians alike, creating a wave of terror among the populace. Each of our enemies in these various wars have done great evil and perpetrated horrors on other human beings.
But so have we. Because, just like any other group of people in the history of the world, Americans are not immune from committing terrible deeds in the midst of war. We have no special mission to mankind which sanctifies our conduct, and no exceptional qualities which keep us from performing the same types of acts for which we have justly condemned our enemies.
War itself is the Atrocity
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. — Omar N. Bradley
If forced to limit myself to less than 100 words to describe why I hate war, the two quotes I’ve just cited by FDR and General Bradley would be the ones I would choose to make my case. For the problem is not that a few individuals do awful, evil things in wartime, but that war itself invariably results in the commission of crimes and atrocities such as those examples I’ve discussed at some length previously in this essay.
We cannot avoid that evil with treaties prescribing the treatment of prisoners and occupied civilian populations. We cannot avoid it through the use of ever more precise and more accurately targeted bombs and missiles. We cannot avoid it through the best training of our soldiers on the applicable rules of engagement permitted in each conflict to which they are employed. The task is too large for such measures to have any real effect.
War itself is the atrocity. And when we commit our troops to war, we ensure that all the despicable acts which accompany war will occur. Torture. Terrorism. Death Squads. Ethnic Cleansing. Children killed by bombs and bullets and chemicals which burn through their very flesh down to the bone. Starvation. Diseases. Death and suffering in any of a thousand different ways.
This is not to imply that our troops will be solely responsible for this evil. It is a mutual activity, a collaboration if you will. Or if you prefer, a process, that once begun, cannot be stopped until something horrible has ensued. This is why war should be a last resort, not the first option, when nations come into conflict. No one can foresee the consequences of any particular war, but it is a near certainty that most of those consequences will be bad ones.
So when you reflect on the tragedy of Haditha today, and in the days to come, remember this. Those who bear the greatest responsibility for the massacre are those who ordered our nation’s armed forces into war in the first place.
