I have let this space lie fallow for too long. Today, I am a blogger reborn.
For the past eight months I have concentrated on turning video I shot in Iraq into a documentary. (Paying the rent by shooting stills and writing has also occupied many of my waking hours.) It’s been easier for me to handle the largely mechanical chores of screening and transcribing tape than it has been to tackle in print the enormity of my Iraq experience and the ugly specifics of the guerilla war and occupation. I have written only an article or two about embedding with Battalion Landing Team 1/2. (See: http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/storydetail.cfm?ID=2815) But I have thought and written enough to have acquired some perspective.
I have had a tough time reconciling the general absurdity of the American effort in Iraq with the moments of individual courage by Marines I witnessed. They don’t reconcile. Each day in Iraq is a tragic improvisation for US troops and Iraqi civilians, a Sisyphean enterprise.
“One of the most important battlefronts in this war on terror is Iraq,” President Bush told US military families during an August address. “Terrorists have converged on Iraq. See, they're coming into Iraq because they fear the march of freedom.” Actually, the bulk of the insurgency, over 80%, is Iraqi – this from the intelligence officer of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit – not foreign. (I doubt this has changed much since the briefing I got in late January 2005.) Terrorists converge on Iraq to attack the Americans who occupy it.
The bloody on-the-ground reality is upsetting enough, but almost as saddening to me is the resilience of the myths upon which the war and occupation rest - nation-building, exporting democracy, Saddam’s connection to 9-11 – in the face of naked truth: the illusory foundations and inept planning for the war; the brutal insurgency it created; and a deep Iraqi resistance to foreign systems, and institutions however wonderful, introduced by Green Zone bureaucrats and 20-year-olds with guns.
Two recent books I read and reviewed brilliantly illuminated the US project in Iraq for me, Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War and The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer. Shadid gives voice and dignity to the men and women caught between overwhelmed US troops and the ruthless insurgents. Packer unearths the origins of the war in the paper and vapor trails left American neocons and Iraqi exiles. He documents the ineptitude, arrogance, and willfulness of some US policymakers and apparatchiks charged with creating and implementing Iraq policy. And it's clear from the book – and his New Yorker pieces – that Packer listened to Iraqis carefully during his many visits.
But curiously, and somewhat dissonantly (cognitively speaking), Packer still supports the US effort to remake Iraq. That a poorly conceived and sloppily executed war of choice borne of cynicism, hubris, superpower desperation, and disregard for life – those of American service members as well as Iraqi civilians - can still be framed as a supportable undertaking is frightening.
Critics of the war must always acknowledge that Saddam was brutal to his own people and those of neighboring countries. I know this; Iraqis in Iskandariya and Musayyib, where a Saddam-era mass grave filled with Shia bodies was discovered, reminded me of this frequently. But the men serving President Bush – Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and, to a lesser extent, according to Packer, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - had a history of ignoring the interests of the Iraqi people except when they dovetailed with their own designs. Saddam killed Iraqis, but other Iraqis died because America was a self-interested fair-weather friend that traded with and supported Saddam for years.
The administration launched an invasion based on fudged information without the force structure or strength recommended by senior US military commanders. It has created a spawning ground for terrorism and catalyzed extremists around the world predisposed to hate America for it policies not for its values. US values haven’t really informed our actions in Iraq. Where is the nobility in this? And, more importantly, where does one find the recipe for successful nation building in this swamp?
The myths we tell ourselves, as Americans, need to be reexamined and, where they fail to meet the smell-test of reality, retired. Iraq is not postwar Germany or Japan. Values, democratic and otherwise, can be supported but not installed over the heads of a country’s citizens, Iraq’s after-the-fact elections notwithstanding. Respect for and understanding of a nation's people , their culture, language, and history, are prerequisites for success, particularly in the post 9/11 world age defined by “asymmetrical warfare," globalization, and cultural-religious polarization. These are absent from US policy, and I fear it may be too late to manufacture them.
ENDS
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