We like to tell ourselves that the American people are a compassionate people and when given a chance, we will do anything to help others.
Iraq changed everything.
Here are a few extremely hard to face facts- one from McClatchy, the other from The Nation. The Nation sought volunteers from Iraqi war veterans to speak openly and honestly about the terrifying and vulgar reality on the ground that the American occupation is for the people there.
This is horrifying on many levels.
The sheer fact that Americans are terrorizing Iraqis; the fact that the US government covers this up; the fact that even if media outlets were allowed to report on this, then they wouldn’t.
Here’s an account after 39 Iraqis had been held for weeks in a shithole without charges and rioted.
" {They shot this guy} A head split open. One of them was...in the back of the truck. They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got an MRE spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and he's smiling. And I said, 'These are some of our soldiers desecrating somebody's body. Something is seriously amiss.'
This is the sort of reporting we would see on NPR before they were compromised by the Scaife Foundation and other wingnuttery farms populated by wingnut bloggers and "analysts" who run from Army recruiters and prefer to fight the war from behind their laptops. You should read this article and you should subscribe to The Nation.
While some veterans said civilian shootings were routinely investigated by the military, many more said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia. He served from August 2004 to March 2005 in Ramadi with a Marine Corps civil affairs unit supporting a combat team with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade. (All interviewees are identified by the rank they held during the period of service they recount here; some have since been promoted or demoted.)
After a while, the soldiers get inured to horrors that you could only imagine, perhaps because they will never be aired other than on an arcane blog.
"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado. Specialist Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, in Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad, for a year beginning in February 2004.
The conditions under which we sent our soldiers over to fight and the consequences of killing innocents by the dozens came crashing down on some of them.
"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."
Americans might be a compassionate people. But you put young men and women in positions where they cannot win, and you get people under arms who are lost.
We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photo–graphs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.
"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
Many of the kids we sent to do these tasks had a 20,000 foot view of the situation and decided to tell the horrible truth.
For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. "I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do," he said.
The simple and kind nature that infects many young people who swear out an oath the flag is crushed when they see what is happening on their, watch, under their purview, under their flag.
"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't--mother–fucker--he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....
This is a heartbreaking and eye-opening series of interviews. You have to read it.
According to interviews with twenty-four veterans who participated in such raids, they are a relentless reality for Iraqis under occupation. The American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away as suspects.
http://www.thenation.com/...
One of the ways in which we lost the war was with our checkpoints.
WASHINGTON — U.S. soldiers have killed or wounded 429 Iraqi civilians at checkpoints or near patrols and convoys during the past year, according to military statistics compiled in Iraq and obtained by McClatchy Newspapers...The numbers cover what the military calls escalation-of-force incidents, in which American troops fire at civilians who've come too close or have approached checkpoints too quickly. In the months since U.S. commanders have dispatched more troops to the field — ostensibly to secure Iraqi communities — the number of Iraqis killed and injured in such incidents has spiked, the statistics show.
In rare moments you will look into the US media see the truth hidden behind Anna Nicole’s tits, and buried under police helicopter footage of a car chase. Behind Paris Hilton's do nothingness, obscured by the pronouncements on global war and foreign policy by pussies like Jonah Goldberg, you will find a nugget of truth that says it all.
In a June 2006 interview with McClatchy, Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who was then the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said: "We have people who were on the fence or supported us who in the last two years or three years have in fact decided to strike out against us. And you have to ask: Why is that? And I would argue in many instances we are our own worst enemy."
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
This war was lost a long time ago and nothing...nothing will fix this. It will take decades under the best conditions to redeem our selves for the crimes committed by confused young men and women. It will take longer to fix the damage done to our reputation. This is the legacy of the Republicans and their latest Crusade, which like the other Crusades, also failed.