Best Nation article in years

[maeve66]

sabotabby already posted an excerpt from this article as a link, but I didn't follow it then. Instead, I saw it as a leading article on the Guardian's front page, yesterday. And read it all, last night. I want to repost a link to it here, and recommend that everyone read it.

IRAQ: why?

The Nation apparently did a multi-year study collecting on-the-record witnessing testimony from Iraq vets, looking for patterns and finding them. The major focus was on what the conditions of an armed occupation facing local resistance did to how American soldiers (and marines and airmen and sailors, though not so many of the last) interacted with Iraqi civilians. I guess it's not that the stories people tell are surprising in their wretchedness. It's that these are soldiers, marines, airmen, etc. speaking ON the record, many of them still on active duty. It's that they are so candid. It's that so many of them have encountered this shit and been transformed into antiwar activists by it. It's how brutally fucking inhumane war like this HAS to be.

I don't usually talk about the war to M. He's opposed to the war in Iraq, or more exactly, he told me the night we met that he "didn't know what the fuck we were doing there and thought we should leave". He's not at that point about Afghanistan, yet. But last night I couldn't refrain from talking to him about this article. One part was especially relevant. There are not nearly enough interpreters for ground-level units in Iraq. Soldiers certainly aren't trained for it. And what interpreters there are are Iraqi civilians themselves. So both sides exist in this fog of mutual incomprehension, punctuated by explosive gunfire. The worst thing I read was that the gesture Americans make to signal someone to STOP, from a distance, is to put your hand palm outward, fingers pointing up towards the sky. For Iraqis, apparently, this is body language for "come here". You can see the problem, at a checkpoint. That was almost the hardest part for me to read.

Anyway, please read the article, if you haven't yet.

Comments

[slit.livejournal.com]

Good link. Thanks.

Forgive me if this sounds dumb, but -- I'm unclear on what people (soldiers? war supporters?) thought the war would look like if NOT that. Even if I didn't know anything about Palestine or various postcolonial struggles, my singular viewing of Platoon at age 14 gave me the idea that this is what war _is_ when you're not meeting another army on an empty field ala Napoleon and the Revolutionary War.

I'm not only talking about the level of violence and carnage, but the basically random nature of the fighting. Even in Afghanistan, which I'm better able to see the moral justification for, the pragmatics of winning seem beyond (or unsuited to) an American military solution.