Iraq War: Soldiers, veterans and dissent

As the Bush administration increases the number of troops in Iraq and prepares for a new offensive in Fallujah and other rebel strongholds just after the US presidential election, here are a few more articles on the whole issue of the attitude of the anti-Iraq War movement toward soldiers, and more specifically the ways in which soldiers and veterans are a critical part of that movement.

This piece by Andrew Exum makes a very forced argument that he suspects that the "left" is somehow hostile to individual soldiers, though his evidence for it is pretty thin gruel, to put it mildly.

The "Fahrenheit" boiling point by Andrew Exum, Salon.com 07/14/04

But I fear the American left is beyond the highly nuanced, sophisticated arguments they have always embraced in the past (occasionally to their detriment). For now, they just want to be angry. And Michael Moore and others are happy to meet their needs.

So where does all that anger go? Unfortunately, I do fear it will begin to fall on the soldiers and their families, especially if Bush wins the White House in November. For now, Moore and other antiwar protesters have the election to focus on. But if Bush is reelected, there is no telling what kind of ugly turn the public's anger will take.

I fear the left's view of American fighting men and women will devolve from admiration to ambivalence to disgust the longer this war lasts and the longer we're exposed to simplistic rants from folks like Moore. Witness the illustrator Ted Rall, whose cartoon accusing Pat Tillman of wasting his life fighting for a foolish cause was widely criticized following Tillman's death in April. As soon as the news of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse hit the press, Rall revised his opinion of soldiers and denounced America's fighting men and women in Iraq as "Gestapo thugs." And consider the experience of Jason Gilson, a 23-year-old who was wounded as a Marine serving in Iraq, who says he was booed and called a "murderer" while marching at the Fourth of July parade in Bainbridge Island, outside Seattle.

Are both of those examples anomalies? Sure. But aren't they also the inevitable result when the rhetoric has been ratcheted to such an extreme?

I dealt with the Jason Gilson case in an earlier post.  I didn't like Ted Rall's cartoon that he mentions much either.  I think he misrepresented Pat Tillman.  But he was making a point, even if a mistaken one, about a famous person who he perceived as promoting a thoughtless attitude to war.  It's a huge leap to get from there to assuming a hostility towared soldiers in general even on Rall's part.  Although as the Foster Barton case illustrates, it doesn't take much encouragement for the Freepers to make those leaps of faith.

Speaking of which, Roy Edroso also picked up on the hastiness of the claim that the on-leave soldier Foster Barton had been assaulted by an antiwar zealot in blog posts of 09/22/04 and 09/30/04.

But Salon.com has been good about covering the problems of soldiers in Bush's War in Iraq, including Mary Jacoby's recent article on the Southern unit that refused a "sucide mission."  Some more examples include:

A Marine declares war on Bush by Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com 09/30/04.  This is about an Iraq War Marine veteran, Steve Brozak, running for Congress in New Jersey (my emphasis):

When Brozak returned from the Middle East to his post in Arlington, Va., he tried to alert civilians in the Defense Department to the trouble on the ground. But, he says, they were uninterested. "It was that same arrogant, contemptuous attitude. When I came back and said we have a problem, we need to address it right away, we are fighting for our lives, their attitude was, 'We know better than you do.' It was their contempt for the people in uniform, it was their contempt for all Americans" that finally drove him out of the Republican Party.

In fact, Brozak says, Republicans' contempt for soldiers -- coupled with their mawkish reverence for the military in the abstract -- had been bothering him for a while. He first started souring on his party when the Bush team smeared John McCain during the 2000 primaries; he was outraged by the 2002 attacks against Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who was tarred as a traitorous ally of Osama bin Laden despite the fact that he lost three limbs serving in Vietnam.

Yet another veteran to remember when you hear Republicans yammering about how they "honor our soldiers" and "support our troops" by mindlessly cheering for Bush's war plans.

He talks about what he learned in Bosnia four years ago. "Here was a country where people were living normal lives, and everything just fell apart overnight," he says. "It showed me how fragile societies can be. Make no mistake. Our society is very fragile."

Of course, the right is quick to seize on this kind of language to attack their critics as raving leftists. Yet in the past few years, this note of crisis has been sounded by those who've spent their lives as staid centrists: Al Gore, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke. No matter how many respectable establishment types sound the alarm against Bush, though, much of the media continues to write off their warnings as irrational "Bush hatred."

Eventually, Brozak says, "people will start to realize how bad things are." After all, he says, 70 percent of New Jersey's National Guard has been called up. A unit from Westfield, one of the towns in his district, is about to be sent to Tikrit and probably won't be home until 2006.

Operation American Repression? by Eric Boehlert, Salon.com 09/29/04. About an Army rserver sargeant who faces a possible 20 years in prison because he wrote an article criticize the Bush administration's incompetent conduct of the Iraq War.  I should note that the site on which he published it is LewRockwell.com, which is a neo-Confederate site.  But they have been opposed to the Iraq War, because they, well, they really do hate America and they don't like to support American wars, or much of anything else the American government does.  But that is not true of every Iraq War critic whose work they've published on their site.  I just mean to say, read especially critically if you're checking out stuff on that Web site.  (They have a whole section on what a vicious, evil tyrant Abraham Lincoln was, so it's not hard to get their drift.)

Turning point by David Morris, Salon.com 09/16/04.  This article shows another instance of a criticism that's not directly at the war itself as a general concept, but is a definite criticism of the war that's actually being fought.  As criticisms like this mount up, the question becomes more and more, "what are we really doing in Iraq?"

On Sunday, at his change-of-command ceremony, the outgoing top Marine general in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, gave tragic voice to what thousands of servicemen throughout Iraq have believed for months. He announced that the April assault on Fallujah had been an overly aggressive mistake and that the often-vacillating American approach to the town had undermined U.S. efforts to win the hearts and minds of local Iraqis. ...

Responding to the killing and subsequent mutilation of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah on March 31, Conway had led a 5,000-man Marine force that laid siege to the restive town for over three weeks. Bad press and reports of civilian casualties by Al-Jazeera later caused the Marines to halt their advance into the heart of the city and, on the eve of a renewed offensive, the Marines unexpectedly turned over the town to a local militia force that later became known as the Fallujah Brigade.

Reflecting on the course of the White House-ordered campaign on Sunday, Conway indicated that he had had serious misgivings about the Fallujah operation from the get-go, "We felt that we probably ought to let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," he told reporters gathered on the sprawling Marine base just east of the embattled town. "I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed."

"Bush lied, my son died" by Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com 09/30/04.  About the political ads of RealVoices.org.  One of the stories that will eventually be told at some length is about how the military in general, and the Army in particular, managed to take the lessons of their loss of public credibility in Vietnam and turn them into conclusions that let them destroy their own credibility at e-speed, instead of 1960s speed. "I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth."

But Salon.com is by no means alone in reporting this aspect of the war.

A strident minority: anti-Bush US troops in Iraq Christian Science Monitor 09/21/04

 Inside dusty, barricaded camps around Iraq, groups of American troops in between missions are gathering around screens to view an unlikely choice from the US box office: "Fahrenheit 9-11," Michael Moore's controversial documentary attacking the commander-in-chief.

"Everyone's watching it," says a Marine corporal at an outpost in Ramadi that is mortared by insurgents daily. "It's shaping a lot of people's image of Bush."

The film's prevalence is one sign of a discernible countercurrent among US troops in Iraq - those who blame President Bush for entangling them in what they see as a misguided war. Conventional wisdom holds that the troops are staunchly pro-Bush, and many are. But bitterness over long, dangerous deployments is producing, at a minimum, pockets of support for Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, in part because he's seen as likely to withdraw American forces from Iraq more quickly.

For Marines, A Frustating Fight by Steve Fainaru Washington Post 10/10/04:

"I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years," said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. "I don't think anything is going to get better;I think it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We're always goingto be here. We're never going to leave."

The views of the mortar platoon of some 50 young Marines, several of whom fought during the first phase of the war last year, are not necessarily reflective of all or even most U.S troops fighting in Iraq. Rather, they offer a snapshot of the frustrations engendered by a grinding conflict that has killed 1,064 Americans, wounded 7,730 and spread to many areas of the country. ...

"Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better,' " said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder, 22, of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day."

Pfc. Kyle Maio, 19, of Bucks County, Pa., said he thought government officials were reticent to speak candidly because of the upcoming U.S. elections. "Stuff's going on here but they won't flat-out say it," he said. "They can't get into it."

Maio said that when he arrived in Iraq, "I didn't think I was going to live this long, in all honesty." He added, "it ain't that bad. It's just part of the job, I guess."

As a reporter began to ask Maio another question, the interview was interrupted by the scream of an incoming rocket and then a deafening explosion outside the platoon's barracks. Pandemonium ensued.

"Get down! Get down!" yelled the platoon's radio operator, Cpl. Brandon Autin, 21, of New Iberia, La., his orders laced with profanity. "Get in the bunker! Get in the bunker now!"

But in BushWorld everything is going fine.  "Freedom is on the march."