Out of Iraq by George S. McGovern & William R. Polk

Author:George S. McGovern & William R. Polk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Of course, young Americans are no more vicious or cruel than any other people, so their actions must be determined by the context in which they have been put and the guidance they believe they have received from their superiors. Taking them out of their own society, where laws are enforced and social norms emphasize respect for other people, and thrusting them into a confrontation with people whose language, culture, and politics they do not understand and who hate them for being there is surely a recipe to bring out the worst in them. The history of guerrilla warfare demonstrates this dehumanizing tendency among peoples of all religions and cultures. It also demonstrates that the longer these conditions persist, the greater the destruction of the values of the young men or women who are so placed. Ultimately a whole generation can lose its civic moorings.

Such damage is very hard to repair. Even returning to “normal” life becomes problematic; the demobilized soldier is apt to take home with him what he has learned. This experience should be a great warning of danger for the most cherished values of American society. Alarmingly, in the midst of the tragedy of the Iraq war, officials of the American government are already discussing how to fight future wars, and some of the administration’s most senior advisers are advocating what amounts to perpetual war. Such officials need to hear again the grim verdict of General Sherman: “War is hell.” They might also contemplate the observation of the eighteenth-century British conservative parliamentarian Edmund Burke: “A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt with blood.” It is worth noting that many of the loudest advocates of war are theoreticians who have never been near a battle.

All war is brutal, but insurgencies and counterinsurgencies are particularly frightening because they nearly always cause the participants to drop even modest attempts to keep warfare within some reasonable boundaries of law and decency. Americans have now seen this occur in three of our wars: the suppression of the Philippine nationalist rebellion in 1900, the Vietnam War of the 1960s, and the Iraq occupation today. In each of these conflicts American troops and intelligence officers engaged in activities that not only created great hatred of America but also corrupted the values for which we proclaimed we were fighting. Those were major episodes, but in between them, in our quest for “security,” we sometimes allied ourselves with a collection of corrupt tyrannies and helped their security services learn the techniques of torture that would provoke such outrage later in Iraq. *

Torture has been the single most widely publicized aspect of the American occupation of Iraq, and it has done more to besmirch the reputation of America throughout the world than any other single set of actions. So shameful have been our practices at the prisons in Iraq that they were withheld from the public as long as possible. When they finally became known, investigations substantiated the worst of the charges. But the only

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