Losing American Hearts and Minds
by Aisha Gawad
In a recent press conference, President Bush gave his most pessimistic assessment of the war in Iraq to date. Any American who watches the war stumbling along on their television sets can see that as sectarian killing continues to rage and as our own US troops are shrouded in controversy, the war is not exactly going well. As the President put it, the war is “straining America’s psyche.” Now, if the average American, who has no real connection to the war and can only experience it as deeply as their media outlets allow them, is “strained” by the situation in Iraq, then one must wonder: how are the troops feeling? How are the Iraqi people coping? Americans, safe in their homes, are strained, so what does that mean for the men and women who live in the battlefield?
Could the string of high-profile human rights atrocities committed by US troops against Iraqi civilians be connected to the emotional situation on the ground? American soldiers, in one of the most admirable sacrifices one can ever make, sign up to defend our country and what it stands for. But in the case of Iraq, we are no longer seen as the defenders of freedom. Our troops, fighting and dying for their country, are without a clear mission. Combine a confused mission, debatable rules of engagement, an undefined enemy, and a lack of accountability, and you get a stunning loss of Iraqi life. Some estimates put the number of dead Iraqi civilians at 45,000, while others go higher still.
While the vast majority of our troops deserve our respect and gratitude, a few of them have been involved in acts of inexcusable violence towards Iraqi civilians. In November of 2005, a group of Marines killed 24 civilians, including women and infants, in the Iraqi village of Haditha after a member of their unit was killed. Some say that the Marines were driven by stress and grief, and killed out of a need for revenge. Others, like Sgt. J.N. Laughner, who during an inspection for insurgent bomb-makers found the 24 dead bodies, said the Marines were simply following the rules of engagement. If the Marines felt that some suspicious or threatening activity was taking place in the village, the appropriate reaction seems to investigate, not to kill every man, woman, and child in sight.
In March of 2005, a group of Army soldiers entered a house in the town of Mahmoudiya, and raped, shot, and burned the body of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi. They also killed her parents and her 5-year-old sister. The actions of the troops in this particularly gruesome event, unlike those in the Haditha incident, are widely agreed upon as a clear violation of the law, yet it is still another example of troops killing as if Iraqi lives are expendable.
Is the massive loss of Iraqi life really just a routine, normal consequence of war? Have we stopped viewing the Iraqi civilian as a fellow human being? Forty-five thousand dead human beings should never be viewed as an acceptable price of war. Yet, there are disconcerting indicators even beyond the incidents described previously that our soldiers are fighting in war with no clear enemy and no clear purpose, where anyone can be a threat to their lives, and the way they cope is simply to kill or be killed. And if civilians suffer, so be it. The value of human life is not being emphasized by the people in Washington who call the shots in this war, so what should we expect from the soldiers on the ground?
A July 2006 report issued by Human Rights Watch called “No Blood, No Foul: Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq,” describes how US troops see the maltreatment and abuse of detainees as routine, and how they are taught that the Geneva Conventions do not apply. Although the report deals with detainees and not civilians, it demonstrates how human rights being underscored by the upper levels of military and government.
Another report, this one by the Washington Post, finds that very few US troops have been charged or convicted for offenses committed in Iraq. Thousands of Iraqis are dying, yet only 39 soldiers were charged in connection to civilian deaths. Only twelve out of the 39 served prison time. What message does this send to our troops? There is no sense of accountability for the killing of civilians, as if they aren’t even worth the trouble of an investigation.
Everything about this war seems to shift like quicksand under our feet. Nothing is certain, nothing is stable. Who are our troops killing and being killed by? Iraqis, Muslims, Baathists, terrorists, insurgents, anyone who hates America’s version of freedom? If the average American, let alone Congress and our president, can’t answer this vital question, how can we expect our troops, under much more pressure, to know the answer? In this elusive battlefield, fighting for an even more elusive ideal, we need to provide support for our troops with more than just armored humvees. It is inevitable that our troops will become somewhat desensitized to killing. It is inevitable that in this kind of war, civilians will die in greater numbers than soldiers or insurgents. Yet we cannot allow ourselves or our troops to view massacres like the one in Haditha as routine and unavoidable. Our military must be vigilant about not letting those responsible remain unpunished just because this is war. We may never have a clear purpose or goal in this war, but we can have clear rules of engagement that outlaw the blind killing of civilians, and we can have a clear sense of accountability for the deaths that do occur.
Sgt. Laughner, who found the bodies in Haditha, said something in a military interview that shows just how deeply we have failed our troops. When asked if he ever felt like something inappropriate or bad occurred in Haditha, he responded: “No, just that a Marine died. That is the only bad thing.” We have left our troops so unsupported, without any sense of clarity, that they have lost all perspective. A man sees 24 dead bodies, and it doesn’t even occur to him to label it as “bad.” Weren’t we once the liberators, fighting to free the Iraqi people? Now that our president has guided American soldiers into this war under that false notion, he leaves them with nothing to hold onto. With no end in sight to the war, we must not abandon our troops’ hearts and minds, and we must not forget that one of the most beautiful things about America, something worth fighting for, is her respect for all human life.
