Today’s dispatch covers just one subject. I recently read Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars, edited by Andrew Bacevich with Daniel A. Sjursen, and the testimony from soldiers who had boots on the ground confirmed my long-held belief that war against the other—you know, those faceless people living in other lands with different customs and beliefs—is hell for the common people doing the fighting (on both sides) and for the innocent bystanders, but just great for the faceless board of directors behind mega-corporations who profit from the plunder of _________. From Open Democracy: When the 2003 war started, the economy of Iraq was already in shambles, with the country having gone through the eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s, the first Gulf War of 1990-91, and the UN-imposed financial and trade embargo since 1990. In the first year of the occupation, more than 70 American companies and individuals, (including Halliburton, Bechtel and Bearing Point) won reconstruction contracts, largely paid for from Iraqi funds. During the same period, Iraqi firms received just 2% of the value of contracts paid for from Iraqi funds. Research from 2013 by the Financial Times showed that the top ten contractors secured business worth at least $72bn between them.
Here are some excerpts from the book to ponder:
By Eric Edstrom—As American as It Gets:
It’s one of America’s darkest ironies: in efforts to “prevent terrorism” in our country, we commit far larger acts of terrorism elsewhere. Terrorism—and the images that some with it: targeted assassinations, bombings, drone strikes, secret black site prisons, torture, and wanton civilian murder—is precisely what we inflict on others. Particularly galling is America’s arrogance in expecting that this won’t come back to haunt us, even when we’ve historically proved that we ourselves will destroy far more for far less. We Americans are truly raised to believe that terrorism isn’t a crime—when America does it.
If General McChrystal’s “insurgent math”—for every innocent person you kill, you create ten new enemies correct, the raid that killed Andy created another 330 insurgents. This 10:1 ratio means that just to keep an insurgency from growing, the American military needs to kill more than ten insurgents without a single civilian death, a seemingly impossible task in modern warfare. Grégoire Chamayou’s book Drone Theory puts it well: “Caught upon in an endless spiral, the eradication strategy is, paradoxically, destined never to eradicate.”
Individuals—young men and women looking to prove their worth to society—must not be misled by the Disneyfication of military service. At the first sniff of adulthood, the military bamboozles children into one of the largest commitments ever conceived: to leave your life, be issued a new identity, and be sent across the world to inflict violence on people you don’t know, for political reasons you’re not meant to understand. I believe in informed consent, and I’m no longer sure that’s what happens when a military commitment is pitched to teenagers too young even to be allowed to drink alcohol or buy a ticket for an R-rated movie depicting gory military combat.
The American public has been complicit in allowing our troops to be sent into a series of wars that everyone knew to be costly and self-defeating, while simultaneously maintaining the audacious idea that, in doing so, we “support the troops.” That is not patriotism; that is betrayal.
By Daniel L. Davis—Going Public with the Truth:
If nothing else, America needed to know what was really happening on the ground in Afghanistan. The soldiers who had died there for no gain to our country were forever silenced: they could never again speak for themselves. Thousands of other troopers who knew the truth only too well also had no voice, because they had no access to publications and no reason to believe anyone would listen. The only messages that America did hear were the perpetually optimistic—and frequently outright false—reports from the senior leaders.
By Jonathan W. Hutto Sr.—A Sailor’s Story:
I found that despite the military’s supposed inclusivity today, it offers no escape from racism and nationalism. And this racism is directly connected to the acts of aggression and even war crimes committed by the US military overseas.
By Matthew P. Hoh—Reclaiming My Morality:
The entire US government, including our military, intelligence, and diplomatic corps, was—and is—full of people who don’t believe in America’s endless wars, don’t believe in our supposed reasons for fighting them, and don’t believe that the sacrifices and costs are worthwhile. The extent of their lying, to themselves and to the public, has been well documented, not only for Iraq and Afghanistan but for all American wars of this century, and most wars of previous centuries as well.
In 2019, the Washington Post reported on the Afghanistan Papers, a confidential trove of interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with more than six hundred US officials, both military and civilian. The report laid bare the systemic lying of the entire US government regarding the Afghan War, just as the New York Times unveiling the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed the systemic lying of the US government regarding the war in Vietnam. Yet our elected officials have made no attempts to address the unmitigated mendacity. Britain’s Parliament, to its credit, has held formal inquiries regarding the wars in Iraq and Libya, confirming that those wars were started and sustained upon lies. In the United States, we have not had justice or truth-telling from our leaders.
By Kevin Tillman (brother of Pat Tillman)—Truth, Lies, and Propaganda:
Like many others, I hoped—or, rather, felt certain—that the country’s first Black president would promptly rein in America’s belligerent foreign policy. By most accounts, Obama is a kind, smart, reasonable, hardworking, and thoughtful person. Even so, it wasn’t long before he escalated the war in Afghanistan, expanded our global drone campaign, recolonized Africa with US troops, not-so-secretly helped turn Syria into an apocalyptic wasteland, and extended America’s economic warfare against countries like Venezuela. This, from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate! My disappointment with Obama’s foreign policy proved yet another reminder that the problems we face are structural and systemic—wired into the national DNA. I had counted on Obama’s election engendering a paradigm shift. Instead, he continued nearly all the Bush administration’s policies, only with far more sophistication. For both presidents, the main concern was expanding the American empire, or what US officials term “advancing American interests.”
By Elliot Woods—From Soldier to Witness:
Somewhere along the way, I encountered the phrase fraud, waste, and abuse, and that seemed to fit the grotesque outlay of resources on the large bases where I spent time. As much as I appreciated our air-conditioned chow hall, and the steak and the crab legs and the Mongolian stir-fry, I couldn’t help thinking that it was all a bit much. Sometimes it felt less like a war than a giant boondoggle to benefit the big contracting companies like Kellogg Brown & Root. I thought it was peculiar that we had Sri Lankans working in our chow hall, Filipinas doing our laundry, and Turks handing out basketballs in the recreation center. It all seemed colonial and corporate. And I definitely found it repulsive that the American KBR employees were making five to ten times my salary.
It was only after I got home that I began to learn about the multibillion-dollar no-bid contracts that companies like KBR received to provide logistics and construction services in Iraq. The debate back home about whether the war was just about capturing Iraqi oil was still simmering when I returned to college in 2005, but as far as I could see, any future oil contracts for American companies would be icing on the cake. The money was already in the bank from the logistical operations before the first boots even hit the ground. And it kept flowing for years, while more American died and got critically wounded, and Iraq was torn to shreds in the security vacuum created by Saddam’s removal.
By Andrew Bacevich—The Price of Free Pizza:
“You did not return from hell with empty hands.” So wrote a French intellectual to an American journalist who had served as a Soviet agent during the 1930s. Even allowing for Gallic hyperbole, a similar judgement pertains to the writers whose essays appear in Paths of Dissent. They have not returned to civilian life with empty hands. In sharing what they experienced in uniform and in charting their individual journeys to dissent, they offer their fellow citizens an invaluable opportunity to learn from and reflect on the last twenty years of disastrous military misadventures.
What we Americans owe vets is not free pizza but the decency to hear them out and ponder what they have learned. There is value in their testimony. To listen attentively is the least the rest of us can do. It just may be that as citizens we do have an obligation after all.
Also, check out a podcast on WBUR’s Radio Open Source titled Dissenting Veterans on Post-9/11 wars.
And if you’re feeling stuck in a rut, listen to Rodney.
And to lighten up the post even more, listen to some Birdcloud.
And now…
I’m afraid there’s no lightening this up.