thoughts from a brokenSoldier

After years of suffering through discourse offered by the likes of William Kristol pronouncing the virtues and efficacy of President Bush’s militant policies concerning the Middle East, a curious and strikingly relevant fact struck me. 

I have served two overseas deployments, one in war-torn Bosnia in 2001 (I was there for 9/11, which was quite harrowing in and of itself), and my most recent combat mission in Iraq in 2005.  During the Bosnia deployment, I got my very first taste of personal experience in how armed conflict and military suppression can deteriorate both a nation’s prosperity and its citizens’ quality of life.  I did not think I would ever see anything that surpasses the despair and utter destruction such conflict forces upon our fellow humans, but my combat tour in Iraq in 2005 quickly dispensed with that notion.  In Bosnia, the effects of the previous hostilities were painfully obvious, from being shown sites where Serbian death squads rounded up Bosnian citizens, raped the women and murdered the men (even five years couldn’t erode the bloodstains from the concrete walls of one former factory I saw) in an attempt to homogenize the local area for their benefit, to discovering multiple mass grave sites where Bosnian citizens had been murdered en-masse simply for their existence, to riding along with my translator and having her point out her home, which had been gutted by bombing and mortar fire throughout her teen years.  Her relation of her experiences of the war made me realize that while children in this country grew up with sports, video games, and television, the children of Bosnia grew up with bombs, air strikes, mortars, and the constant fear of retribution from a militarily superior occupying force.  In Iraq, however, I witnessed firsthand the havoc such conflict wreaks upon people while it is actually occurring.  The aftermath of such brutality is horrifying, but seeing it happen firsthand is infinitely worse.

Even as an American soldier, well-equipped, well-protected in my base, and well-prepared to deal with such things, I still harbored an innate and inescapable fear of what the next hour would bring.  I cannot imagine the horror experienced by the Iraqi families that have to manage - somehow - to live with such fear day in and day out, especially without the solace that comes with knowing that you’ll get to leave at the end of a one-year tour of duty.

This brings me to the realization I mentioned at the top of this post.  Kristol and his ilk extol the benefits that this war and the policies enabling it have produced - the supposed safety and protection of our nation, the projection of American power as a tool for creating political and diplomatic leverage, etc… - without the slightest knowledge of, or seemingly even concern for, the effects such policies have on those living in the concerned areas.  They repeatedly spout the talking point that we "liberated" 53 million Iraqis, yet they have never actually seen these Iraqis’ quality of life with their own eyes.  Sure, some of them may have visited, but - like McCain and his "stroll" through a "safe" Baghdad market (all the while under the protection of aircraft and over 100 soldiers) - they had their conclusions readily prepared for delivery long before their ridiculously short trips.  Hell, I spent almost an entire year there before being evacuated, and even in that extended period of time I was only beginning to understand and appreciate the constant dread that plagues these families that have been trapped in the midst of this conflict.

While we may have freed Iraqis from the rule of a definitely brutal despot, the life they live now is still one that is filled with the ever-present fear that they will be caught in the crossfire of combat, or even worse - that they will be the target of such action, from either side.  (And before the neo-con faux-patriotism induces them to decry the suggestion that US forces would target Iraqi non-combatants, they need to realize that just as the umbrella of "national security" has facilitated the erosion of many of our long-standing civil liberties here at home, there also exist those in Iraq who will falsely inform on neighbors they either dislike or simply want removed from their community, and some such complaints are too readily accepted and acted upon without the confirmation that our due process would require, all in the interest of "security."  And lest they forget - I have seen such things with my own eyes and tried - in vain, sometimes - to stop them.  Kristol, on the other hand, only has experience in unjustifiably denouncing such assertions based solely on his idealistic belief that American soldiers just wouldn’t do that.  Such a belief is just another example of him projecting his own narrow views upon a community he knows nothing about.  Until Kristol himself dons body armor and steps into the combat zone, he has absolutely zero knowledge of what a soldier would or would not do when a possible threat arises that could very possibly - if justified - end their natural life.)  All other equivocations aside, that level of fear in Iraqis is immeasurably greater and more immediate than it was prior to our invasion, and that situation is a direct result of the failure of our Commander-in-Chief to accurately assess the consequences of his decision to drastically cut the size of the force to be used for the invasion and subsequent occupation. 

Instead of concrete experience, these neo-cons rely on ideological justifications for their ideas and actions that simply ignore the fact that every such action has a consequence, and many times those consequences are far more dangerous that the original threat.  They have never woken up to the bone-shaking concussion of a massive air strike and felt the internal consternation that such a thing ignites within you - even when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the strike isn’t aimed at you.  They have never felt the impact of an IED exploding three feet from their body and had to deal with the physical and mental injuries that result - not to mention the disillusionment that goes along with returning from war only to have to fight your very own Army even harder in order to get the care you were promised when you signed up for service in the first place.  They have never had their home damaged - and in many cases, destroyed - by an errant US strike, only to be told that they will receive no compensation for their losses because the military asserts the damage was not intentional.  They have never had to deal with how they will make their living after their country descends into and is functionally destroyed by the kind of sectarian violence that erupted in Iraq due to the misguided policies of Bush and Rumsfeld that led to the significantly reduced force used for the invasion - even despite the warnings from many experienced senior officers, including the Army Chief of Staff GEN Shinseki, that such a course of action would result in our inability to control the resulting situation.  Instead of genuinely considering their concerns, those officers were ostracized and ignored, and either resigned or were subsequently marginalized and silenced.

In short, Kristol and those like him are essentially armchair quarterbacks, convinced that only their intellectual conception of how the world works is deserving of merit - a conception that has been proven utterly false by the past few years of horrific instability and violence in the war we have supposedly "won."  He doesn’t know the effects his ideological bent has on the actual human beings living with its consequences, and what’s worse is that he doesn’t seem to care.  He is far from contrite, but rather in his final NYT column asserts that the neo-conservatives that held the reins of our government for the better part of the last quarter-century actually bettered the world, going so far as to state the following:

Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

It is typical of an individual like Kristol to attruibute any positive results to the policies he espouses while at the same time attributing any adverse consequences of those very same policies to the inherent flaws and impediments in the "real world."  And really, a fair amount to be proud of??  Seriously, I want some of whatever this guy is taking that is so obviously and drastically altering his perception of the harsh reality that those very politicians’ short-sighted policies have foisted upon us today.  I often find myself wondering what could possibly allow this obviously educated man to have such a willfully skewed view of his ideology’s effects on the rest of the known world, and then it dawned on me. 

He has never had to exit the comparably luxurious comfort of his own life to actually experience - not read about, hear about, or vacation in - the cesspool of consequences such ideas and actions have resulted in.  From his privileged viewpoint, these policies have been a success, and therein lies the lynchpin.  These policies have been wildly successful, in both financial and influential terms, for him and those around him, and that seems to be his main criteria for policy success.  Such a viewpoint betrays both an arrogant assumption of an understanding of the global condition combined with a willful ignorance of anything outside his scope of daily life, especially anything that contradicts his own beliefs.  Simply put, if it works for him, why should he - aside from simple human decency and consideration of the other - see any reason to consider such policies anything but a success?

It all just makes me glad that this functionally uninformed, ideological hack will have one less platform from which to project his idiocy and inconsiderate, self-serving ideas.  I’m all for the freedom of speech, but freedom to express your ideas does not automatically oblige major media outlets to sponsor and distribute them.