Gods of War

It`s an excerpt from Peter Laufer`s new book, ``Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq`` (Chelsea Green, 2006).

Money Quotes:
``We was going along the Euphrates River,`` says Joshua Key, a 27-year-old former U.S. soldier from Oklahoma, detailing a recurring nightmare -- a scene he stumbled on shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. ``It`s a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a real sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over here and U.S. troops in between them. I`m thinking, `Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What`s caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?` We get out and somebody was screaming, `We fking lost it here!` I`m thinking, `Oh, yes, somebody definitely lost it here.```

Joshua says he was ordered to look around for evidence of a firefight, for something to rationalize the beheaded Iraqis. ``I look around just for a few seconds and I don`t see anything.`` But then he noticed the sight that now triggers his nightmares. ``I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like a soccer ball. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and it was like, I can`t be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war but this is outrageous. Why did it happen? That`s just my question: Why did that happen?``

He`s convinced there was no firefight that led to the beheading orgy -- there were no spent shells to indicate a battle. ``A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there were any shells. There were never no shells, except for what we shot. I`m thinking, Okay, so they just did that because they wanted to do it. They got trigger happy and they did it. That`s what made me mad in Iraq. You can take human lives at a fast rate and all you have to say is, say, `Oh, I thought they threw a grenade. I thought I seen this, I thought I seen that.` You could mow down 20 people each time and nobody`s going to ask you, `Are you sure?` They`re going to give you a high five and tell you that you was doing a good job...``
Pulling security duty in the Iraqi streets, Joshua found himself talking to the locals.

He was surprised by how many spoke English, and he was frustrated by the military regulations that forbade his accepting dinner invitations to join Iraqis for social evenings in their homes. ``I`m not your perfect killing machine,`` he admits. ``That`s where I broke the rules. I broke the rules by having a conscience.``

Re: # 35

Very well said... It can`t be explained in a better way... :)

#30 by mohar11 on June 5, 2006 10:14am PT
Re: # 27 kedar

There was no insurgency against the brits in colonised india... apple and orange


Just because the majority of the Indians lacked the cojones to fight their occupiers unlike the Iraqis does not mean that what we did was right and the Iraqis are wrong. So you support the hanging of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev I presume. Bottom line is that Iraq has been invaded by an occupying force and like the Vietnamese the Iraqis are fighting back real hard. Unlike us wimpy Indians who meekly accepted foreign rule and saw our condition deteiorate.

Re: # 28
HP Sahib,
Very well said.

I would also like to add their totally arrogant attitude to the list of reasons for failure in addition to the basic premise of invading EE-Rak being simply wrong because they were based on imperialist designs.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm

“U.S. overseas military bases thus frequently give rise to major social protests in the subject countries. Until the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1992, the U.S. bases in the Philippines were widely regarded in that nation as a legacy of U.S. colonialism. Like nearly all U.S. military bases overseas, they brought with them a host of social problems. The town of Olongapo next to the U.S. base at Subic Bay was devoted entirely to “rest and recreation” for U.S. troops and housed more than fifty thousand prostitutes.

U.S. bases in Okinawa, which became the hub for the U.S. overseas basing system in the Pacific following the loss of the bases in the Philippines, exist at odds with the population. According to Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, in his book Blowback (2000), the island of Okinawa, a prefecture of Japan, “is essentially a military colony of the Pentagon’s, a huge safe house where Green Berets and the Defense Intelligence Agency, not to mention the air force and Marine Corps, can do things they would not dare do in the United States. It is used to project American power throughout Asia in the service of a de facto U.S. grand strategy to perpetuate or increase American hegemonic power in this crucial region” (p. 64).

In 1995, anti-base protests broke out in Okinawa in response to the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three U.S. servicemen, who had rented a car for the purpose, so that they could take her to a remote location and rape her; and in response to the callous view of Admiral Richard C. Macke, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, who told the press: “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” The widespread protests, led by an organization called Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, were not, however, just in response to this single rape, brutal though it was.

Between 1972 and 1995, U.S servicemen were implicated in 4,716 crimes, nearly one per day, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a conservative Japanese newspaper. The Japan-U.S. agreement that governs the Okinawa base allows U.S. authorities to refuse Japanese requests for military suspects, and few indeed have suffered any inconvenience for their crimes.``

Re: # 1
sanjay ``There is no need to keep blaming USA all the time, we should also look into our shirts. You cant expect charity from a country if you shout Death for it``

The problem is that the USA`s recent actions indeed makes many of its long standing well-wishers to go to the extreme of shouting death for this country and this includes many so-called ``western-educated`` and enlightened muslims who may even be living in the USA. It is the USA who should look into its shirt.

sanjay ``Any country, with its interests threatened, will resort to war--thats for sure``

So do you really think that the people who planned the 9/11 were only simple maniacs and nothing more. Their interests, or the interests of the people whom they represented, were never threatened.

Re: # 29
[...Pakistan should be next in the queue for invasion...]

Yep - it should be... probably by canadians... just yesterday they caught a bunch of pakis planning to blow up their parliament...

Re: # 27 kedar

There was no insurgency against the brits in colonised india... apple and orange

Re: # 24 So does invasion of iraq or Afghanistan guarantee such an incident won`t happen again? COuld the act of a dozen of people be made an excuse to invade the entire country and kill thousands of civilians in the process? And above all, if such an incident does take place again, would it result in the occupation of another country, fictitously held respinsible or linked? Going by that arguement, Pakistan should be next in the queue for invasion, why oppose that?

Well! the US is defeated in Iraq. No amount of propaganda can hide this fact.
They have been defeated in a place where the US or for that matter, no one else thought that the resistance would be so fierce.

The US lost in Vietnam to a country that was supported by two other powers in the world namely, the Soviet Union and China. In Iraq, the resistance had no such support. It can be argued that both Iran and Syria have supported the resistance but their support can never be equal to what China and the Soviet Union did in Vietnam.

As has been argued in many forums, the US did not send enough forces in Iraq because they never thought there would be any resistance to the US occupation. The Iraqi resistance astounded not only the Pentagon and the military planners but it caught the CIA and the political brass by surprise too. There is no history of armed resistance in the Arab world at such a large scale. Different forces throughout the history have occupied most of the Arab countries. We saw some resistance in Algeria and then in Palestine but the resistance in Iraq have surpassed them all in a very quick time.

The US must ask itself how that happened. Saddam did not plan this. The disbanding of the Iraq Army immediately after the take over could be one reason but if we pay close attention to it, we find that the Iraqi Army never had any will to fight the US army even when Iraq was not occupied. In the two gulf wars, we saw an Iraqi army that was not willing to fight under any command structure. There maybe some elements in the elite guards that might have sparked the initial resistance but the nature of that force clearly shows that it was not trained to start a guerrilla war against a superior army.

The only plausible answer is that the resistance is made up of the civilian political elements of the Ba’ath Party.

In wars like this, the occupying forces must be trained to “out guerrilla the guerrilla”. No US force in Iraq now is trained in such wars and the frustration with a hit and run enemy takes a heavy toll on the regular army that has been trained to kill in a combat. When the US army is exposed to a war where they can’t see the enemy, they tend to fire indiscriminately. We saw that in Vietnam and we will continue to see that in Iraq, if the US army generals decided to continue to seek the resistance in the civilian areas.

I think after so many massacres in Iraq and a wide publicity in the international media, the US army and the Marines would be confined to the safe areas instead of actively seeking the Iraqi resistance in the countryside. That means that in a very short time we will see a complete anarchy in the country, if that is not the case now.


No one should eliminate the race factor from the horrible massacres that have taken place first in Vietnam and now in Iraq.

#25 by mohar11 on June 5, 2006 9:07am PT
Re: # 23

give em a break - the marines are a fighting a full blown insugency - so things will happen every once in a while.... stop this unnecessary chest beating....


Would you also have given a break to General Dyer and his 91 soldiers as well for Jallianwala Bagh???

chor kay ghar may mor

Re: # 23

give em a break - the marines are a fighting a full blown insugency - so things will happen every once in a while.... stop this unnecessary chest beating....

#9 by shobig_sifar on June 5, 2006 4:27am PT


Re: # 3 Good post Charlie! who in his right mind could presume that the anarchy or `Islamisation` of Afghanistan could pose any danger to the `democracy and liberty` of the US


Who in his right mind could think people could fly planes into building full of thousands of innocent people...

The Afghan war is where I draw the line..That war was justified as any war can ever be justified..Interesting that Islamists are against the afghan war and not just the iraq war(which even I disagree with)..

The behavior of the US troops is not new, but what is new is the availibility of such acts courtsey of a global media and its instant reach. History of US military operations will tell that such things happened and the reason, why such acts are shocking is because they have punctured the myth of the martial nobility, which the United States had created since the end of the Second World War for its armed forces.

Ciao

For pakis to be shedding tears is the height of hypocrisy..

If you collect all the tears shed by the pakis for IRaq, Palestine, Kashmir etc, you could fill a very large lake..

If you collect all the tears shed by the pakis for the bangladeshis they killed, you couldn`t fill a fish tank..