Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) sponsored Winter Soldier in March, 2008, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part, this event and the testimony offered has been ignored by the mainstream press. The story was #9 in the Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009.

The myth of the "clean" war and the uniformly honorable behavior of US soldiers in times of war is a persistent one. War is never waged honorably. Perhaps it has never been so. Civilians are always killed and those viewed as the enemy are regularly brutalized, maimed, and killed even when weaponless and in custody. Their status as the "enemy" makes them subhuman or non-human.

For soldiers, war is often a maelstrom of situational ethics and mission orders, of tribal oaths against evil outsiders, of hate and fear.

Because of the intimate intertwining of individual soldiers with a fantastically strong and monolithic command structure, it becomes difficult to separate opposition to a war from so-called support for the troops.

That there is a strong sense of honor and patriotism among most individual US soldiers is a given. The bonds of loyalty squad or platoon members have for each other are strong. Tests of courage, of life and death under fire, reach deep. This is the special domain of the warrior's experience and it is difficult for most civilians to really grasp what it is like.

If this seems like I'm contradicting what I've written further up, the relevant factor is the command structure itself. While soldiers and field commanders have some latitude on how to accomplish "objectives" logistically on the ground, often they are constrained by other standing commands or lack of particular resources.

For example, lack of adequate translators leads to an inability of troops to communicate with civilians or prisoners. When compounded by opposition forces without readily visible uniforms to identify them using unconventional tactics like IEDs, this leads to a self-protective attitude of universal suspicion.

Questioning the War in Iraq is not remotely like questioning the integrity or courage of individual soldiers. Yet the proponents of the war consistently accuse those against the war of doing just that. This is a classic instance of misdirection, false blame, and the use of a straw man argument.

Yet here we are, many years into the war, still hearing these calumnies and "Why do you hate America?"

Labels: activism, Iraq War, politics

Every year I await the arrival of Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Stories. I like to get the book version even though the basic stories are online. There's a fair amount of extra material in the book version not available online, making it worth the price in my opinion.

Their number one story was "Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation". These figures are consistently glossed over by the American press. I was shocked by this:

"...an Associated Press poll conducted in February 2007, which asked a representative sample of US residents how many Iraqis had died as a result of the war. The average respondent thought the number was under 10,000, about 2 percent of the actual total at that time."

The whole "we don't do body counts" attitude by the US military seems clearly designed to trivialize and marginalize the Iraqi dead and displaced.

Interviewers from the Lancet report of October 2006 (Censored 2006, #2) asked Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died. Of deaths for which families were certain of the perpetrator, 56 percent were attributable to US forces or their allies. Schwartz suggests that if a low pro rata share of half the unattributed deaths were caused by US forces, a total of approximately 80 percent of Iraqi deaths are directly US perpetrated.

Even with the lower confirmed figures, by the end of 2006, an average of 5,000 Iraqis had been killed every month by US forces since the beginning of the occupation. However, the rate of fatalities in 2006 was twice as high as the overall average, meaning that the American average in 2006 was well over 10,000 per month, or over 300 Iraqis every day. With the surge that began in 2007, the current figure is likely even higher.

Labels: Iraq War, news, war