Perhaps there is too much going on to ever step back a take the long view, but some people do. Sometimes taking the long view is an assignment, like the annual report of the Pentagon’s Mental Health Advisory Team for the Iraq War, which did get some play in the news - but then Paris Hilton was sentenced to actual jail time, the result of driving in the neighborhood here after her license had been suspended for, earlier, driving under the influence. This seems to be big news in the rest of the country. Out here it just means you need to be extra carefully dropping your mail at the post office on Wilcox, and even more careful if you think a burger at the In-And-Out down on Sunset at midnight would hit the spot. There are these crazy Hollywood people around, you see. It’s hard to see why this matters anywhere else, but it seems to. It got more play than the annual report of the Pentagon’s Mental Health Advisory Team for the Iraq War. Even the name sounds stultifying.
But the report, as dull as it sounded, was full of troubling details, like their finding that the length and duration of tours of duty in Iraq were starting to cause serious problems -
Multiple deployers reported higher acute stress than first-time deployers. Deployment length was related to higher rates of mental health problems and marital problems.
Okay then - suicides are up, marital conflicts are up, and about ten percent of the soldiers and marines reported mistreating civilians when not necessary. That doesn’t help when you have this counterinsurgency mission designed to win hearts and minds of the locals.
But this can be solved, or at least made less of a problem. It’s quite simple. Do the obvious -
Extend the interval between deployments to 18-36 months or decrease deployment length to allow additional time for Soldiers to re-set following a one-year combat tour.
But we’re doing the opposite. What’s up with that? Do we want to screw up this surge thing?
Here’s the odd thing. The report was written last November, just before President Bush announced the surge. It was it was not released until Friday, 4 May. The New York Times asked why there was a four-month delay and got this -
Pentagon officials have not explained why the public release of the report was delayed, a move that kept the data out of the public debate as the Bush administration developed its plan to build up troops in Iraq and extend combat tours. Rear Adm. Richard R. Jeffries, a medical officer, told reporters on Friday that the timing was decided by civilian Pentagon officials.
Kevin Drum comments -
I’ll bet it was. The last thing you need when you’re announcing longer deployments to support a surge that’s opposed by your commanders on the ground and virtually every military expert and the Iraq Study Group, is a report from within the military itself recommending that deployments be reduced. Hell, I’m surprised they released it at all.
Well, they did release it. Given the decisions that were made - extend all year-long tours to fifteen months - there was no good time to release it. But late Friday after the news cycle closes, and four months late, and coincidental with the Paris Hilton news, will do.
Drum also notes that local newspaper out this way, the Los Angeles Times, finally made up their (its?) collective mind and ran the editorial that was probably inevitable - the surge won’t work and it’s time to start planning for withdrawal, as in, “We are not naïve. U.S. withdrawal, whether concluded next year or five years from now, entails grave risks. But so does U.S. occupation.”
Drum contends too few people seem to have figured that out. No. Everyone has figured that out. After they have, the newspapers come next, slowly, one by one. Eventually more than a few of the key politicians will follow, perhaps. Editorials and what politicians say are always lagging indicators, as they say on Wall Street. You see a large parade going noisily and happily down the street, and most of it has passed by, and you’re feeling not only left out, but stunningly irrelevant, and, damn it, you’re SUPPOSED to be relevant, as it really is your job, so you run down the street and out in front of the parade and pretend you’re leading it - it’s like that. (Sometimes the Homeric simile works best.)
You don’t believe that the surge is a bit of a bitter joke? The LA Times also reports on what Drum calls one of the worst-kept secrets of the Bush administration - Defense Secretary Robert Gates is not exactly a major fan of the surge. You get things like this -
“I believe Gates is on a completely different page than President Bush and Gen. Petraeus,” said a former senior Defense official who has supported the buildup. “He wants to see some results by summer, and if he doesn’t see those results, he seems willing to throw the towel in.”
There seems to be some sort of odd charade going on here.
But back to that report about those soldiers and marines.
Digby at Hullabaloo has some comments in Landmines -
I have long been concerned about the effects on society at large when a government openly endorses torture. It would appear that we will get a first hand look as some of the troops who fought in the Iraq war come home for good. It’s hard to believe that they will easily shed these views and may even find themselves hardening them in order to defend their actions abroad.
That’s a thought, reinforced in the Associated Press overview -
In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.
More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.
“It is disappointing,” said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. “But anybody who is surprised by it doesn’t understand war. … This is about combat stress.”
The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
“I don’t want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military - look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in,” Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said of the mission in Iraq. “There’s a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk.”
The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.
Officials said the teams visited Iraq last August to October, talking to troops, health care providers and chaplains.
The study team also found that long and repeated deployments were increasing troop mental health problems.
But Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the Army’s acting surgeon general, said the team’s “most critical” findings were on ethics.
“They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at,” said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health.
Well, the findings included this sort of thing -
Only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.
About a third of troops said they had insulted or cursed at civilians in their presence.
About 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property when it was not necessary. Mistreatment includes hitting or kicking a civilian.
Forty-four percent of Marines and 41 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or Marine.
Thirty-nine percent of Marines and 36 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to gather important information from insurgents.
And John Pike adds historical perspective -
Pike contrasted Iraq’s campaign to World War I, saying: “The trenches were pretty stressful, but a unit would only be up at the front for a few months and then get rotated to the rear. There’s no rear in Iraq; you’re subject to combat stress for your entire tour.”
Things are different. This is the low numbers high-tech military Rumsfeld wanted. It’s not working out so well, now that the mission, whatever it is, doesn’t any long involve flying drones from an air-conditioned trailer two or three nations away, and pushing the appropriate “fire” button while you sip your Diet Coke.
Digby speaks to that -
Obviously, war is hell and the amount of stress they are putting on these guys is quite inhumane. The mission is a mess, they don’t know who the enemy is and they likely feel they are under siege from every direction, even from the US, although I don’t think anyone actually holds them responsible for what has happened. If there was ever a reason to remind the chickenhawk “300″ aficionados that the real thing is something other than a video game and should not be undertaken for anything less than vital purposes, this should do it. (But it won’t - the quest for martial glory is embedded in the human DNA, I’m afraid, only in the past it was required that you join up to prove your manhood rather than shake your pom poms from the sidelines dressed in a warrior’s costume.)
But even with all that, 40% of the military believing that torture is acceptable is more than alarming, particularly in an elective occupation like Iraq. This is the mightiest military on earth we are talking about, not some fourth rate militia that doesn’t understand that even aside from moral considerations, torture is not worth the price in bad information, wasted time and the dehumanization of those who perpetrate it. (Of course, those in our government who use “24″ as their moral and tactical guideline might disagree.)
Even more shocking to me than the torture numbers, however, is this: “47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.”
Well, yes, for obvious reasons -
Noncombatants are the very people we “liberated.” I’m hard pressed to find any reason other than rank racism or a very serious misunderstanding of what the American mission is supposed to be to explain this. I suspect it is both. Even without all the other considerations that is a clear indication that the American military can no longer effect positive change in Iraq. It has, in some very important respects, lost its honor.
That’s a problem that’s going to bite all of us. At some point these people will be bringing home these attitudes and all the confusion inflicted upon them about “enemies” and “liberation” and whether torture is moral and whether the Iraqi people deserved to be treated with respect will manifest itself in post-traumatic stress syndrome and many broken lives. It is going to be very difficult for these people to reconcile all this.
War can do that, even the “good” ones. There was plenty of “battle fatigue” after WWII and a whole lot of “shell shock” after WWI. But this is actually a magnitude worse, as Vietnam was, because when a failed and disastrous war is based on lies by powerful people for murky political ends, the people who fight it pay an unusually steep price with the guilt and confusion and life-long struggle with the fact that the people who put them there really didn’t give a damn. They react to it in many ways, some with deep anger at those who spoke out, others with a lifetime of resentment toward authority, but virtually none of them without serious damage to the psyche. I’m not sure what the effects of having two such wars in a single generation will be, but it’s bound to be very, very serious. It was bad enough the first time.
It is more troubling than Paris Hilton’s driving. We are making a generation of something else entirely.
And as for what those on the ground think, this must confuse them -
Recently unclassified documents suggest that senior officers viewed the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in late 2005 as a potential public relations problem that could fuel insurgent propaganda against the American military, leading investigators to question whether the officers’ immediate response had been intentionally misleading.
Col. R. Gary Sokoloski, a lawyer who was chief of staff to Maj. General Richard A. Huck, the division commander, approved a news release about the killings that investigators interviewing him in March 2006 suggested was “intentionally inaccurate” because it stated, contrary to the facts at hand, that the civilians had been killed by an insurgent’s bomb.
According to a transcript of the interview, Colonel Sokoloski told the investigators, “We knew the, you know, the strategic implications of being permanently present in Haditha and how badly the insurgents wanted us out of there.”
… The documents also show that derailing enemy propaganda was important to senior Marine commanders, including Col. Stephen W. Davis, a highly regarded regimental commander under General Huck, who played down questions about the civilian killings from a Time magazine reporter last year, long after the attacks and the civilian toll were clear to the military.
“Frankly, what I am looking at is the advantage he’s giving the enemy,” Colonel Davis said of the reporter, Tim McGirk, whose article in March 2006 was the first to report that marines had killed civilians in Haditha, including women and children. In their sworn statements, General Huck and his subordinates say they dismissed Mr. McGirk’s inquiries because they saw him as a naïve conduit for the mayor of Haditha, whom the Marines believed to be an insurgent.
Digby says this is “sheer, bureaucratic ass-covering masquerading as leadership.” And thus, “No wonder those grunts think what they think.”
Who to blame for all this? Frank Rich has some ideas -
Until there is accountability for the major architects and perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.
Richard Einhorn wants more specificity -
Well, yes, of course. But also, of course, exactly what’s meant by accountability is left unsaid. Well, here’s how to hold them accountable:
1. Impeach Cheney and Bush - not necessarily in that order.
2. Hand over Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Shulsky, etc, etc, to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.
But there is reality -
Think it’s gonna happen? Think any of it’s gonna happen? If so, I urge you to take a course in American politics 101 - and also get professional help - not necessarily in that order. But that’s what accountability means.
Now, gettting these people out of office, marginalizing the American extreme right - yes, that is doable and there are many encouraging signs. And don’t get me wrong - that’s gonna take a lot of hard, hard work and is no small achievement! But accountability - impossible. Even with Bush at half his current approval rate. Like it or not, the American government and public life doesn’t work that way. The murderous Nixon was pardoned, The murderous Kissinger not only was never indicted, he went on to earn a huge fortune and is thought by the MSM an honored statesman. Accountability’s a non-starter for America’s rotten Republican elite. If the Worst President Ever is a part of that rotten elite, then no jail, no indictments, no nothing. No accountability. Maybe a few scapegoats, but Rumsfeld? Cheney? Bush?
Never.
The question is, then, is accountability really all that important? Maybe it is -
Let’s put it this way. Once Bush stole his way into the White House, America entered a period of decline. Declining influence in the world, declining pre-eminence in science, and declining trust in international affairs. Some of this is normal and some of America’s decline is not necessarily such a bad thing. But a lot of it is very bad news indeed. Perhaps the worst decline is that last one I mentioned, trust that the American system will, at the very least, place major checks upon, the megalomania of mentally unstable executives. And here’s the nut of the problem:
Even assuming the next president makes Lincoln look like a log, would you trust this country if you were a foreign leader, knowing that not only had it enabled a George W. Bush to run the show but, worse, never held either him or his administration accountable for its serial crimes and failures? What - you think it’s gonna be easy to say it’s the dawning of a new era? Y’think the next President can just appeal to multiculturalism and s’plain away Bush? Like “it’s just our culture” to let monumentally incompetent and murderous fuck-ups get off scot-free?
So we won’t get a Mulligan it seems -
No. Until the Whole Sick Crew of Bushites is held accountable, this country will continue to lose influence and trust. It will mean that life for Americans who deal with other countries - that means all of us, Chucko, ’cause of the importance of our imports - will become increasingly more inconvenient. And the United States on many fronts, will continue to become less secure. It’s hard to build alliances with assholes. But, as cynics are quick to point out, it’s also true that when it comes to international relations, most governments can be best described as rectally empowered. The problem is that after Bush, if there is no “catharsis” as Rich delicately puts it - and there won’t be - many governments will conclude they’re still dealing with an unpredictable, incontinent, and explosive asshole which also happens to be the largest on the planet.
Some damage is permanent. Some things cannot be explained away. It’s best to worry about Paris Hilton, even if you don’t live in this neighborhood. The rest is too depressing.
