mwaw.net Blog

The anti-war movement can thank Richard Littlejohn for being away on March 20 when, in place of his usual hate-filled tripe, the Daily mail published this powerful article detailing US atrocities, its soldiers “fast degenerating into an out-of-control force consumed by drink, drugs, sex crimes and mental collapse”.

For America’s fighting forces, this is their darkest hour. The U.S. military, the most powerful fighting force on Earth, is facing a collapse in morale far more devastating even than that experienced in the toughest days of the Vietnam War.

The troops are bogged down in the occupation of Iraq, where they are trapped on a murderous front line in an urban guerilla war for which they had little preparation, and for which support at home has all but disappeared.

Faced with hostility abroad and indifference to the war at home, the soldiers are fast degenerating into an out-of-control force consumed by drink, drugs, sex crimes and mental collapse.

An appalling picture emerges from the daily headlines – the latest revealing that nearly one third of the injured coming home are suffering from the mental scars of war.

New figures show that of 104,000 who had sought medical help by the end of 2005, some 32,010 were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, drug addiction or alcoholism – three times as many, proportionally, as those who returned from Vietnam.

At home in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the latest military murder trial into an Iraqi atrocity has opened with the prosecution alleging that Staff Sgt Ray Girourd, of the legendary 101st Airborne Division, ordered soldiers to slaughter male prisoners.

The incident took place last May during a raid on a suspected camp of insurgents outside Samarra. Two soldiers have already admitted to the killings. They have been sentenced to 18 years in a military jail and will testify for the prosecution.

Specialist William Hunsaker and Private Corey Clagett say Girourd, 24, ordered them to cut the prisoners free, let them run and then shoot them down, covering up the crime by making it look as if the prisoners were attacking and died in a firefight.

In his defence, Girourd’s lawyers claim he was obeying orders from a senior officer, Colonel Michael Steele, commander of 3rd Brigade, to “kill all military-age men”. If that proves to be true, President Bush’s Iraqi adventure has brought America to an unprecedented new low of atrocity. So how has it come to this?

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the ‘haji hooch’ or ‘haji juice’, a locally-made, 90 per cent proof moonshine whisky regularly sold to American troops by Iraqi merchants and often smuggled into their bases by colleagues from the newly-formed Iraqi army.

It is swilled along with prescription drugs such as amphetamines, distributed by medics ordered to keep troops sharp for extended patrols and flight missions, and tranquilisers meant to calm nerves.

The American military, on ships as well as in army camps, has long been ‘dry’, with an official ban on all alcohol. But this has not stopped an Apocalypse Now-style dependency on drugs and booze in a crazed ’self-medication’ that gets only worse with worsening fighting conditions, tightening an already depressing downward spiral.

Figures forced from the Pentagon by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act make shocking reading: 240 of the 665 cases of military indiscipline in Iraq and Afghanistan involved drugs and alcohol.

Seventy-three of those 240 cases were the most serious yet known from these two wars: murder, rape, robbery and assault.

To get an idea of how deep into depravity some of these men have sunk, here is just one of the sex offences: in March, 2006, a group of men – again from the 101st Airborne Division – gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, and then murdered her and her family.

They had been manning a road block in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, and drinking ‘hajji juice’ supplied by Iraqi soldiers for most of the day.

According to the prosecution evidence presented when he was charged with murder in a civilian court, Private Steven Green planned and led the attack.

He and at least three others broke into the house after changing into civilian clothes. They forced two adult women and a man into a separate room, and then took turns in raping the girl, and were still violating her when Green went into the other room and began shooting.

He returned to the rape scene saying that he had “shot them all”, and then raped the girl himself before killing her with two bullets to the head. For all the murders, he used a Russian AK-47 rifle he had found in the house, and then casually dumped it in a canal.

Private Green, who was discharged from the army with a ‘personality disorder’, faces the death penalty.

In one case as long ago as May 2004, when President Bush was declaring ‘victory’ and the vast majority of Americans were still cheering him on, Private Justin Lillis got drunk on illicit whisky on his base in Balad, stole a Humvee and went on a rampage, shooting up a residential neighbourhood with his M16 rifle, before taking pot shots at the guards on the entrance to his own base.

Six months later, Private Chris Rolan of the Third Brigade got into a drink-fuelled argument with a fellow soldier and shot him dead with his 9mm service pistol.

Another remarkable statistic can be no co-incidence: a record number of women soldiers – as many as one-third of the total returning from tours in Iraq – are coming home pregnant.

Lyndie England, for example, the private who became the disgraceful face of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, photographed making sexual taunts at naked Iraqi prisoners, gave birth to the child of the ringleader of those disgraced torturers as she was about to be led off to a military jail.

There was already controversy over the role of women in combat as America marched to war in the Middle East. These figures suggest that the critics were right when they said that putting women soldiers on the front line would be a mistake.

But the women were never there on the front line because the Pentagon and White House believed in women’s equality; they were there because President Bush launched this most irresponsible war when America was chronically short of combat troops.

The draft ended with the Vietnam War, too loathed by American voters for any politician to maintain, and so did a great many of the attractions of life in the armed forces. America switched to the kind of lean ‘professional’ army long before adopted by Britain, but it did so with much less success.

By 2000, America was enlisting pretty much anyone its recruiters could drag in off the streets. First they filled the vacancies with women, promising ‘pride’ and education for jobs which would last a lifetime.

Then they dropped the academic standards. Then they even lowered the standards for physical stature and fitness.

The idea was that smart-bombs and technological superiority would win wars on the ground anyway. Small, fast forces of overwhelming technological might would secure the world for American freedom and commerce. Boots on the ground, whether worn by male or female soldiers, belonged to the past.

This policy failed, of course, to be replaced by the ’surge’ in extra troops, not to mention the everextended tours of duty by soldiers, thousands of them from the parttime National Guard, who never really expected to have to leave home at all.

But the worst aspect of all this is the scandal about the Bush administration’s treatment of its dead, wounded and suffering.

As any soldier will tell you, there is nothing so crucial as the treatment of casualties and traditions of honouring the dead.

This is sacred turf to fighting men: you are rescued from the battlefield at any price, you are mended if possible, you are honoured in death, and you take comfort from knowing that your loved ones will be cared for, come what may.

Did no one at the White House bother to read a little history?  History tells us why the Royal Navy built the first of Britain’s hospitals at Greenwich and why Lloyd George promised ‘homes fit for heroes’. America has just been waking up to the scandal of the Walter Reed military hospital, where returning wounded were left unattended in rooms while rats scurried below their cots and doctors cut down on pain killers to save money.

For years, the Pentagon has banned the taking of photographs of returning coffins, while President Bush has refused to attend funerals because honouring the dead was deemed bad for public relations. Already, there is a new crop of veterans joining the old lags from Vietnam on the streets of American cities, begging, robbing to support their drug addictions and lining-up outside the overnight shelters and the charity soup-kitchens.

It all points to another shocking statistic: almost one in three of troops returning from the Iraq and Afghan fronts in need of health care are wounded not in the body, but in the mind.

The younger the soldiers, the greater the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcoholism and drug addiction. This third compares with 10 per cent of Vietnam veterans – survivors of a war so far considered to have produced an unprecedented number of mental casualties.

The upshot of all this? If President Bush wants to know the full cost of his adventure in the Middle East, he must look beyond the bloody carnage in Iraq every day, to his own cities in America.

There he will see the shattered remains of many of the men – and women – he sent off to war and perhaps, just perhaps, realise what a dreadful mistake he has made.

Sami Ramadani, a member of MWAW’s steering committee, published this article in The Guardian on March 20, explaining how Britain and the US have encouraged violence and sectarianism in Iraq. We have taken the liberty of adding some links to reference key facts stated in the article.Two catastrophes have been in the making since President Bush and Tony Blair launched their war on Iraq four years ago. Both are epoch-making, and their resolution will shape regional and world politics for decades to come.

The first catastrophe relates to the political and moral consequences of the war in the US and UK, and its resolution is the urgent task facing the American and British peoples. The second concerns the devastation wrought by the war and subsequent occupation, and the lack of a unified political movement within Iraq that might overcome it.

Bush and Blair are in a state of denial, only offering us more of the same. They allegedly launched the war at first to save the world from Saddam’s WMD, then to establish democracy, then to fight al-Qaida’s terrorism, and now to prevent civil war and Iranian or Syrian intervention.

Four years after declaring “mission accomplished”, the US government is sending more combat troops to add to the bloodbath – all in an effort to impose its imperial will on the Iraqi people, and in the process plunging its own country into its deepest political-moral crisis since Vietnam. Under heavier pressures, Blair, the master of tactical subterfuge, is redeploying Britain’s forces within Iraq and Afghanistan, under the guise of withdrawal. He has long known that British bases in Basra and the south were defenceless against attacks by the Sadr movement and others.

Bush, on the other hand, is escalating Iraq’s conflict and threatening to launch a new war, this time against Iran. It is hard not to presume that what he means by an exit strategy is to install a client regime in Baghdad, backed by US bases. The Iraqi people will not accept this, and the west should be alerted to the fact that US policy objectives will only lead to wider regional conflicts, rather than to full withdrawal.

In attempting to achieve their objective, the occupation forces will escalate their war with the resistance forces within and north of Baghdad, as well as clashing with the popular Sadr movement in the capital and the south. The latter is, despite the ceasefires and political manoeuvrings, Iraq’s biggest organised opposition force to the occupation.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Iraq continues apace and its people are subjected to levels of sustained violence unknown in their history. Overwhelmingly, the violence is a direct or indirect product of the occupation, and the bulk of sectarian violence is widely known in Iraq to be linked to the parties favoured by Washington. For example, forces in control of the various ministries, including the interior ministry, clash regularly.

It is not difficult to see how this violence is linked to the occupation, for it has spawned a multitude of violence-makers: 150,000 occupation forces; 50,000 and rising contracted foreign “mercenaries“; 150,000 Iraqi Facilities Protection forces, paid by the Iraqi regime, controlled by the occupation and engaged in death-squad activities, according to the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki; 400,000 US-trained army and police forces; six US-controlled secret Iraqi militias; and hundreds of private kidnap gangs. Pitted against some or all of these are tens of thousands of militias and resistance forces of various political hues. In total there are about 2 million actively organised armed men in the country. There are about 3,000 attacks on occupation forces every month, while tens of thousands of Iraqis languish in prison, where torture is widespread and trials considered an unnecessary formality.

The success of the occupation’s divide-and-rule tactics and their insistence on basing the new political and military structures on sects, religions, and ethnicities is threatening the communal cohesion that was once the country’s hallmark. This is a factor in the absence of a united movement, capable of leading the struggle to end the occupation. The occupation has sown divisions where there were none and transformed existing differences into open warfare.

And is it any wonder that the long-suffering Iraqi people find themselves at an impasse. Try catching your breath after decades of brutal dictatorship, 13 years of economic sanctions and four years of an obscene war.

But even in the absence of a unified anti-occupation front, the resistance of the Iraqi people has managed to thwart the world’s greatest military empire. And there are signs of a mass rejection of these sectarian forces, and the possibility that public anger will translate into the very unity that is so desperately needed. Rage against corruption and the collapse of public services is sweeping the country, including Kurdistan. Similarly, the proposed corporate occupation of Iraq, disguised as a legal document to tie the country to the oil companies for decades to come, has reminded the population of one of the main reasons for the US-led invasion. It has also reminded them what a self-respecting, sovereign Iraq looked like in 1961, when the government nationalised Iraq’s lands for future oil production.

In an opinion poll released by the BBC on March 19, 86% of people are opposed to the division of Iraq. This and other polls also show majority support for armed resistance to the occupation. Four years into this terrible adventure, both the US and Britain must realise that it is time to pack up and leave.

Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam’s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

Arab Media Watch reports: Given the frequent media criticisms and depictions of Hezbollah instigating a war last summer that Israel did not want, Arab Media Watch is disappointed that the Guardian and Independent were the only British national dailies to report, on 9 March 2007, the revelation by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the invasion of Lebanon was in fact premeditated.

This confirms previous allegations of Israel preparing for a premeditated war long before Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and using the kidnappings as a convenient excuse to launch the invasion of Lebanon.

Such allegations were reported last summer by the New Yorker, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail, CNN and the BBC, among other media outlets. Further details are available here.

Certain columnists and editorials in much of the British media have suggested, during and since the conflict, that the blame lies with Hezbollah for instigating a conflict that would not have otherwise happened.

On 8 March 2007, the Israeli daily Ha’artez reported a leaked testimony by Olmert to the Winograd Commission, the body charged with investigating the 34-day war, in which he admits he first discussed the possibility of war in January 2006 and asked to see military plans in March.

Now that the matter is beyond dispute, AMW is discouraged to note that those who were so quick to lay the blame for war on Hezbollah have remained completely silent when Israel, the instigator, has owned up to its actions.