Still Hard to Comprehend the Brutality of What the US Has Done in Iraq

Michael Massing:

How can such a critical feature of the U.S. occupation remain so hidden from view? Because most Americans don't want to know about it. The books by Iraqi vets are filled with expressions of disbelief and rage at the lack of interest ordinary Americans show for what they've had to endure on the battlefield. In "Operation Homecoming," one returning Marine, who takes to drinking heavily in an effort to cope with the crushing guilt and revulsion he feels over how many people he's seen killed, fumes about how "you can't talk to them [ordinary Americans] about the horror of a dead child's lifeless mutilated body staring back at you from the void, knowing you took part in that end." Writing of her return home, Kayla Williams notes that the things most people seemed interested in were "beyond my comprehension. Who cared about Jennifer Lopez? How was it that I was watching CNN one morning and there was a story about freaking ducklings being fished out of a damn sewer drain -- while the story of soldiers getting killed in Iraq got relegated to this little banner across the bottom of the screen?" In "Generation Kill," by the journalist Evan Wright, a Marine corporal confides his anguish and anger over all the killings he has seen: "I think it's bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They're worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don't even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this -- all these women and children we're killing? Fuck no. Back home they're glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you."

"Generation Kill" recounts Wright's experiences traveling with a Marine platoon during the initial invasion. The platoon was at the very tip of the spear of the invasion force, and Wright got a uniquely close-up view of the fighting. In most U.S. news accounts, the invasion was portrayed as a relatively bloodless affair, with few American casualties and not many more civilian ones. Wright offers a starkly different tale. While expressing admiration for the Marines' many acts of valor and displays of compassion, he marvels at the U.S. military's ferocious fire-power and shudders at the startling number of civilians who fell victim to it. He writes of neighborhoods being leveled by mortar rounds, of villages being flattened by air strikes, of innocent men, women, and children being mowed down in free-fire zones. At first, Wright notes, the Marines found it easy, even exciting, to kill, but as the invasion progressed and the civilian toll mounted, many began to recoil, and some even broke down. "Do you realize the shit we've done here, the people we've killed?" one Marine agonizes. "Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison."

In an interview he gave soon after the publication of his book, Wright said that his main aim in writing it was to deglamorize the war -- and war in general. The problem with American society, he said, "is we don't really understand what war is. Our understanding of it is too sanitized." For the past decade, he explained, "we've been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation" -- Tom Brokaw's book about the men who fought in World War II -- "and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They've forgotten that war is about killing." In "Generation Kill," he noted, he wanted to show how soldiers kill and wound civilians. In some cases, he said, the U.S. military justified such killings by the presence of Iraqi fedayeen fighters among the civilian population, but, he added, "when you see a little girl in pretty clothes that someone dressed her in, and she's smushed on the road with her legs cut off, you don't think, 'Well, you know, there were Fedayeen nearby and this is collateral damage. They're just civilians.'" The "real rule of war that you learn -- and this was true in World War II -- is that people who suffer the most are civilians," Wright said. "You're safest if you're a soldier. I'm haunted by the images of people that I saw killed by my country."

As Wright suggests, the sanitizing of news in wartime is nothing new. In most wars, nations that send their men and women off to fight in distant lands don't want to learn too much about the violence being committed in their name. Facing up to this would cause too much shame, would deal too great a blow to national self-esteem. If people were to become too aware of the butchery wars entail, they would become much less willing to fight them. And so the illusion must be maintained that war is a noble enterprise, that the soldiers who wage it are full of valor and heroism, that in the end their intentions are good and their actions benign.

In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don't. In the case of Iraq, the many instruments Orwell felt would be needed to keep people passive and uninformed -- the nonstop propaganda messages, the memory holes, the rewriting of history, Room 101 -- have proved unnecessary. The public has become its own collective Ministry of Truth -- a reality that, in many ways, is even more chilling than the one Orwell envisioned.

Further compounding this tragedy is that 1) the Americans who have perpetrated these crimes the most, just don't give a fuck and will almost certainly escape any punishment, and 2) this horrible situation is not unique to Iraq, but is just another part of the long, dirty, hidden history of the US.