An article entitled A Soldier's Story was recently published in The Nation. It's written by Bill Edmonds, a major in the Army Special Forces who spent a year in Iraq training soldiers for the new Iraqi army.
It's an inciteful article, giving a very good first-hand account of a subject that doesn't get reported very often, at least not with such clarity.
There were a couple things that rubbed me the wrong way:
American soldiers now patrol the streets with extreme caution and quick reflexes. They have come to think that every Iraqi who runs a red light or does not yield is a terrorist. They shoot at or accidentally kill civilians, which then creates one more insurgent and three more insurgency supporters. I know this cause-and-effect explanation is simplistic for an immensely complicated situation, but you get the picture. I will never fault American soldiers for their actions and reactions; it really is dangerous out there, and no other nation could ever ask for such service and sacrifice from its citizens.Well, I will fault American soldiers, because they shouldn't be there in the first place. They are participating in an illegal and immoral war, and they don't get my sympathy just because they lack the courage to stand up and refuse to be a part of such an amoral waste of humanity. A good lot of American soldiers go to Iraq specifically to kill Arabs, so Mr. Edmonds' default portrayal of the killings of civilians as "accidental" is a cop-out in an otherwise lucid essay.
So what is the balance between taking charge in Iraq and/or abandoning the country? Our best response is to pull the American soldiers back and push the Iraqi soldiers/policemen forward as quickly as possible. I feel the urgency of this mandate as I type these very words on this small Iraqi base among Iraqi soldiers. As I told Ibrahim, the captured insurgent, "I want to leave your country. The only reason I stay here is because Iraqis are dying and you insist on fighting. All we want to do is to help."
Yes, the Arabs would love nothing more than to continue their killing, because that's what they do, while the noble white man comes in to tame the savages and bring civilization to a backwards people. I was surprised to read this, because up until this paragraph I thought this guy really "got it", but apparently he has a bit more thinking to do.
Notwithstanding the above, I believe this man to be sincere in his desire to "help" Iraq, but the basis upon which his hope is founded is a fraud and a farce. He seems to be struggling with what he knows to be the solution to the mess of which he's a part, but he comes just shy of embracing it, and that is to just leave Iraq, and let the Arab "savages" sort out the mess the Americans created. I think he'll be surprised. All his life he's been taught to believe that civilization started on the North American continent in 1776, but he forgets that it actually began in the very place he wants to "help".
Just leave. Sure, it'll be messy for a while, but things will sort themselves out much more quickly than if the noble and civilized Americans insist on sticking around.
Just leave.
P.S. It's naive to assume that the current chaos in Iraq wouldn't or couldn't happen in America if our country was raped by a foreign invader in the same manner that Iraq was. Hopefully, we'll never have to find out, but history has an interesting way of meting out lessons to great powers.