A falling toll, but war hits home
Five years on the
violence has diminished, yet there is no end in sight. With Donald Rumsfeld long gone as defence chief, and a new commander installed in Iraq 13 months ago, there is a
consensus in the United States that the war that began with the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, is finally "
going better".
This is the equation: about 150,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed - but their deaths were measured only in the hundreds last month; almost 4000 US troops have been killed - but just 29 of them died last month.
It is a
crude measure of success, which in the past week has been challenged by a spike in civilian and military deaths. And it does not take into account an estimated 90,000 Americans otherwise harmed in the war: the wounded, the amputees and the mentally impaired.
The New York Times recently outlined another hidden dimension of the war when it revealed that 121 Iraq war veterans had committed or been charged with a homicide on home soil since their discharge.
The victims included a two-year-old girl thrown against a wall by her 20-year-old father, who was recuperating from a roadside bomb blast that severed one of his feet and "shook up his brain". While they may have exhibited symptoms of mental disorder upon their return, these veterans were not assessed for, or did not receive a diagnosis of
post-traumatic stress disorder until after the homicides.
The lessening of the toll, however, counts as success. Supporters of the war claim that the surge - the
additional 30,000 troops sent to Iraq in the first half of last year - is working.
Nine months ago there was a mood of impatience for it all to end. The conflict seemed out of control as, in three months last northern spring, 331 US troops died and more than 2000 were wounded. Since then, a series of protracted struggles during the electoral primaries, especially for the Democratic nomination,
a failing economy, collapsing home prices and an ailing US dollar have
distracted the country.
Even reaction to the tragic tales of traumatised returned soldiers seems relatively low-key. There is certainly nothing like the sweeping anguish that accompanied America's foray into Vietnam in the 1960s. But then the military casualties are a fraction of the official figure of
58,000 US troops killed in Vietnam, and the military now is a
volunteer force. With no draft threatening to draw the country's unsuspecting youth into a foreign conflict the direct impact of loss has been contained to military families and reservists.
And it may be this demographic reality as much as the broader political and military ones that explains why resistance to the war has been contained despite more than half of Americans opposing it (at least in principle). The US military no longer represents the broader society it is pledged to protect.
As well as having an
over-representation of black Americans and Hispanics (though not in the officer ranks), recruits are disproportionately drawn from the South and from society's middle ranks, says Professor David Segal, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.
"The top strata have pretty much excluded themselves. They have not joined," says Segal, the director of the Centre for Research on Military Organisation.
Unlike Vietnam's sometimes reluctant draftees, volunteer families are also less prone to protest. And less likely to be heard.
Meanwhile, suicide among Iraq veterans has become such a persistent issue that last November the President, George Bush, approved a suicide prevention law requiring mental health training for staff in the Department of Veterans Affairs and screening for veterans under care. Dozens of returned Iraq veterans have taken their own lives, and hundreds more are homeless.
The problem for returning soldiers is that they simply "don't fit" any more, said Jerry Donnellan of the Rockland Veterans Service Agency in New York. He said many homeless veterans lived isolated lives in rural areas.
"A good number of them don't want to make contact with people and they have the ability and skills to live off the ground," said Donnellan, who served in Vietnam. "People don't understand the gravity of what it is to take a human life."
He said it was common for veterans not to report mental disturbances on their return. Most wanted to return to normal life as quickly as possible, and also worried that admitting to psychiatric problems could harm their civilian careers.
One very visible factor that helped change the public perception of the war was the departure 16 months ago of Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's first secretary of defence, who had badly underestimated the task of controlling local insurgents after the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
In his book Daydream Believers: How A Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, the journalist Fred Kaplan describes a meeting in the Oval Office between Bush and a group of Iraqi exiles, among them a prominent academic at Brandeis University.
While the exiles were keen to see Saddam overthrown, they warned the President that toppling the regime might be the easiest part of the conflict. The government that followed would have to manage rivalries between Sunni and Shiite Arabs that would be reignited when Saddam lost his grip on power.
"[Bush] seemed not to have heard about the two kinds of Iraqi Arabs or the tensions between them," Kaplan wrote. "The exiles spent much of their remaining time with the President explaining these realities, but the lecture didn't seem to take."
Perhaps the refusal to understand and counter the conflict that erupted in the early years of the US occupation stemmed from this misunderstanding of the forces at work. The invasion, as conceived by Rumsfeld, did not include a long occupation since he did not think stabilisation was the military's job.
"Iraq and Afghanistan are similar in this way:
as soon as the government was overthrown, the US Government declared victory. This was a very apolitical view of war.
Wars are fought for political objectives and they are not over until the political objectives are won."
But the political landscape - and perhaps the political objectives - in the US are changing fast. If the debate about Iraq seems muted now, perhaps it is partly because Bush will soon follow Rumsfeld. Ordinary
Americans are biding their time for a new administration. They have reached their conclusions. Polls suggest two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of Bush's handling of the conflict, while 58 per cent say it should never have begun.
The question is
how to end it.
- Ian Munro
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/03/ ... 88709.html
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