"The fellas from 121 started showing up the other day. It's starting to sink in... I'll have to go home, the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end. Like a hobby I'll never get to practice again.
It's not a great war, but it's the only one we've got. God, I do love killing these bastards. .
.. Morale is high, the Marines can smell the barn.
It's hard to keep them focused. I still have 20 days of kill these motherfuckers, so I don't wanna take even one day off. " -- letter home from an unnamed Marine F/A -18 pilot in Iraq.
The above letter arrived in my inbox via an email circular sent by an acquaintance of mine, a defense analyst and former congressional aide named Winslow Wheeler. It came alongside a pained commentary by another former Pentagon analyst named Franklin (Chuck) Spinney, who is probably best known for the famous "Spinney report" of the mid-'80s which exposed the waste and inefficiency of many hi-tech Defense Department projects.
Spinney's career followed the classic whistleblower arc; after sending his courageous Jerry Maguire letter on Pentagon waste up the bureaucratic flagpole, he was nearly buried by his own bosses only to be saved from ignominy at the last minute by the intercession of Senator Chuck Grassley, who invited him to air his findings in Congress.
Spinney ended up on the cover of Time magazine a week later and soon thereafter began a new career as a much sought-after expert on the inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Like another famous post-Watergate whistleblower, Karen Silkwood, Spinney ended up inspiring a Hollywood feature film -- although in this case no Oscars were forthcoming, as the key role in the lighthearted comedy The Pentagon Wars was played by Cary Elwes instead of Meryl Streep. Brutally, Kelsey Grammer also made an appearance as the film's heavy.
Now retired and living in the Mediterranean, Spinney briefly returned to the States and somehow got hold of the above letter by a Marine pilot involved in close air support missions in Iraq. Spinney's commentary about the pilot ran as follows:
Here is a "warrior" who brags about killing for killing's sake, but the people he kills are just spots on the ground that disappear in clouds of explosions. He describes the joy of war at a distance and sees nothing of its horrors.You won't find any descriptions of blood, broken limbs, trauma or destruction in this email. You won't even find reference to his own feelings of menace or fear -- not to mention their noble counterweights courage and esprit -- just braggadocio on the subject of killing. Of course, his targets are all insurgents: no sense of any human capacity for doubt on that point.
...
Hopefully, the man who wrote this ghastly thing is an aberration and not at all representative of the men and women in our military.
I searched the internet to see if anyone had anything to say about Spinney's commentary. There were only a few sites that mentioned it, but in he is predictably blasted by soldiers who viewed his comments as a betrayal.
"I'm surprised at Spinney's outburst," writes one. "I would have thought that as an AF guy, he'd at least understand the emotion of a fighter pilot doing a CAS mission. I've enjoyed Spinney's views on Pentagon finances -- maybe he should stick with his area of expertise.
"
"Spinney is pathetic!!!
" writes another. "I'm a grunt, we get paid to kill and we do a damn good job. America has kept Marines around for that fact, and not because we look incredibly good in our dress blues.
"
I'm always wary of these stories about American soldiers acting like hateful, mindlessly violent psychopaths in Iraq, -- from Abu Ghraib of course, to a chilling video of a pilot pointlessly wasting a huge crowd of what appear to be civilians in Fallulah ("Oh, dude!" the pilot chuckles, after the explosion appears to kill dozens), to a gang of squids in the Gulf who lined up on an aircraft carrier deck in a formation that "Fuck Iraq," to soldiers running over a cab driver's car with a tank of looting a few pieces of wood to stories about the use of napalm in Tallulah, and so on.
It's not that I don't believe these stories, and not that I don't want to hear them.
I'm just wary of sullying the debate over this war with a referendum on the behavior of young soldiers who have been placed in an impossible position, sent to fight in a strange and hostile place with no clear mission and no detectable strategy for securing peace or victory. In my mind, all the people in the Bush administration and in Congress and in the media who got these kids sent there in the first place have to be the first ones held responsible for whatever those kids do after being thrown into the fire. I just don't yet have the stomach to start pointing the finger at a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings who never should have been sent there in the first place.
But the letter from this Marine pilot is something different. What worries me about it is this unabashed glee in killing people from high altitudes might not be a psychiatric aberration, but an inevitable consequence of the entire structure of our economy, which is based heavily on government spending in the area of high-technology defense manufacturing. When Spinney focuses on this gruesome and bloody letter from a single Marine pilot, he's not ripping an individual soldier but showing graphically how the tail has, by now, wagged the whole dog -- how a society whose economy is based on hi-tech defense spending will first tend to gravitate inexorably toward hi-tech defense solutions to policy problems, and then over time will raise whole generations instilled with an implicit belief in and enthusiasm for such lunacies as the "surgical strike.
" Here's how Spinney put it:
We all know that the American Way of War is to use our technology to pour firepower on the enemy from a safe distance. Implicit in this is the central myth of precision bombardment that dates back to at least to the Norden Bombsight in World War II ... Of course this is all hogwash, as the conduct of the Iraq War has proven once again. Real war is always uncertain and messy and bloody and wasteful and accompanied by profound psychological and moral effects.
But these preposterous theories are central to the American Way of War, because they justify the maintenance of a high cost hi-tech military which is so essential to the welfare of the parasitic political economy of the military-industrial-congressional complex that is now seamlessly embedded in our political culture.
The reason I'm even writing about Spinney's letter this week is that we're now just seeing come into focus the first outlines of the rhetorical parameters for the 2008 presidential campaign. Among other things, I'm seeing a lot of TV commentators pound home the theme that the Democratic party needs to shed its reputation for "pacifism.
" An article I saw about Rudy Giuliani last week saluted the former mayor for being sensible on Iraq without being a "peacenik." After four years of Iraq, we still can't talk about peace in public! This evil bullshit has been buried in the commercial media's descriptive campaign language seemingly forever by now, but it may be time -- in the wake of this Iraq disaster -- to start thinking about where it comes from and what effect it may have on the national psyche.
I believe that Marine pilot is driven by the same forces that render the presidential candidacy of someone like Dennis Kucinich impossible in America. A country that feeds itself through the manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them.
If that's true of us, and I think it is, our troubles won't be over even if someone brings the Iraq war to an end. We'll be treating the symptom and not the disease. And the reason our elections are a sham is that the disease is never on the table.
Excepting the occasional Kucinich, no one in either party is interested in trying to change who we are, no matter how sick we become. in our 200-odd year history, even imagining peace is a real stretch both for politicians and for citizens.
As to the comments about the relative size of direct expenditures on military activities: budgets miss the point.
In a militaristic culture, the threat of force accomplishes several "trickle down" effects: debt, interest on that debt, distraction from possible solutions to real domestic problems, and the politicization of policy around circular reasoning about "cutting and running." The result is a climate of stagnation of ideas, pointless "debate," and an opening to authoritarianism. Militarism as foreign policy devolves into armed robbery, coercion, protection rackets on a global scale, and the invitation of a tool--the "defense and intelligence" establishment--into the policy making arena.
What was supposed to be merely a tool becomes an end in and of itself.
Matt opens up probably the most important question we can ask today: why can't peace be talked about openly, not merely as a temporary status (i.e.
, as the condition we experience between acts of aggression), but as a desirable and necessary condition for human existence? I'd expand that question somewhat to include the relative absence of any concept of justice from public discourse.
I don't know that the "why" in either case is simple, but two possible answers jump out at me: first, if we used the condition of peace or the test of justice to interrogate our actions, the very "business" of our corporations and our "leaders" would be jeopardized.
If, for example, Congress or the Unitary Executive, had to consider doing something other than making war, propping up corporate profits, and attempting to control other counties, what would be left to them to do? They have been so adept at this for so long that they clearly have no other skills. They have no imagination for other tasks.
To require politicians and bureaucrats to change focus is to make their job descriptions change so fundamentally that they'd be at a loss as to what to do next. Social welfare? Diplomacy?
Wise fiscal management? They're simply not schooled in the work of governing beyond the ad hoc "arts" of organized crime.
Secondly, to talk about peace (and justice) openly would open up that historical can of worms: "What is to be done?
" If you take the radical step of entertaining ideas of peace and justice, other forms of social, economic, and political organization fall onto "the table." And, at that point, we get to talk about socialism, a discussion that would never do, would it?
Point me to a fully capitalist society that doesn't see its military as an economic tool, please.
Even the EU gets to shore itself up with alliances such as NATO. But citizens of the EU at least have the possibility of social justice (although that window seems to be rapidly closing for many), and I think this is in part true because they've experienced military defeat. Having lived through the misery that total war necessarily brings, they've been forced to "talk about peace" out in the open, even while allowing the US to act as proxy shock troops.
I can't bring myself, yet, to hope for a military disaster to bring even the subject of peace into our consciousness, but I would hope that our "leaders" might consider that they probably won't win them all (abroad) and that they can't continue to lose at home. I've always observed and maintained that Amerika is a soldier-cult. Period.
That we cannot talk peace in public today is not new. It's only more virulent.
You cannot teach peaceableness to a cult-ure that cannot even imagine what peace actually is.
Just as you cannot train a soldier as a soldier and expect him to be a warrior in the modern budo tradition. Unfortunately we were a solider-cult, now we are a soldier-cult-on-crack and that's beyond the point of no return. This is the inevitability of nation-states and why we have to throw out the bullshit of the past that has proven itself incapable of "reform" and repair.
We must start all over.
As for speaking peace in public. It's long past time to do it fearlessly and often and shame publicly those for whom doing so is treason.
We have a whole cult-ure to deprogram here. To be honest, some of your recent articles have been long-winded, ranting, and unfocused.
This one gets back to why I started reading your column: edgy, blunt, direct, different.
..A refreshing break from a lot of the group-thinking, PC stuff.
Peace is indeed a dirty word in this country. No politician will be caught dead using it. No one can really doubt that the self-interest of the oil (they make outsize profits from oil-flow disruption) and military (Haliburton is only one example of a company that makes money from perpetual war) industries are partly driving the irrationality of war.
That, and the fact that the current politicians-in-power have specific interests in those industries.
Also, the war resources are disproportionately directed to middle America, and the heartland, which many of us "lefties" imagine is the roost of evil in this country (Republicans, religiosity, gun nuts, low-levels of intelligence and academics), supports the corporate welfare and wealth transfer that is the Iraq war.
Imagine the billions redirected toward health, medicine, technology, and social services.
The quality of life of Americans is sacrificed to fund war, and to enhance the wealth of Republicans in power. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been murdered to support the American economy and make special interests rich. I am writing to you for help.
It appears that democracy has utterly failed in the U.S. The majority of Americans are against the Iraq war and want our troops brought home , yet even after the virtual referendum on the war (2006 election) that radically changed the makeup of congress , our ‘representatives’ are unable to pass even a wimpy non-binding statement against the war.
i. Revenge for 9/11: None of the hijackers were from Iraq and there is no credible evidence that Saddam had anything to do with it although corporate media misinformation confuses many.
ii.
To Protect the U.S. from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD): There is no evidence of Saddam’s missing WMDs.
Ironically the U.S. has the most weapons of mass destruction including --- 9,962 nuclear warheads (enough to destroy humanity several times over via nuclear winter ), and vast stockpiles of internationally illegal chemical/biological weapons.
This does not even include weapons such as those currently contaminating Iraq with toxic and radioactive “depleted uranium”.
iii. Toppling Saddam to bring Iraq democracy.
Historically the U.S. has supported Saddam when he served our purposes.
The current Iraq regime is considered a puppet in the Middle East. Ironically we barely function as a democracy as corruption breads apathy. We are paying the price for corruption via no bid contracts to the likes of Cheney’s company, Halliburton.
The truth is America has become a corrupt empire through the ‘military-industrial complex’ . We account for ~1/2 of world military expenditures. The Pentagon owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the U.
S. and its territories. We spend $200 million each day in Iraq, $ 404 billion to date , and a trillion dollars is estimated to finish it.
We do not have this money – we put our children in debt to fund this war.
Iraq has an enormous stockpile of oil – oil that the entire global economy is dependent on . The war really is all about oil and our control of it .
The troops suffer the consequences of our oil addiction : 3,161 Americans have been killed and a staggering 23,417 Americans have been wounded in Iraq. Although more Americans have died in Iraq for fake retribution for 9/11 than in 9/11 itself , this toll on human life pales in comparison for the death toll among Iraq’s civilians: 655,000
Life in Iraq now is simply dismal– violent, insecure, and worse than under Saddam . Iraq is occupied by a foreign military that continues to commit atrocities, war crimes, and torture.
Not surprisingly, the Iraqi people hate us. In fact, partaking in this illegal war of aggression has turned the international community against us . Most alarmingly, it has actively forced people to become terrorists.
Terrorism has expanded 700% since the invasion of Iraq . Terrorism is simply a method of warfare or a tactic – you can not win a ‘war against a method’.
Continuing the Iraq war is clearly insanity.
Please ask yourself “How can I stop the Iraq war?” and then – do it! I've always maintained that if the US spent as much on Peace and Justice as it does on Defense, we might not need a Military.
Tehran Delegation Returns Stressing Talks Between the U.S., Iran
WASHINGTON (RNS) A delegation of 13 U.
S. Christian leaders who recently traveled to Iran to help defuse tensions over Tehran's nuclear ambitions will meet with members of Congress next week to discuss their trip.
"Our governments have not spoken for 30 years," said the Rev.
Jeff Carr, of Sojourners/Call to Renewal. "We think that beginning dialogue and paving the way for mutual respect and peaceful relations is really something that needs to happen, and religious leaders could play a significant role in that."
During the Feb.
17-25 trip, the group met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, members of parliament and local religious leaders.
The trip was organized by the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. Others participating include Sojourners/Call to Renewal; the Episcopal, Catholic and United Methodist churches; the National Council of Churches and Pax Christi USA.
In the meeting with Ahmadinejad, the delegation spoke about topics including the role of religion in easing conflict, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During the 2 1/2-hour discussion, the president told the group that Iran has no intention to acquire or use nuclear weapons, according to the delegation's statement. He also advocated solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through political rather than military means.
Carr said members of Congress from both sides of the aisle encouraged the religious leaders to make the trip. "I think they understand the tensions between (Iran and the U.S.
) need to somehow be resolved peacefully, that war is not the answer," Carr added.
Jim Winkler, general secretary of the United Methodists' Board of Church and Society, said the group will stress the need for dialogue with Iran when they meet with members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"There have to be talks," Winkler said.
"The president's statement that he will not speak to somebody that doesn't meet his standard of behavior is just not a realistic or appropriate way to deal with the situation."
"I think there's no one better to extend the olive branch of peace than the followers of Jesus Christ," he added, "so I felt like I was really carrying out my responsibility as a disciple of Jesus when I traveled to Iran." “…There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial mysticism.
The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one's desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection…
… A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes mild but necessary rules upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties.
…On most people the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the symbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden of adulthood.
They continue to direct industry and government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants of society, or something greater than they — the State.
…The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together.
And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your definite action and ideas.
…In this great herd machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push toward military unity.
Any difference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse toward crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and the Government, backed by the significant classes and those who in every locality, however small, identify themselves with them, proceeds against the outlaws, regardless of their value to the other institutions of the nation, or to the effect their persecution may have on public opinion. The herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and war enterprise becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.
”
On THAT DAY we call 9/11 3,000 innocent people died and Bush responded with his 'war on terror' which has effectively TERRORIZED the world
As of Jan 1, 2007, John Hopkins School of Public Health has reported:
22,000 are permanently maimed
654,000 Iraqi civilians are dead.
UN health care workers states the war in Iraq has created "a lost generation of traumatized children."
UNICEF officials estimate 840,000 children in Gaza bear the consequences of Israeli shelling and other attacks and suffer PTSS, severe malnutrition and other diseases.
"One may oppose capital punishment as retaliatory brutality but still wonder if the Bush administration and its Israeli allies will also be held accountable for their crimes."-page 9, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2007.
Your Marine flyer, much to his apparent regret, will be back among us soon, his war over, his opportunity to do murder gone.
We spent a tidy portion of our tax dollars training him to be a psychopathic killer and soon he will walk among us, with access to weapons as easy as access to chewing gum. Even if he tries to obtain help for his PTSD (unlikely given his gleeful accommodation of his deep pathology), he'll probably end up enjoying the tender mercies of the pysch unit at Walter Reed, again at our expense.
No doubt when he cracks and mows down some bystanders at a shopping mall, somebody will find a way to blame it on the "liberals".
..
Anybody still wondering "why they hate us"?
Foreign Corporations-governments are sucking up these united States, Constitution and bill of rights and creating a North American Union. www.americapolicy.
org
Our countries Canada, Mexico, and U.S. will have the borders erased and a new ruling body will enslave the people.
It is designed by the International Bankers and Corporations and signed into agreement on March, 2005 by Pres. Bush, Pres. Fox and Prime minister Martin.
Keep the focus on the Iraq people and when you wake up America will be 'No More.'
We the people of this U.S.
have been and are being lied to for over 93 years. Our money is not real and there is no law that requires citizens within the 50 states of the U.S.
to pay taxes on our Income or Labor.
Many thanks for this article. You exoressed my feelings, exactly.
I agree with everything you said, 100%.
Unless we get someone like Dennis KUcinich for president I don't see any hope that the US war, military, Industrial, killing attitude will continue. And america will never elect Dennis because he will be tarred by the warhawks and chickenhawks for his beliefs that america should be a beacon for peace.
It is quite interesting to me, having been raised a Catholic and taught that killing is wrong to see that the past and present popes have aligned themselves and even worse the entire Catholic Church with the party of war, the republican party since probably the days of Nixon. I know for a fact that this alignment most assuredly took place through Pope John Paul II who put Reagan in office via the Catholic voters. And the Catholic Church has maintained this alliance between it and the Republican Party and Republican presidents and Republican congressman ever since.
The selling or giving away of religion for political power is an abomination. It is amazing to me to note that Pope John Paul II is being fast-tracked for sainthood when he is nothing but a war criminal as are all the repugs and dems who support this endless killing, and i'm not a pacifist by any stretch. Strange as it may sound I think Gen.
Wes Clark would also make a good president. So far I like Gen. Clark, Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold, Sen.
Jim Webb and possibly Barak Obama as the best presidential candidates. We who want peace have to fight Catholics and southerners, most of whom want war. I don't think Jesus would endorse war, not even a little bit.
He was the ultimate pacifist and maybe someday I will also learn to be one. God bless you Matt for your thoughtful and very well written article, we need more americans like you. Ane we especially need more americans like you in the MSM.
Pray for the end of the rule of those who think killing is the right,proper and correct way of doing things. There is no doubt in my mind that the U.S.
has already crossed that line to a "permanent war economy." See: http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Permanent_war_economy
and decide for yourself.
We need to shift our focus to green industries, fom fighting eachother to fighting to save the planet.
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