Salon writer takes IVAW at face value

Robin sent me a link this morning to a Salon article written by Chris Hedges entitled The real consequences when America is at war. Hedges uses IVAW members strictly as a source in order to demonize the troops and he borrows from our favorites like Geoff Millard and Camilo Mejía to make broad generalizations – mostly that our troops are a bunch of racists and borderline retarded.

We all know Millard’s line – every single soldier, Marine and airman in Iraq are racists because, as a general’s gopher, Millard heard one officer refer one time to Iraqis as Hadjis. Well, now Millard has expanded on that idea;

“The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you’re holding a duffel bag in each hand,” Millard remembered. “You’ve got your weapon slung. You’ve got a web sack on your back. You’re dying of heat. You’re tired. You’re jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then you’re scared on top of that, because, you know, you’re in Kuwait, you’re not in the States anymore … So fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can’t trust any of these f—ing hajis, because all these f—king hajis are going to kill you. And ‘haji’ is always used as a term of disrespect and usually with the F-word in front of it.”

Fear sets in, so the tiny-brained troops are susceptible to racism. That analysis from the super-intelligence of Geoff Millard, the guy who takes his Mom to a Code Pink Mothers Day protest. But of course, hedges finds others to play along with the racist platitude;

“A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want,” said Spc. Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. “And you know, 20-year-old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg, and we’re picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day for having a dirty weapon. But over here, it’s like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can — do you know what I mean? — we have this power that you can’t have. That’s really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food’s going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol, and to stay alive.”

I’ve heard that plenty of times from people who’ve never been in combat – that combat makes men into cavemen. So after you make guys pick up cigarette butts in Fort Bragg, they get a sense of liberation when you give them a gun and surround them with brown people. How very mature and enlightened.

To lend credence to Middleton and Millard, Hedges draws from a book about Poles rounding up and shooting Jews in the woods during World War II;

  Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they “were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken.” They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, “but they needed no encouragement in that direction.”

Of course combat operations in Iraq are just like shooting Jews in Poland in 1940. Nice.

Mejía condemns the US troops because they were disrespectful towards Iraqi toilets;

Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be “sh-tting like dogs.”

Even in their privies Arabs weren’t safe from American racism. Sigh. Mejía continues with his odd recollection of how he tortured prisoners for weeks during the 24 hour period he was near prisoners. Of course, Hedges neglects to repeat the chronological error – artful editing on his part.

Then, Hedges makes a flight of fancy to elevate himself above all of the war-making from which he benefits mightily;

 We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chests for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak, and rule. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.

I’d say Hedges made his heroes out of clay. Millard, Middleton and Mejía are drooling morons whose only claims to fame is their sociopathic tendencies to avoid their duty and stand up for their fellow soldiers. In every decent recollection of life among soldiers, one truth always emerges – warriors stand with each other, even among enemies.

Millard, Middleton and Mejía have, at every opportunity, done their level best to disparage and mistreat their fellows, their accomplishments and their memories. Yet Hedges and the other pretend intellectuals hold these goobers as heroes to their nihilist cause. Where’s Hedge’s contrasting image of the truth of what’s happening in Iraq? Where’s the fact that none of these IVAW icons have been in Iraq in the last three years so what could they possibly know about the war there now?

What’s wrong with this picture?

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Phony soldiers, Politics