Freesteel Blog » War non-stories

War non-stories

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:13 am Written by:

We’re beginning to see a slew of Iraq War movies arriving at the local cinema. They’re certainly much less romantic than the Vietnam War movies of the earlier generation where they had jungle landscapes, river boats, peasant villages, napalm explosions and 60s music.

The Iraq War movies are dry, very dusty city-scapes. Cities aren’t alive like the jungle, so when things are reduced to rubble, it stays that way. The main weapons are IEDs and bullets, and the occasional kidnapping. On an artistic level, much less to work with.

The Battle For Haditha is a slice of life, played completely straight. It tries to cover all sides of the story, and pretty much pulls it off. The source of the evil is laid squarely on the commander.

Redacted is a far more compelling film. Its title is not well chosen, but the story sucks on the horrible dregs of war. It’s personal, and the actions are up-front, deliberate, not accidental.

As one character says, “We can torture and kill these people; why is there a problem when we rape the women?” Invading armies have always, always done this, whether you like it or not, and nothing we have seen sets the US army apart. It is utterly predictable that after the first few soldiers have been killed, their comrades no longer see the enemy as human beings. They’re wild dogs that at any time will turn and go for their neck. At this point all things become possible.

So in these narratives of the life of a soldier, you see them get damaged. Over half a million young Americans have gone through this war, and many of them learn to hate the enemy, and they come back and commit suicide, or they beat their wife and family they used to love, or their life falls apart, and so on and so forth. All of these things happen. What they don’t do — not even 0.02% among them — is take on a vendetta against the leaders and commanders who sent them there.

I find this extraordinary and irrational. As in the past, and in this war in particular, there are certain named individuals who have been seen to make it up entirely out of whole cloth. By the back-breaking work and force of will, they have kept it going for all these years.

Take Donald Rumsfeld, for instance. He believes in numbers. Suppose human nature was thus that his adviser said:

Look, Rummy, you’re going to put half a million young men through training, where they’re all going to learn that killing people is a way to solve problems. Out of that number, 10% are going to have a life-changing bad experience. These boys are representative of society at large, so if the polls say that 20% of Americans believe that you are personally responsible for bringing about this war, that figures out at 10,000 young men whom we expect to have an experience that haunts them for the rest of their life, and they will blame you for it. Out of that number, 10% will take out a personal vendetta against you. They will carve your name onto a bullet in the middle of the night and keep it hidden to be used in the event they get the chance. And 1% of these people will be brilliant high-functioning individuals. They will have the skills that will be recognized, and they will be promoted up the ranks close to the level of general. Maybe they will get to be a general’s personal assistant, or the pilot of your plane, or even an adviser like me, and all the time they will have this secret — the burning desire to seek revenge against you personally. It will be what they live and breath for every single day. Ten guys like that which no one can protect you from, because they are completely hidden on our own side and have thought of it independently. Do you feel lucky enough for that?

Back in the good war, the one our politicians keep referring it to but with the roles reversed so that the territorial invaders and occupiers are instead the good guys, there was a assassination attempt on Hitler by his own Generals. This event is celebrated (by at least a dozen films) because it is so exceptional, while at the same time appears utterly rational.

The result is the question: “What tiny change in the human mind in the direction of rationality would have caused these assassination attempts against the leadership to occur about once a week, rather than once every ten years?”

Such a notion would have changed everything about society and war. It wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be about the odd inconvenient assassination in the middle of wars. It would be a fundamental alteration in the calculus.

You know, when leaders are planning their next atrocious action, they take a glancing note in history. And they’d take a little more interest on matters that may have some personal bearing. So, if history taught them:

When you do these war things, and a fraction of people whom you harm know that you have played fast and loose with the truth to send them out there, sometimes you get assassinated in circumstances where there is nothing any security apparatus could have done to protect you.

If this was so, they wouldn’t play this game. It would feel too dangerous for them. We know Rumsfeld sleeps well without a conscience for all those people who have died as a result of his hard and diligent work. However, why does he not fear a rogue element seeking rightful revenge?

It’s not a pattern you would predicted of a rational species.

Filed under: “hard-coded parameters of the human mind that will cause our eventual extinction”

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