One of my best friends from the Army just returned from Iraq and when I asked him about what it’s like, he said:
“The people over there aren’t all bad – the insurgents are animals. They only understand power. They only understand pure unadulterated power and they only respect people that show and use their power.”
In the movie Hearts and Minds:
* a returning POW gives a talk at a school and says the Vietnam is a beautiful country, except for the people (the Vietnamese)
* General Westmoreland makes the claim that Asians have no real concept of a valuing a human life: this is edited against footage of a Vietnamese soldier’s mother at her son’s funeral, wailing and screaming as she tries to follow his coffin into the grave
* the parents of a Harvard graduate, by all accounts a young man with a lot of promise, tearfully discuss his death in a helicopter crash, saying they trust President Nixon (this was all done before his resignation)
* and the well-known still image of the Vietnamese prisoner being shot in the head is in there, but not as a still: the whole sequense is there.
There are many other scenes and vignettes that underscore this completely botched misadventure, but what sticks with me is the dehumanization, the “nuke ’em back to the Stone Age” comments. Where the hell does that come from? It’s not like the brutal murder of Nick Berg took place in Times Square: it took place in Iraq, an occupied nation, with an undermanned occupation army that was sent into harm’s way without training, without body armor, without enough weapons, all in the name of a snipe hunt in which only a few delusional zealots still believe.
Dehumanizing a people who never asked for what they’re getting is beyond arrogant, beyond imperial. Are the “insurgents” ruthless? Are they willing to stop at nothing? If we treat them like animals, we had better be prepared to fight them on those terms.
Given that they’re acting in hopes of liberating their country from the so-called liberators, is anyone surprised?
Whatever good will and gratitude the military earned by their swift and resourceful ouster of the old regime has been squandered by the armchair warriors who seem incapable of changing their minds and their strategies to meet reality. This is just a 3D game of Risk to them.