Active-Duty US Troops Become Outspoken Critics of Iraq War
A recent op-ed about the war in Iraq charged that upbeat official reports amount to “misleading rhetoric.” It said the “most important front in the counterinsurgency [had] failed most miserably.” And it warned against pursuing “incompatible policies to absurd ends.”
Five years into a controversial war, that harsh judgment in a New York Times opinion piece might not seem surprising, except for this: The authors were seven US soldiers, writing from Iraq at the end of a tough 15-month combat tour.
In books and professional journals, blogs, and newspapers, active-duty military personnel are speaking publicly and critically as never before about an ongoing war.
Respectfully, but with a directness and gritty authenticity that comes from combat experience - sometimes written from the battlefield - they offer a view of current strategy, military leadership, and the situation on the ground that is more stark than Pentagon and White House pronouncements.
Part of this reflects weariness with the war. But it also represents a shift in military culture where speaking up publicly is more usual and acceptable than in previous conflicts, experts say, thanks to changes in technology and society.
“This is the first post-Internet, post-digital-camera war” in which “the line between private lives and public lives has been blurred,” says Eugene Fidell, a former military lawyer who teaches military justice at Yale.
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), as long as uniformed critics do not speak or write using “contemptuous words” regarding the president or other senior officials, they are free to voice their opinions, notes Mr. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. “We’re a nation built on free expression, and it can get pretty noisy.”
Part of this criticism reflects weariness with the war, especially among those serving multiple extended combat tours.
“You could almost construct an equation to predict the rate at which dissension in the ranks will reach the public as support for a war sours,” says military analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a public policy think tank in Arlington, Va.
“I have to tell you as somebody who deals frequently with the military, there’s been a lot of disagreement for a long time about this war,” he adds. “It just tends to get expressed obliquely and in private.”
A May survey of Army soldiers in Iraq showed 45 percent with “low” morale compared with 19 percent who said their morale was “high.” The percentage of West Point graduates who quit the Army after their five-year obligation has more than doubled since the Iraq war began in 2003.
More and more, a vocal minority is also speaking out publicly - a far cry from the World War II era when, in order to keep his political conscience clear, Gen. George C. Marshall never even voted.
Earlier this year, Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling challenged his superiors head-on in an article in Armed Forces Journal.
The Vietnam and Iraq “debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps,” wrote the former West Point instructor and Iraq veteran who recently took command of a battalion. “In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions…. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
Acceptable target: the systemColonel Yingling’s target was institutional, not personal.
“He is going after the system - training, experience, the promotion system that produces mediocre generals because all the innovators get fed up and leave,” says retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a military analyst with the Friends Committee on National Legislation who fought in Vietnam and later taught philosophy at West Point.
Military sources in Iraq and Washington also voiced their criticisms on the record in “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq ,” Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks’s best-selling 2006 book, The blogosphere is filled with soldiers grumbling, not only about lengthy repeated tours but also about the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place.
Is all of this a good thing?
“In these times when so few have any personal experience of the military, it is good to have their voice in the public discussion,” says retired Naval Reserve Capt. John Allen Williams, a political scientist at Loyola University Chicago who teaches civil-military relations.
But some observers worry that active-duty personnel speaking out in this way begins to trespass on the constitutionally mandated civilian control of the military.
“The notion that the military defends democracy but does not practice it still seems sensible to me,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense-information website in Washington. “We have sufficient serious problems with civil-military relations without adding a politicized military as just another interest group.”
There are obvious reasons for not speaking critically of one’s superiors or the mission: harm to one’s chances for promotion as well as potential legal difficulties from going too far under the UCMJ.
But here, enlisted men and women may have more freedom to speak out since the “contemptuous words” provision applies exclusively to officers. The seven soldiers who signed the column in The New York Times are infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
“To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched,” they wrote. “Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the ‘battle space’ remains the same, with changes only at the margins.”
Enlisted men freer to speakHowever harsh the language, the soldiers’ status may protect them from military discipline.
“Enlisted men, so long as they ensure that they explicitly state that they are expressing their own opinion, can say anything they want, which is exactly what these men did,” writes active-duty Army Lt. Col. Bob Bateman in a blog at the online information-exchange and discussion site Small Wars Journal.
But he takes them to task for asserting that they have knowledge about conduct of the war which is “way above and beyond their positions.”
“The fact that they, like me, wear uniforms should not convey some sort of magic pixie-dust validity to their opinions on events way beyond their personal experience, just as it does not for mine,” writes Colonel Bateman, recently back from Iraq himself.
Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor
Jesus. Even the CSM can’t (or won’t) get it right. The constant references to a WAR are right-wing bullshit. It’s a ***** OCCUPATION and who is surprised by the fact that those who are occupied don’t much like being occupied or that immature, pissed-off, scared shitless soldiers shoot first and don’t even bother to ask questions later?
What did we say about civil war before we had one?
Remember when we said we wouldn’t stay in Iraq if it became a civil war? Remember how the neocons all agreed? It’s virtually the ONLY damn thing we could get the the neocons to agree with. I remember the arguments going into Iraq, and that was about the only point of agreement. Remember?
I don’t see how they can defend against it, they all agreed we’d never put you in a conflict you can’t win. Remind them of it! Beat them UP with it. They don’t have an answer.
Keep speaking up miltary! Remind them of what you were promised. Never stop fighting for what you were PROMISED by both sides and everybody in between.
Next will be an expose that these brave souls are realy insurgents in disguise.
Whatever the name - war, occupation, piracy - , our actions are still illegal.
The CSM negligently forgot to add the word ‘crimes’ after the word ‘war’. I am sure that they will correct it later.
NOT!!!
Perhaps the troops are finally learning there are trillions times trillions of deadly specks of DU in Iraq and Afganistan floating in the air. Perhaps they are now learnig the truth, that the government, the DOD, lied to them all about the dangers of inhaling nano-particles of DU and they don’t wish to inhale any and die from cancer at a young age.
Well unfortunantly, there are now trillions times trillions of deadly DU particles all over the United States also. If DU contamination is the honest reason to protest going to the Mid-East, for any, you may as well go troops, it don’t matter anymore. Just limit your inhaling as much as possible.
Wait until the troops are sent to occupy Iran…they will wish they were back in Iraq.
Hell, we can’t even handle Iraq with a population listed at 28 million (more like 22 million now after about a million dead and a few million leaving the country). How is our over-used military supposed to take on a country of almost 70 million? Shoot enough depleted uranium around the middle east like we have been doing and we won’t have to worry about any resistance, though, but our supposed friends in Israel will go down the drain, too. I wonder how they feel about that.
Most sevice members are buffalloed into thinking they give up their constitutional rights. Bullshit. But if you speak out you will probably pay. The military has a real herd mentality. I wish more would think critically. Seems to me that would make a more effective soldier. But the military, just like the rest of the gummint is going through one of it’s mad periods, as the brits would say.
The real test comes when they are ordered into Iran or the U.S. to fight enemies of the fatherland (oops) homeland.
I’m sorry troops, The celestial portents show me enormous tension between human rights and the controls of the authoritarians, when i take the tin-foil off my head, the extraterrestrials speak to me. particularly from 2010-2016. This will be a hugely trying phase for mankind as the world’s workers labor force governed by the secret masonic “new world order”,building a new pyramid, this time against the new tyranny of the pharaohs, global corporate masters. In 2020 there is a configuration that speaks to me of a true world coalition of ordinary people that replaces these power-bastions. they will be called TELEPHONE PSYCHICS. they will have 1-800 numbers. instead of thinking for yourselves you can call them. In other words there IS light in the tunnel. The bad news… I don’t see the egalitarian trends coming into dominion until around 2020, so we do have years of genuine tribulation between now and then. How many survive? Will there be war over oil, water or human rights? Will DU spread cancer rates? Will earth changes take many lives? All of these probabilities fall into a calculus NO prediction can entirely embrace. I can see the general ARC of those greater trends that have always acted as a mirror to the human condition”
This article is just an indication of how smart most military people are, they are about five years late. I will never understand mans infatuation with violence and murder. Will we learn or kill ourselves?
Dude, put the foil hat back on! Hey troops, live and learn, get back here so you can live and learn some more. Now once your back you can get this country back on its feet. Your the biggest patriot we need on our soil and you know how messed up things shouldn’t be. Do it! Our true stability is what your fighting for even if you might not know what that is, not Oil.
zooey2013- We will kill ourselves unless reverse brainwashing can be easily and quickly achieved.
Bush said its better to fight al Qaeda “over there” than “here”. But he is fighting “his own people” here instead. One day Bush will be lynched for dividing Iraq and dividing America. But in the process the concentration camps will overflow with innocent Americans.
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everybody have nice house parties this month of September and inform all your neighbors that we must not approve the 50 billion dollars for the continuation of the surge in Iraq- that will send a message - No more war!!!!
A sign at the LA drop in cent: “The best way to stop a bullet is with a job”.
We need to do what the US does best: Mashall plan around the globe. take that 50 billion and solve the global food crisis. ” A chicken in every pot”
Calling terrorists” enemy combatants” what a bunch of hype- they are just common criminals who need to be facing the rule of law. Good thing Gonzo got kicked out. Maybe we are figuring out that our laws based on the Constitution are just fine: No secret prisons- make it all public- convict criminals in open court or yes, let them loose! Have some guts.
Peacekeepers is what we need to build: soldiers with social services and police and law and order capabilities- that would not be high school drop outs.