The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Because the enemy is not limited by Western notions of war, the temptation arises among a stymied soldiery to bend its own rules. Following an atrocity carried out by French paratroopers that calms a rural area of Algeria, one soldier rationalizes to another: “ ‘Fear has changed sides, tongues have been loosened….We obtained more in a day than in six months fighting, and more with twenty-seven dead than with several hundreds.’ ” The soldiers comfort themselves further with a quotation from a fourteenth-century Catholic bishop: “When her existence is threatened, the Church is absolved of all moral commandments.” It is the purest of them, according to Larteguy, who is most likely to commit torture.

  Here we enter territory that is utterly unrelated to the individual Americans I’ve been writing about. It is important to make such distinctions. When Larteguy writes about bravery and alienation, he understands American warriors; when he writes about political insurrections and torture, some exceptions aside, he is talking about a particular caste of French paratroopers. Yet his discussion is relevant to America’s past in Vietnam and present in Iraq. I don’t mean My Lai and Abu Ghraib, both of which aided the enemy rather than ourselves, but the moral gray area that we increasingly inhabit concerning collateral civilian deaths.

  In The Face of War: Reflections of Men and Combat (1976), Larteguy writes that contemporary wars are, in particular, made for the side that doesn’t care about “the preservation of a good conscience.” So he asks, “How do you explain that to save liberty, liberty must first be suppressed?” His answer can only be thus: “In that rests the weakness of democratic regimes, a weakness that is at the same time a credit to them, an honor.”

  What kind of soldier can make the most of such limitations? Larteguy found his answer in the elite Israeli units of the mid-twentieth century, which were in turn a product of Larteguy’s own personal hero: Orde Wingate. Wingate is of paramount importance because of the way he confronted challenges similar to those faced by America in Vietnam, and again in Iraq.

  Larteguy writes: “The Israeli army was born of…that mad old genius” Orde Wingate and his “midnight battalions” of Jewish warriors, which included the young Moshe Dayan and Yigael Allon. “The Israelis would say of this goy: ‘If he hadn’t died, he would be head of our army.’ ” Wingate was a Christian evangelical before the term was coined. The son of a minister in colonial India, he frequently quoted Scripture and read Hebrew. In 1936, Captain Wingate was dispatched to Palestine from Sudan. For religious reasons he developed an emotional sympathy for the Israelis, establishing himself as “the Lawrence of the Jews.” He taught them “to fight in the dark with knives and grenades, to specialize in ambushes and hand-to-hand fighting.”

  Wingate headed to Ethiopia in 1941, leading Ethiopian irregulars in the struggle to defeat the Italians and put the Negus Negast (“King of Kings,” Haile Selassie) back on the throne. From there it was on to Burma, where he consolidated his principles of irregular warfare with his famed “chindits,” long-penetration jungle warriors, dropped by parachute behind Japanese lines.

  He took the name from the legendary animal—half eagle and half lion—whose statue graces Indochinese pagodas. According to Larteguy, Wingate was openly obsessed with a dislike of conventional armies that “used parades to transform its young men into automatons.” Instead, Wingate thought in terms of individuals, and believed that if he had the right young men, he could do more with ten of them than with one hundred of the conventional kind.

  Wingate would teach these select few “trickery.” That is, how to be assassins, how to ambush, how to get accustomed to broken sleep rhythms and brackish water for drinking, how to win over the local tribes. Larteguy’s famed two-armies quote, with its reference to “tricks,” was partly based on Wingate’s vision, forged initially in Sudan and Palestine, and refined in the Horn of Africa and Indochina. It was in Vietnam where Larteguy first encountered the historical figure of Wingate, whose warrior ethos would ultimately merge with that of the Green Berets in the early part of the Vietnam War.

  Uri Dan, a longtime Israeli journalist, a devotee of Larteguy, and an intimate of Ariel Sharon, told me that democracies of today, because of the existential threat they face from an enemy that knows no limits, “need centurions more than ever.” He’s right, but only up to a point. Take this story told to me by a Navy lieutenant at Annapolis who had commanded a SEAL team in Iraq:

  Time after time, the lieutenant’s combined American-Iraqi team would capture “bad guys with long rap sheets,” who were undoubtedly terrorists. His unit would hand them over to higher authorities, but after a few weeks in prison they would be released and go back to killing civilians. “The Iraqis and my own men saw how broken the system was, and some felt it was easier just to kill these guys the moment we apprehended them. After all, it would have saved lives. But,” he continued, “I told them, ‘Oh no. Here is where I have to draw the line.’ It was important to have an officer in charge who had studied ethics.” The enlisted chief petty officers of his SEAL team—reminiscent of some of Larteguy’s centurions, for all intents and purposes—were the finest men he had ever commanded. But they required supervision.

  A frustrated warrior class, always kept in check by liberal-minded officers, is the sign of a healthy democracy.

  As an early supporter of the war in Iraq, I like others have taken refuge in counterfactuals: all the bad things that might have happened had we left Saddam Hussein in power. Counterfactuals, if you haven’t noticed, have become a staple of conservative opinion pages.

  Indeed, the list of what-ifs is long and compelling. Just some examples: Had we not invaded, the sanctions regime against the Iraqi dictator would soon have crumbled, without the oil-for-food scandal being exposed. The French, Russians, and Chinese would have swept in with lucrative deals for Saddam, even as he restarted his weapons program. The arms race between Iraq and Iran would have grown fierce, with many, especially the Iranians, believing Saddam already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Israel would have been the big loser in this arms race, feeling less secure and consequently more trigger-happy than ever. Saddam’s grip on power would have surged with the price of oil. Drowning in oil wealth, Saddam would have, among many other nefarious deeds, increased his payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. In a larger strategic sense, the success of Saddam Hussein, an implacable hater of the West, in forcing President George W. Bush to stand down his troops and beat the sanctions, too, would have had a radicalizing effect on the entire Muslim world. He would have emerged as the new Nasser of the Sunni faithful, from Morocco to Pakistan, even as he continued to murder in desultory fashion thousands of people per month in his police state. As a footnote, sooner or later an American Navy or Air Force aviator would have been shot down patrolling the no-fly zones and paraded through the streets of Baghdad, thus providing immense propaganda value. Truly, a world with Saddam still in power is awful to contemplate, as I can personally attest, having visited Iraq several times in the 1980s, the worst years of Saddam’s tyranny.

  Yet, there is a problem with this line of reasoning: How do all these might-have-beens, as frightfully convincing as they seem, stack up against the very real, violent deaths of more than four thousand Americans and tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis, as a result of our invasion—not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war that could have been used to meet other threats to our national interests? To coldly state, without qualifiers, that these costs have been a price worth paying is to reduce foreign policy to the realm of inhuman abstraction. In any case, I don’t believe anyone making such a claim could pass a polygraph test. And I include President Bush in this category. His attempts to compare himself with President Harry Truman—a president whose decisions were also hated at the time he made them—have the air of desperation rather than of historical thinking.

  I am aware that the American death toll in Iraq is many time
s lower than that in Vietnam, and that aversion to casualties has become a feature of low-birth-rate, postindustrial democratic societies. But I am also aware that when I and others supported a war to liberate Iraq, we never fully or accurately contemplated the price that would have to be paid. Of course, it can be argued that the high human cost of the war was not a result of the invasion at all, but of the negligence that characterized the subsequent military occupation. But you could well make the case that such negligence was at least partially inherent in the hubris of the conception of regime change in the first place.

  Moreover, when you sign on to a war, you implicitly place your confidence in those who would carry it out. Thus, a character judgment is required. And events have shown how wrong supporters of the war were in this regard.

  At a far deeper level, as with many of life’s disappointments, you are stuck with the reality that you have, not the one that might have been. You can play the counterfactual game for all of history’s great junctures, and as enlightening as the exercise can be, it is still a game that doesn’t get you anywhere. It is where we are now that matters: overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Russians move methodically to re-create their former Soviet near-abroad in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and the Chinese continue to use the years of our Middle East distraction to become, in military parlance, a future peer-competitor.

  We are undeniably in a far better situation in Iraq today than we were in 2006. Credit for that must go to President Bush. He bravely, and wisely as it turned out, ignored the advice of almost the entire Washington establishment, surged troops into the country, changed his strategy, his generals, and his defense secretary. In this very limited sense, he might yet be compared with Truman. Iraq could well stumble along to greater democratic stability, leading not to a model state, but to a viable and nonthreatening one, which can, in the fullness of time, encourage liberal movements throughout the Arab world.

  Might one then argue that the invasion was worth it? From a purely historical perspective, perhaps. But policy is about the here and now. It’s about taking or not taking action based on a near- and middle-term cost-benefit analysis. To subsume policy making completely to long-range historical thinking is to risk constantly getting involved in grand schemes.

  Most fundamentally, does Iraq meet the parents’ test? Can you look parents in the eye and tell them it was worth losing their son or daughter over? As awful as it sounds, quantity matters here, for it says much about the scope of violence that is unleashed for the sake of a higher good. If there were, say, five hundred sets of parents you had to look in the eye, the answer might well be yes, it was worth it, given where Iraq is today and what might have been had we not toppled Saddam. But at more than four thousand and counting, the answer for years to come will still be no. Counterfactuals can take you only so far.

  Covering the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, I learned that most of the land mines that the Soviets laid were designed to maim, not kill. The Soviets knew that a dead body causes no tactical inconvenience. It only removes the one dead person from the field. But a wounded person requires the assistance of people all the way down the line who could otherwise be fighting. Likewise with the home front in a war. The dead leave an awful vacancy in the lives of loved ones, but those who are seriously wounded or psychologically traumatized can disrupt families and society more. Families of the dead can move on, as difficult as it may be, and as awful as it may be to say; the families of the seriously maimed, physically or psychologically, never can.

  Army Colonel Ross Brown, a squadron commander in Iraq, told me this story:

  After a suicide bomber killed four of my soldiers, my Command Sergeant-Major (CSM) and I spent a night picking up their body parts. I walked around one side of the blast area while my CSM covered the other side. An 18-year-old soldier walked behind me towing a body bag. As I came upon a limb or other body part, I would place it in the bag and move on to the next body part. After six hours of walking the blast radius, I had a full bag. Although I knew the soldier beside me was young, and even as I tried to protect the youngest soldiers from seeing such terrible things, I had to use him to assist me that evening. The next day I had him see a psychologist, and had him see one again after we returned from Iraq. However, less than a year later, I signed paperwork releasing him from the Army for post-traumatic stress disorder and long-term psychological damage.

  To be sure, the dead and the psychologically wounded of that terrible evening will have ripple effects upon their families and the larger society for years to come. And this is merely one story. Nancy Berglass, director of the Iraq-Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund, says “hundreds of thousands of active duty and former active duty troops are dealing with significant mental health [and drug dependence] problems that have not been adequately addressed.” In each instance of psychological disturbance, there is a story, perhaps as bad as Colonel Brown’s, behind it.

  The long tail of suffering that extends from the war front to the home front, and from dead and wounded soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen, to their wives and children, and to their children’s children, is statistically numbing and heartrending. Of the 2.2 million American troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, several hundred thousand have sustained physical and psychological wounds. The figures of 4,417 dead from Iraq and 1,368 from Afghanistan (as of November 10, 2010) are well known and oft quoted. But the physically wounded from both wars number more than 40,000, a staggering number, and roughly three-quarters of them have been wounded in a serious life- and family-affecting way. According to the Army Office of the Surgeon General, between 2001 and 2009 doctors performed 1,286 amputations, three-quarters of which were of major limbs.

  Then there are the psychological wounds, to which Colonel Brown’s story attests. Between 20 and 35 percent of deployed troops test positive for depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. More than 100,000 soldiers today are on prescribed anti-anxiety medication, and 40,000 are thought by the Army to be using drugs illicitly. At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug. The effect on wives and children is immense. There have been around 25,000 cases of domestic violence in military families in the past decade: 20 percent of married troops returning from deployment are planning a divorce. Problems in family relationships are reportedly four times higher following a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. In families where one of the spouses is deployed, instances of child abuse are 40 percent higher than the norm. In 2009 alone, 74,646 criminal offenses were committed by soldiers.

  In 2009 alone there were 334 military suicides. Marine Corps suicides are now 24 per 100,000, compared to 20 in the civilian population. Eighteen veterans a day die by their own hand. As for active-duty troops, Berglass says they are taking their own lives at the rate of one every thirty-six hours. These may not seem like such high numbers, but keep in mind that in the 1990s the Army and other armed services were touted as the most disciplined and psychologically healthiest sector of the population.

  Then there is homelessness. Homelessness is only partly a sign of insufficient financial means. At a deeper level it can be about the inability to cope with the complexities of modern life following a period of sustained trauma. Veterans for America estimates that 10,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are now homeless. During the Vietnam War, the number of homeless veterans exceeded the number of fatalities (58,000), and experts have told me that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming homeless at a quicker rate than those of Vietnam. One-third of the adult homeless population are veterans, even as veterans represent only 11 percent of the population.

  Furthermore, young male veterans of the Iraq War had an unemployment rate of 21.6 percent in 2009, more than double that of the general population. Foreclosure rates in military towns are running at four times the national average. Then there are the rates of underwater mortgages, in which the family owes more on the loan than the value of the house
. There are no adequate statistics for this regarding the military, but experts assume the rate is much higher than for the civilian population because war means deployments, and deployments mean moving locations at a quicker rate than in a peacetime Army. That, in turn, leads to more disadvantageous house purchases. I have heard stories of returning wounded veterans with amputated limbs who have trouble finding jobs and whose mortgages are in foreclosure or underwater. Though these stories may seem apocryphal, they make unmistakable sense given the other statistics. Retired Army Major General Robert Scales indicates that such statistics are central to what “land warfare does to a ground force.” Too few troops have been carrying too heavy a burden for too long, he told Government Executive reporter Katherine McIntire Peters. There was a debate back in the dark days of 2006, when America’s land forces were suffering their highest numbers of casualties, about whether Iraq would break the Army. Such numbers indicate that it has already done so, at least partially.

  Edith Wharton, in a somewhat obscure antiwar classic, A Son at the Front (1923), writes of war’s “jaded appetite,” of “the monster’s daily meal,” devouring all the “gifts and virtues,” “brains in the bud,” “imagination and poetry” of so many young men. But at least Wharton is writing about World War I in France, where there is an authentic home front to which the wounded and traumatized can return, where all of society is “swept” into the great effort, compared to which all else is trivial. So the hotels and households of the rich are “shrunken” and “understaffed.” Hallways in Paris are “piled with hospital supplies.” Every family has someone at the front: War is the subject of nearly every conversation. Indeed, the cruelest fate for the seriously wounded and those psychologically oppressed by awful memories is to return to a civilian society with distinctly other matters on its mind. For unlike the war Wharton wrote about, we in America famously constitute an army at war and a nation at the mall.