Irregular Army

  The archives included a document sent by the embassy to London that detailed a day in the new president’s life. “It is not often we are permitted a glimpse into the personal lives of Iraq’s leaders,” said the letter to the Foreign Office, “so by way of introduction, I enclose a touching account of a day in the life of President Saddam Hussein.” Badly translated from Arabic, it read: “The early morning workers often exchange tales of how President Hussein surprised them at work site, how he chatted with them, smiled to them or asked them and listened to them . . . Tales full with love and admiration growing day after day in their hearts.” On January 1, 2010, the day the thirty-year embargo was up and the newspapers printed our articles, I went to my local newsagent and checked all the other papers nervously to see if I had missed any big stories buried in the documents. Luckily, there were none. Everyone looked to have found the same sort of things—except, funnily enough, the one about Saddam Hussein. My article in the Financial Times (headline: “Saddam Was Well-regarded by British”) was the only one that even referenced the documents related to Iraq. It was an example of our deeply biased reporters ignoring the ugly truth of what our government stood and stands for in the world. The British had, in fact, been honing their methods of domination for decades—methods copied by the US. They were spelled out quite clearly by Lord Curzon who, when installing King Faisal in Iraq in 1921, wrote that the British need an “Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff . . . There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.”28 Nothing has changed in the twenty-first century.

  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also had profound effects on the UK military, the only other country in the coalition fighting the War on Terror whose armed forces were stretched even close to those of the US, and the most generous partner in terms of providing troops. A high of 9,500 British service members were deployed to Afghanistan in 2009, while the Iraq war saw an initial force of 46,000. So far, 179 UK soldiers have been killed in Iraq and 407 in Afghanistan.29 For a country with a population a fifth of that of the US, it was a substantial commitment and the biggest military operation since the end of World War Two. The UK military experienced some but not all of the problems that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon presided over in the US, and the differences are instructive. For example, there have been very few reports of a proliferation of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the British military, although members of the fascist British National Party have joined up. Little substantial investigative work has been conducted on the matter and it remains an open but worrying question. The leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, has said that his party is popular among British soldiers. “I’m the one who talks to the families of young squaddies and large numbers of ex-servicemen and they all say that almost everyone at the coalface, fighting in Afghanistan, vote for the British National Party,” he said in 2009.30 But gangs are considerably less prevalent in the UK and their members have not been enlisted to any worrying degree in its military. Likewise the rules on recruiting criminals were not tweaked to swell the ranks.

  Where the UK military did suffer was in the susceptibility of its troops to alcohol and drugs and the concomitant problems of PTSD. There was a fivefold increase in UK soldiers failing drug tests in the period 2002–8, although their drug of choice was different from that of their American colleagues.31 On the whole it was cocaine and ecstasy, with a move in later years to mephedrone, which is cheaper and more easily accessible. In 2006 the Daily Telegraph revealed that the armed forces had in fact scrapped, in secret, its policy of automatic dismissal for those caught using Class A drugs. The Ministry of Defence claims, like the DOD, that it doesn’t tolerate any drug use, but by 2008 it had allowed 1,300 drug users to stay in the military.32 Alcohol is not strictly banned by the UK military and it developed into a big problem during the War on Terror—one in seven soldiers reported being driven to alcohol by their experience in war.33 PTSD also became a big problem for UK soldiers, though dwarfed by comparison with the US. One study found that American soldiers were seven times more likely to get PTSD than their British counterparts. UK rates for PTSD stayed at around 3–4 percent during the War on Terror, compared to 30 percent in the US military. “PTSD seems not to be a ‘universal stress reaction’, arising in all societies across all time,” wrote Neil Greenberg, author of the study. “Evidence from both world wars suggests that the ways in which service personnel communicate distress is culturally determined and that the development of PTSD may be one more phase in the evolving picture of human reaction to adversity.”34 Perhaps the more important difference was the lack of health and rehabilitation services available to US troops as the military unraveled—something the UK didn’t experience on the same level. Likewise, German soldiers in Afghanistan had PTSD levels at 2 percent for returning soldiers.35

  In terms of the general physical condition of UK troops, the picture was not pretty: the only soldier whose death was officially linked to obesity was British. In 2009 a leaked army memo complained that thousands of British troops could not be deployed to Afghanistan because they were too fat.36 Operational readiness, the memo noted, was being undermined by the lack of fitness of British troops, who are required to do a minimum of just two hours of exercise per week. Unlike in the US, there’s no proof they stopped kicking out overweight troops. Homosexuals were already allowed to serve in the UK military before the War on Terror began, so that engendered no change, and tellingly no problems either. Foreigners—notably in the form of Nepalese Gurkhas—had fought in the British military since the time of the empire. The issue attracted a high-profile campaign when the British government refused to allow Gurkha veterans to live in the UK after service—a controversy similar to that which arose when the government had refused to let Iraqi translators and other workers in danger settle in the UK. The Gurkhas were joined by others during the War on Terror, although the regulations were not changed to allow more of them into the UK. Figures released in 2009 show that one in ten new recruits to the army were born abroad, three times the number in 2000. In 2008–9, 1,320 service members born outside Britain joined the military, compared with 540 in 1999–2000.37

  Heroes and Villains

  The majority of this book (excepting the heroic civil rights victory for gay service members) will have been a depressing and a sobering read for patriotic Americans and those around the world concerned with human rights and decency. But it has also revealed a heroes gallery of lawmakers, activists, active-duty soldiers, and veterans who refused to accept the degrading treatment that has been meted out by the military brass and their colleagues in Washington. Henry Waxman was one member of Congress who stood up to highlight the outrageous proliferation of felons in the military, while Marty Meehan tried his damnedest to pass civil rights legislation that would allow gays to serve openly. They were widely traduced and attacked at the time. Active-duty troops included Justin Watt, who alerted his superiors to the Mahmudiyah massacre and risked his life in order to see justice done for the family involved. He was mocked and ignored by the military initially but kept his steel. Then there are the kids of Bushwick, Brooklyn, who have fought valiantly against the de facto conscription the Bush administration imposed on the poor children of America by allowing recruiters to take over their schools. Private First Class Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the Wikileaks cables and war logs, is another. So angered was he at being ignored by his senior officers when he told them about the illegal activity he saw, he thought he had to do something about it—and changed the course of history at the same time.

  Unfortunately brave individuals like Manning have been the exception. There has been a concerted effort by the military brass and their political allies to ignore the problem or simply deny it even exists. In every case where the milit
ary acknowledged there had been a loosening of standards it was presented officially as a victory for democracy or civil rights—permitting older recruits, for example, confirms a commitment to non-discriminatory practices based on age. It was the same tactic as is used generally for US foreign policy: every action, by definition, has to be spun as altruistic. While finishing this book, the Wikileaks release of the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs gave the public an unprecedented look at the anatomy of those wars and the toll they had taken on civilians. I decided to check out the SIGACT (“significant activity”) reports related to some of the events I was writing about. It became clear quite quickly that although a vital tool in revealing the true brutality the war inflicted on Iraqis, the reports did not come close to conveying the true horror of what had taken place. One of the distinctive features of US war-waging, as in Vietnam, is that specific massacres and murders are held up by the Pentagon as unfortunate exceptions, the transgressions of a few “crazy” lowlife troops. The perpetrators are then made an example of. In Iraq, those massacres were Haditha and Mahmudiyah (and in 2012 Panjwai district in Afghanistan). In Vietnam, after the investigative work by Seymour Hersh, it was My Lai (an “American tragedy” according to Time magazine). The great lie, then as now, is that these are the exceptions when in fact they are commonplace. Cold-blooded murder, taking pot-shots at the locals: it’s all par for the course if you talk to veterans who have been at the sharp end of the conflict. In interviews published in the Nation magazine in 2007, veterans of Iraq described the true horror the invading army had inflicted on the civilian population. Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, the interviewers, concluded that indiscriminate killings were “common,” “often go unreported—and almost always go unpunished.”38 They were right. Even the atrocities that were reported had been initially hushed up by the US military.

  Take the case of Lance Corporal Delano Holmes—who stabbed his Iraq colleague Private Hassin to death while on sentry duty. He received a joke sentence handed out by a farcical court-martial system, but typical of the justice afforded to what was viewed as just “collateral damage.” How was the murder of Hassin reported in the log? One host nation soldier killed, it says. “Prior to an Iraqi guard post change . . . the Marine and the IA were arguing over the off-going soldier smoking in the post. Smoking is prohibited inside the post due to the enemy sniper threat,” it begins, as if excusing what is to come. “The arguing changed to shoving each other at which time the oncoming Iraqi soldier arrived and joined in the shoving. The [redacted] of the off going IA was fired [redacted] times inside the post, at which time the Marine believing his life was threatened stabbed the off-going Iraqi soldier with a knife resulting in [redacted].”39 But at the court-martial, the prosecutors said Holmes had fired Hassan’s AK-47 afterwards to make what was a cold-blooded murder look like self-defense—the same lie reported by the SIGACT. In other words, the SIGACT is entirely misleading. The Wikileaks logs gave a glimpse of the horror, but only a glimpse. Behind every report, there was another world of truth obfuscated by the pared-down and tendentious military reportage. Often the truth looked more like that of the “kill team” in Afghanistan, whose reign of terror in Kandahar was made public in 2011. Twelve men were charged with the indiscriminate murder of civilians after they had posed for photos with the dead bodies. When one of the soldiers was asked by the judge what he had intended to do with the shootings, he replied: “The plan was to kill people.” Some of them were also charged with staging killings to make it appear as if they had been defending themselves against Taliban assaults. It is safe to assume that many others got away with this tactic.

  The reaction from the American public when such truths are revealed is always one of disgust, which is why the truth has to be kept from them. In 2004 about three-quarters of the US population believed it was not right to invade Iraq if it had no weapons of mass destruction or links to Al-Qaeda. But nearly 60 percent still believed Iraq had WMDs, or programs for them in development, and links to 9/11, thanks to the Bush administration propaganda (and a pliant media).40 The national press parroted the lie that these wars needed to be undertaken for our own protection. The opposite was the case. A classified US intelligence report Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States revealed the huge effect the war in Iraq had on increasing Islamic radicalism and spreading it to a new generation of young Muslims who would now be more likely to attack Western targets. In Britain, a report by the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre—composed of officials from MI5, MI6, Government Communications Headquarters, and the police—stated that “events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.”41 The amount of money spent in the twin occupations has also helped to bankrupt America. The esteemed economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that all-told the war in Iraq alone will end up costing in total $3 trillion.

  I hope reading this book will rouse that anger, because the veterans and the occupied populations deserve the truth to come out at the very least. The FBI and other investigative bodies outside the US military—like the GAO—have been alive to the problems of the Irregular Army and done important work to address them. For the military itself, however, it has been too painful to look into the mirror; no one will ever know the number of personal tragedies on both sides this dereliction of duty has caused. It is a national and international scandal. The benefits of empire are always unequally distributed at home—benefits that come to the imperial country as a result of war and occupation are generally concentrated among the economic elite. In the US there remain very sharp differentials in income, and the polarization of wealth and poverty as a result of imperialism got worse during the War on Terror. When foreigners look at the US, they see the riches, but they tend not to see the other side. The recruitment for the Irregular Army preyed on this other side—the most vulnerable and poor Americans—while the financial benefits of their sacrifice filtered back to the rich and powerful.

  Using the Military

  The US is at a crossroads. After the trauma of September 11, the biggest ever attack on its homeland, it was taken on a dangerous, violent, and reckless journey by a group of nationalist extremists. It is getting sicker as the wars continue to consume the nation, but it’s not terminal. With the will and fortitude of the American people, there can be a reckoning with the forces that have destroyed so many lives in both the US and the Middle East. According to some estimates, over a million Iraqis died as a result of the invasion, while Afghanistan is poorer than ever and sees little hope of redemption (we don’t keep count of the number of people we kill). But as I write this at the turn of 2011, 4,408 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the invasion, and 1,339 have perished in Afghanistan, while all the issues raised in this book are alive as ever and continue to blight the US military. ­As we move on to new “theaters of conflict” like Iran we need to look unflinchingly at what we’ve done and who we’ve destroyed in process. The lives lost will be in vain unless the truth of what was done to both military service members and the occupied populations enters the historical record unvarnished. The people who did this to us, to them, must face their crimes and their victims: the veteran who has just committed suicide after being denied treatment for PTSD; the Afghan children murdered in their beds by drugged-up airmen; the next generation ravaged by military-trained gangs and neo-Nazis in American cities. And they must look into the mirror and accept it was all a huge mistake: for history has shown that imperial hubris and the degradation of the fighting force only ends one way.

  Amid the possibility of a ground force intervention in Libya in early 2011 and continued troop increases in Afghanistan, a split emerged between the Obama administration and the Pentagon over how large the US army should be and what it should be capable of in the future. In a debate which mirrored closely what happened in the build up to the war in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates publicly said that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again se
nd a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”42 He added that large-scale conflicts with other big countries will likely be fought mainly with air and naval forces. But as he made those comments during a lecture to future army officers at West Point, the soon-to-depart army chief of staff, General George Casey, pointedly cautioned against the “hollowing out” of the armed forces after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan come to an end.43 Whichever school of thought wins out will define American expansionism over the next century. In January 2012, Obama seemed to side with Gates. Recognizing the dreadful toll the Irregular Army had taken on the US, in terms of both its soldiers and its ability to project power, Obama outlined a historic change in direction for the military, specifically moving towards a “leaner” military force and away from the troop-heavy ground warfare which defined the War on Terror. He said he wanted “smaller conventional ground forces,” which reflected his abandoning what he called “outdated cold war-era systems.” “Yes our military will be leaner,” he added, “but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible, and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats.”44 It sounded exactly like Donald Rumsfeld in 2001.

  The US is now profoundly aware of its waning power and how this could impact its future. “Owing to the relative decline of its economic and, to a lesser extent, military power, the US will no longer have the same flexibility in choosing among as many policy options,” concluded the National Intelligence Council (which gathers information from all US intelligence agencies) in early 2009.45 And this weakness will be exploited. Sun Tzu wrote: “When the weapons are dulled, your ardour damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.”46 There’s a healthy dose of irony in the fact that Tzu was himself Chinese, the country which is slowly challenging America’s role as the world’s sole superpower. “When the army is restless and distrustful, trouble is sure to come from other feudal princes,” he continues. “This is simply bringing anarchy into the army, and flinging victory away.”47 An anarchist’s distrust of bureaucracy and state power is an apt description of Rumsfeld’s attitude towards the military.