http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071016_dissent_from_the_front_lines/Dissent From the Front Lines
Posted on Oct 16, 2007
Arrest in Iraq
AP photo / Hamza Hendawi
A young Iraqi suspected of throwing a grenade at American troops is apprehended in Baghdad on Sept. 17.
By Robert Scheer
When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George Bush photo op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war has also produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought. First, a group of sergeants came forward, and on Tuesday it was the captains’ turn to speak out.
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If there was a draft, people would be in the streets demanding an end to this carnage, which now threatens to go on for decades. That is precisely what the neocon ideologues who got us into this mess built their fantasies on: a volunteer force, supplemented by hundreds of thousands of contractors (including 50,000 mercenary troops like those from Blackwater) and the purchase of largely irrelevant but highly profitable high-tech weaponry, although they forgot about simple armor for the troops.
The most fraudulent neocon claim was that pro-Western, even pro-Israel Iraqis, like their favorite, the now totally discredited Ahmed Chalabi, would police the country as surrogates for the U.S., and that Iraqi oil sales would pay for it all. The 12 captains, who worked with the locals, are very clear as to the forlorn outcome of that plan: “ ... many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq’s oil industry which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction.”
As for that other ongoing illusion—that we are turning power over to Iraqi forces we have trained—the captains write: “Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And ... corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we’re gone.”
Building an empire on the cheap and by proxy doesn’t work. If you want one, and of course most of us don’t, since only a few fat cats benefit from such imperial adventures, you need a vast conscript army.
As the captains put it: “There is only one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.” Enough said.
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