Blowback from A Bad War

[marmar]

BLOWBACK FROM A BAD WAR
Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2006-08-03 18:36. Media
By Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services

And where is it that the Vice Lords meet the Aryan Nation? Why, in Baghdad, of course - where, in one of the less obvious unanticipated consequences of W's disastrous war, potential domestic terrorists and "army of one" nutjobs are getting top-notch weapons instruction and plenty of target practice. It's sure to come in handy when they get home.

With the military unable to meet recruitment goals for an unpopular war, gangbangers and white supremacists are having a far easier time getting "moral waivers" to enlist, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center called "A Few Bad Men," as well as an investigative series in the Chicago Sun-Times in May. The upshot: a future compromised in yet another way, as we train and further desensitize the psychologically fragile and psychotically embittered.

Some of them, baptized in hellfire, could, like Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad and a long list of others, turn around and bite us. Bush's war to promote terror - the perfect self-sustaining fear machine - isn't just generating an endless supply of hardened enemies beyond our borders. It is also creating the conditions of social breakdown and psychological blowback within our borders. Guess what? Under Plan Bush, we'll never be safe.

Among the costs of mobilizing for and waging war - even a "good war," with huge popular support - is a general cheapening of human life. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them," Lt. Gen. James Mattis famously blurted out about the Iraqis during a panel discussion in San Diego a year and a half ago, to much applause from couch-potato warriors everywhere.

Such glibness notwithstanding, the actual desensitization process the military must employ to turn raw recruits into killers is serious and often irreversible. David Grossman, a lieutenant colonel, psychologist and author of, among other works, "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society," has researched the evolution of U.S. military training since World War II. In that war, he has noted, recruits' natural aversion to killing human beings was short-circuited by such techniques as replacing bull's-eye targets with human figures during marksmanship training. The process of "disengagement" is now a standard part of basic training.

The rest is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/13516

[Dhalgren]

1. Jesus! We will reap what we have sown.

There's a new Dark Ages coming, but this one will have a twist - thermonuclear weaponry...

[marmar]

2. I know...

In my 34 years on earth, I've never lived through a period as bleak as this one. I almost long for the days when I was in middle school, terrified that Reagan and Andropov were going to vaporize the earth.

[RoseMead]

3. Ronnie and Yuri. Sigh.

Those were the days. Funny thing, but I never felt really afraid of the Russians. How sad that I am now frequently scared shitless by my own government.

[marmar]

4. It was the childhood fear thing, exacerbated by the move "The Day After"..

All grown up, I realize I'm far more terrified of this group that's in charge now than I ever was of Ronnie Ray-gun and the USSR.

[marmar]

5. Yuri!

That's his first name. I couldn't recall it.