In the week that George Bush took to
fantasising that his blood-soaked "war on terror" would
lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty"
I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed
to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant
colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply,
my American friend believes the change of military creed under
the Bush administration--from that of "soldier" to
that of "warrior"--is encouraging American troops to
commit atrocities.
From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo
to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black"
prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape
and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage
is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting
notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture
and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present
point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously,
the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty
begin?
So first, here's the official
US Army "Soldier's Creed", originally drawn up to prevent
anymore Vietnam atrocities:
"I am an American soldier.
I am a member of the United
States Army--a protector of the greatest nation on earth. Because
I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable
to the military service and the nation that it is sworn to guard
...
No matter what situation I
am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal
safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit or my country.
I will use every means I have,
even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from
actions, disgraceful to themselves and the uniform.
I am proud of my country and
it's flag.
I will try to make the people
of this nation proud of the service I represent for I am an American
soldier."
Now here's the new version
of what is called the "Warrior Ethos":
I am an American soldier.
I am a warrior and a member
of a team. I serve the people of the Unites States and live the
Army values.
I will always place the mission
first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen
comrade.
I am disciplined, physically
and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks
and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the
United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of
freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American soldier.
Like most Europeans--and an
awful lot of Americans--I was quite unaware of this ferocious
"code" for US armed forces, although it's not hard
to see how it fits in with Bush's rantings. I'm tempted to point
this out in detail, but my American veteran did so with such
eloquence in his letter to me that the response should come in
his words: "The Warrior Creed," he wrote, "allows
no end to any conflict accept total destruction of the 'enemy'.
It allows no defeat ... and does not allow one ever to stop fighting
(lending itself to the idea of the 'long war'). It says nothing
about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws
or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions
...".
Each day now, I come across
new examples of American military cruelty in Iraq and Afgha-nistan.
Here, for example, is Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, part of
an American mobile interrogation team working with US marines,
interviewed by Amy Goodman on the American Democracy Now! programme
describing a 2004 operation in Babel, outside Baghdad: "Every
time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners
who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They
were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners
what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would
tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued,
while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by
the Force Recon Marines ... One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust
pipe of a Humvee ... he had a giant blister, third-degree burns
on the back of his leg."
Lagouranis, whose story is
powerfully recalled in Goodman's new book, Static, reported this
brutality to a Marine major and a colonel-lawyer from the US
Judge Advocate General's Office. "But they just wouldn't
listen, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of
terrorists apprehended ... so they could brief that to the general."
The stories of barbarity grow by the week, sometimes by the day.
In Canada, an American military deserter appealed for refugee
status and a serving comrade gave evidence that when US forces
saw babies lying in the road in Fallujah--outrageously, it appears,
insurgents sometimes placed them there to force the Americans
to halt and face ambush--they were under orders to drive over
the children without stopping.
Which is what happens when
you always "place the mission first" whenyou are going
to "destroy"--rather than defeat--your enemies. As
my American vet put it: "the activities in American military
prisons and the hundreds of reported incidents against civilians
in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are not aberrations--they
are part of what the US military, according to the ethos, is
intended to be. Many other armies behave in a worse fashion than
the US Army. But those armies don't claim to be the "good
guys" ... I think we need... a military composed of soldiers,
not warriors."
Winston Churchill understood
military honour. "In defeat, defiance," he advised
Britons in the Second World War. "In victory, magnanimity."
Not any more. According to George W Bush this week "the
safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the
streets of Baghdad" because we are only in the "early
hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom".
I suppose, in the end, we are
supposed to lead the 21st century into a shining age of human
liberty in the dungeons of "black" prisons, under the
fists of US Marines, on the exhaust pipes of Humvees. We are
warriors, we are Samurai. We draw the sword. We will destroy.
Which is exactly what Osama bin Laden said.
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