Decline and Fall

There's been an outpouring of support for me since my last post, for which I am very grateful. Special thanks goes to Edger at OOIBC and Docudharma. He re-posted PTSD... over there and his commenters have been amazing. Thank you each and every one.

It's a funny thing: when I was a conservative, I always got a lot of "it's great that you're in the Army/defending freedom/taking it to the terrorists" but when I problematized the situation a little bit--bringing up flaws in the war strategy, expressing doubts about the war itself, pointing to past mistakes made by our government that contributed to the current situation--my conservative friends couldn't find it in themselves to acknowledge that anything was wrong. And this was in 2005, by which point you would have had to be deaf, blind, mentally retarded and/or willfully ignorant to not notice that things were looking very bad. Invariably, they would tell me that it was all the media's fault (just like Vietnam!) and that I needed to insulate myself from traitors and collaborators such as Peter Jennings.

I finally had enough of the conservative movement and its pathetic inability to look in a mirror or think critically about any of its cherished platitudes and bolted. What I had expected to find, based on years of reading the likes of Russell Kirk, David Horowitz, Lew Rockwell, Victor Davis Hanson, the AEI gaggle, The National Review (I subscribed for more than five years), Human Events (my parents subscribed throughout my childhood), and other organs of the right-wing propaganda machine, was rabid anti-war neanderthals who hated America. (I should say that by the time I left, I knew this wasn't the only face the Left had to offer.)

What I found instead was compassion, understanding, a willingness to examine one's positions, and an openness to divergent points of view that utterly confounded the dichotomies I had absorbed in my youthful Right-wing radicalism. These were good, decent people by and large. I won't claim that there is no Left-wing lunatic fringe, but I will say that the crazies have not infiltrated the Left mainstream the way they have on the Right. There is no Left equivalent of Ann Coulter, at least not in terms of attention, airtime, book sales or general publicity. This is partly because the Right has much more leeway in the current media climate, but it's also because the Left does a better job of policing itself. It's true that Coulter was kicked off The Corner, but that didn't actually affect her popularity at all. When the Left ditched Hitchens (a subject about which I remain conflicted) he stayed ditched. This is not the result of some sort of Politburo that meets in the offices of The Nation every Wednesday at 9 am to decide the fate of liberalism, it's the genuine dislike of rank-and-file liberals for those who give them a bad name.

I have no doubt that the Right will eventually come to the consensus that Bush has been a disaster, but the Left would have been dogging him all along, rather than swallowing his absolutist rhetoric so gleefully as they failed to criticize even his most abhorrent policies (torture being perhaps the most egregious). The Right did that eventually with Nixon, after all, but only because of his economic policies and supposed kowtowing to Mao. When LBJ got us (deeper) into an unwinnable and morally repugnant war, the Left ensured that he would not serve another term. When Bush did it, the Right rallied around him and invented controversies about the service of an actual warrior and patriot in one of the most cynical and depraved moments in the history of our politics. Oh, and google the term "PTSD" on "corner.nationalreview.com" to see how often that issue has come up on one of the busiest political blogs in the world. That's what happens when you substitute "support my agenda" for "support the troops."

The Right loves to talk about freedom, but it suppresses freedom of expresion within its own ranks. They barely even debate anymore. As Peter Fonda put it in Easy Rider:

[Freedom's] what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Too true. Sorry I was so wrong about you guys for so long.

Labels: conservatism, personal, politics, PTSD

...is a bitch.

I haven't been officially diagnosed (that will have to wait until I get back stateside, in August) but the signs are all there: obsessive thoughts about horrific scenes I witnessed in Iraq, anxiety at the mere mention of anything having to do with that war, extreme guilt at having willingly participated in such a colossally wicked venture, sleepless nights, mood swings, constant fidgeting, and the strong proclivity to self-medicate by any means necessary. I have good days and bad days, but they've been mostly bad, and certainly worse than they were when I blogged about them before.

The worst for me is the guilt and the anger. Guilt for what I was a part of and anger that such a war could happen, or that people could still believe there is anything remotely positive about our military presence in Mesopotamia. As Thoreau put it so ably at Unqualified Offerings:

It outrages me more than I can describe that there are still apologists for this. It outrages me more than I can describe that there are people who can look at this and say "Yep, we sure made the right choice there!" And it outrages me more than I can describe that the people who look at this and see no evil are actually taken seriously. They are invited to speak and write in serious venues. They are warmly thanked for offering their amoral apologies. They are allowed to remain in power rather than impeached, convicted, removed, and stripped of privilege. They are able to walk down the street undisturbed when they should be cursed and pelted with trash. They should be sprawled on a sidewalk next the McPherson Square Metro Station, hoping to cadge enough quarters to enjoy the rare treat of laundering the vomit out of the only shirt they own, praying all the while that decent people do not recognize them beneath the matted beard and tangled hair.

In a real republic Bush would have been drummed out of office by now and the last thing any major candidate for the Presidency would say is that we might be in Iraq for another 100 years. Just thinking about it makes me so... anxious. Every time I hear a war apologist speak I am overcome with grief and it's a good hour before my mind's back on track. This is my war casualty: a complete inability to escape from that place for longer than a couple of hours.

Seeking mindless distraction, I went to see Ironman the other day, and boy was that a mistake. The predictably evil defense contractor (played by Jeff Bridges, who always looks like Jeff Lebowski to me, which is a bit disconcerting) reminded me so much of my old boss in the war-profiteering biz--warm and friendly on the outside, cold and heartless on the inside--that I spent half the movie trying to will away my flashbacks, then spent the next several hours after the movie drinking alone in my apartment. Such an innocuous reference from such a banal movie shouldn't produce such a powerful reaction, but such is life after war, for me at least. Suffice it to say I won't be watching Rendition or In the Valley of Elah any time soon.

So there it is: I'm pretty messed up in the head right now, and there's not a lot I can do but try to work through it. It's not like there are VA programs for DoD Contractors with PTSD. That's why the federal government loves contractors so much: there's no long-term commitment. A servicemember has all those whiny legislators demanding benefits (and overriding Bush's veto... we hope) for the troops, but us temps, we're on our own. Now that I'm not working for the company that paid me to go to Iraq, I'm nobody's problem but my own. Hell, I don't even have medical insurance any more. I swear to FSM I'm moving to Canada or Denmark some day.

Discovering that your soul has a price isn't a pleasant experience, but I'm the guy who signed on the dotted line, so it's my cross to bear. I wish I had read the fine print.

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Iraq, OOIBC, personal, politics, PTSD

It has been quite a long time since I have posted anything. The fact is, I haven't felt up to it. Those final months in Iraq were more taxing, mentally and otherwise, than I could have expected. I simply did not have any thoughts that I deemed worth sharing. I thought, and wrote, that my diminished posting quality and frequency was due to a lack of intellectual stimulation, but as I have since discovered, it had less to do with that than with a sort of emotional distancing from everything and everyone that matters to me, to include my own sense of self. I was, and most likely still am, angry and depressed.

I know this sounds like a whiny, selfish, prozac nation excuse for what could have been chalked up to simple writer's block and staying too busy to keep up with my blogging, but it's the truth. The Iraq War, surprise surprise, is really hard on people, and its effects are felt in many ways. In the past five months or so I have removed myself from any real engagement with the world around me. My realization, open-eyed from the beginning, that the war I chose to involve myself in was immensely destructive and morally despicable took its toll in the form of ennui and biting cynicism. I noticed that I had grown more callous toward other people when I found myself sneering at everyone, particularly my friends and coworkers, for even the slightest breach of my standards of conduct.

At least I noticed before I left, which allowed me to warn my girlfriend a couple of weeks before my departure that I was a changed man, and not for the better. It's a good thing that I did, because even despite holding my tongue when I knew I was about to say something cruel to her, she observed that my usual joking was noticeably more caustic, and the light had gone out of my eyes. It's a testament to her that she recognized it as a symptom of my loss of compassion in the face of gross inhumanity and remained the caring person she has ever been.

I left Iraq on March 7, and have only in the last few days begun to feel a bit more like myself. In the intervening weeks, I have visited the Carribean coast south of Cancun, spent about a week and a half seeing friends in Arizona, and have now spent four days in Luxor visiting temples and learning, the hard way, how to haggle. The time in Mexico and Arizona was a time of emotional disengagement and relationship difficulty, but I've grown more at peace since coming to Egypt. I start classes in Cairo tomorrow.

I am finally back in a proper headspace to renew my blogging, and I am sure Cairo will provide many opportunities to do so. Also, I no longer feel the need to keep myself out of the blog, now that I no longer work for the Masters of War. So there will be more of me in the future, although hopefully not this sort of thing.

Labels: personal

Since I came to Iraq, my blogging has been pretty light, obviously. There are a number of factors at play here: partly it's due to the fact that my coworkers and bosses don't know that I do this. I've kept D&F a secret from them because I wanted to be able to blog freely, safe from the prying eyes of my reliably red-state colleagues and superior officers. Since I haven't mentioned any of them, or the nature of my job over here, I don't think I've written anything to set them off, so it's not like there's been any betrayal on my part. I just like to keep this part of my opinions to myself, even though they are all pretty well aware that I'm a librul.

But more than my (perceived) need to keep D&F to myself, I've found being over here to be intellectually impoverishing. The sad fact is that among my colleagues, there's very little in the way of nuanced political analysis. Every time I've tried to have a political discussion that goes below the surface, I have been stymied by their lack of engagement and generally uninformed outlook. Sure, they dutifully noted that my guy won in Iowa and South Carolina and that he seems like an OK dude, but they've never actually confronted me on it, which makes talking politics, well, boring. It's not that they're all unintelligent, it's just that their intellectual interests differ from mine, and their desire to engage in wars of words is much less than mine.

Refusing to engage me in Socratic dialogue (or Crossfire polemics) is their right, of course, and I can't really begrudge them. But not being challenged or engaged has dulled my intellect in a way that only felt familiar once I got out here and said to myself, "oh yeah, that's why I didn't stay in the Army."

In short, being in Iraq has made me dumber.

Exhibits A-C: this post, this post and this post. Reading these again is pretty depressing because I know I can do better. It turns out that I require more inspirado than I'm getting over here to churn out blogs that are up to my own standards.

So I will try to do better. Hopefully I will be getting more of an intellectual workout next month when I leave Iraq, first for Arizona to visit loved ones and then for Cairo, where I will be studying Arabic for two months.

After Cairo, I will join the masses of , overworked grad students as I begin my studies toward a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies (or something related thereto), first at the University of Arizona and then at whatever school will take me and fund me. I came to the realization about a year ago that the only time I have ever been really at home was in academia, so it only makes sense to make academia my home.

I hope I haven't lost too many of my readers, because god knows I never had many to begin with. In the future, you can expect my discussions of military matters to get more thoughtful, if less numerous, and you can expect more posts on the wider Middle East and, perhaps, the life of a grad student who is a few years older than most of his cohort. Also, I'll have more time to keep up with things and to write about them, which should make this site more worthy of your time.

Labels: personal

I'm a Rationalist Procedural Liberal Democrat Individualist Hayekian Progressive Federalist Altruist Cosmopolitan!

Or, if you prefer, a Hippie Reformer (i.e., a Pelagian Digger Right-Hegelian Whig)!

I'm glad we've managed to settle this matter once and for all.

Labels: humor, personal, politics

I'll be incommunicado for the next few weeks while I take a well-deserved (I think so, at least) break from this to spend a lot of time savoring this, this, this, this and this. I'll see you next month.

Labels: personal

Regarding the motivations of the insurgents I interrogated in Iraq, a week ago I wrote:

The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

Later last week, The Washington Monthly published an article by Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter, that came to a similar conclusion, and on Tuesday Gallup released a poll analysis that supports my anecdotal experience. (Thanks to Framing Science for the link) The pollsters discovered that political grievances, rather than religious ones, are the prime motivating factors behind Violent Islamic Extremism:

After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category -- those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States -- 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, "Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world," paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.

On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group's responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, "The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing."

The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety. For example, the politically radicalized often cite "occupation and U.S. domination" as their greatest fear for their country and only a small minority of them agree the United States would allow people in the region to fashion their own political future or that it is serious about supporting democracy in the region. Also, among this group's top responses was the view that to better relations with the Muslim world, the West should respect Islam and stop imposing its beliefs and policies. In contrast, moderates most often mentioned economic problems as their greatest fear for their country, and along with respecting Islam, they see economic support and investments as a way for the West to better relations. Moderates are also more likely than the politically radicalized to say the United States is serious about promoting democracy.

Note how counter-intuitive this all seems from the Clash of Civilizations perspective through which the entire GWOT has been filtered for us. No significant difference in mosque attendance between radicals and moderates. The Quran cited only as justification for abhorring violence, not condoning it. American occupation and lack of respect are the reasons the radicals fight us, not the results of their fight against us.

The implications of a study such as this are enormous. The most obvious is that if we are going to claim to be serious about fighting terrorism, we need to focus our efforts on the factors that actually motivate people to become terrorists, not the factors we continue to insist motivate them. Killing or incarcerating a terrorist or insurgent may take one of them out of circulation, but if you create two new ones for every one you destroy, you are going backward, not forward.

I saw this dynamic when I was an interrogator in Iraq. Coalition forces would arrest an insurgent, humiliate him in front of his family, keep him in prison for months, and then release him without charges. In the meantime he learned to hate us (even if he hadn't before) and, more importantly, his family learned to hate us. While he was learning to hate us, he was in a population that was uniquely qualified to fan the flames of his hatred and teach him how he might better act on it. Meanwhile his family and close friends were now easy targets for recruitment. In getting rid of one "terrorist," we created several. Is it any wonder that the estimated number of insurgents in Iraq jumped from 5,000 (total) in 2003 to 70,000 (Sunni) in 2007, while the prison population skyrocketed from 10,000 to 60,000? (See pp. 25-26 of this Brookings Institute report for details.)

When will we realize that our presence in the Middle East and our support of tyrants such as Mubarek and the Saudi Royal Family are not only not helping ease the troubles in the region, they are the primary cause for those troubles? Middle Easterners are not stupid. They can see that America has a long history of supporting brutal dictators (remember the Shah?) and they have learned from that experience that we are not to be trusted. They see us stomping around the world with our big stick and turn to whatever means of resistance they can find to resist what they see as the assault on their culture by the biggest bully on earth. The fact that militant Islam is their only major option should not cause us to confuse their motives

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Framing, fundamentalism, GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, Islam, OOIBC, personal, politics, terrorism

I might have predicted that now that a few people are actually reading my blog, posting on something as controversial as gay marriage would bring out the hataz. Here's the comment "anonymous" posted:

Just because someone you know has skills or qualities that you admire but who turns out to be a homosexual does not mean you should support or condone his homosexuality. What if your uncle was a talented writer who also saved a bus load of senior citizens from falling over a cliff... but you discovered that he also likes to get together on the weekends with a group of guys and circle jerk on his 21 year old daughter, with her permission. Are you supposed to support his love of shooting sperm on his daughter with his buddies? Of course not. It's disgusting and wrong and is detrimental to the fabric of society. (Your blog just went downhill fast.)

Wow. Thanks for the disturbing image. I'm glad such a paragon of decency deigned to comment so vividly on my humble blog. I'm sure my traffic will increase even more now that my blog can be reached by googling "circle jerk daughter."

This comment shows many of the problems that homophobes have when trying to actually think about homosexuality:

1) Their assessment is based completely on the fact that they think homosexual sex is disgusting. First, given the vividness of this commenter's hypothetical scenario (I'm betting he got a little turned-on just thinking it up), I'd wager that a tour through his hard drive would reveal plenty of evidence that he doesn't find anal sex disgusting per se, just when it's a guy getting penetrated. He's probably got a copy of "ANALyze This 14" or "Weapons of Ass Destruction" and a box of kleenex just waiting for him when he gets home from his Klan meeting. But that's OK, because it's, you know, chicks getting it.

2) They refuse to separate the activity from the orientation. Actually, they usually deny that being gay is an orientation at all, but rather a choice, as if people are just lining up to become the next Matthew Shepard. But notice that in my post I didn't mention the activity itself even once. I focused it on love, because that's what marriage, and brotherhood, is about. The thing that small-minded people like Anonymous don't get is that the love that one homosexual man feels for another homosexual man is indistinguishable from the love that us heteros feel for the special women in our lives. My personal transformation occurred when I realized that, and discovered that my pathetic dogmas were no match for my much stronger conviction that

3) They frequently invoke indefinable terms like "fabric of society" to support their arguments, but that's where their analysis ends. What is this "fabric" of which they speak? In a nation as multi-faceted as ours, that's not a question that lends itself to a short answer. The "fabric of society" line is just intellectual laziness. Guess what: even if there is a definable fabric in American society, it's much more likely to consist of things like liberty, individualism and the Golden Rule than discrimination, repression and pretending the world isn't as it actually is. If you insist on living somewhere where those are widely-shared values, Tehran is lovely this time of year.

4) They are always ready to impose their sense of "ewwww, that's disgusting!" on others with the full force of the State. This guy probably came here via a link to my Blackwater Air Force post. It's generated about 80% of the total traffic to my site, so that's a fairly safe bet. You would think he'd be all about keeping the terrifying power of the State at bay, but you'd be wrong. It's only within very well-defined parameters that he is willing to stand for freedom. He's just like Ashcroft or Gonzalez: infringing the rights of others is fine as long as he thinks it's justified. Civil libertarians such as myself, however, tend to be unwilling to grant the State that much authority, no matter what the circumstances. It's the old, "your freedom ends where my nose begins" line, but it applies to other people's noses as well.

5) They actually believe that the world will be better off if homosexuals continue to be relegated to pariah status and have avenues toward healthy, long-term commitment cut off from them. This guy's so worried about the damage to the "fabric of society" done by the acceptance of roughly 10% of the population that he completely misses the damage that is done by the ghettoization and oppression of that same 10%. I submit that normalizing and accepting people who are different from us will not only improve their lives, but ours as well. I submit that opening up the opportunity for that 10% of our people to live openly in fully committed, legally-binding relationships will only strengthen society.

Why are some people so unwilling to just let others be? What could my brother's or Andrew Sullivan's love possibly do to harm him? The answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing, that is, except force him to see that the world is full of people that aren't like him. And thank god for that.

Labels: homosexuality, liberty, personal

(Photo by Michael Stuetz)

Labels: homosexuality, liberty, personal

I was just told that I am leaving in 2 - 4 days for the Anbar Province, where I will apparently remain for the rest of my stay in this lovely country. So, recent uptick aside, there's a good chance that I will again post very lightly, if at all. It's a surreptitious things for me here anyway.

At least Anbar is pretty calm, for now. Of course I hope it stays that way (even more so now that I will be living there and travelling across it regularly), but I've seen too many "pacified" areas where the "local tribes are working with Coalition Forces" turn sour and go right back to being hotbeds of violence to believe that this is permanent.

Labels: Iraq, personal

I've been really, really, really bad about posting. Sorry about that.

I have been busy, however. My job takes me all over Iraq, which generally means spending six or so hours getting ready to travel followed by one to four hours flying to a random base somewhere in Iraq in a Blackhawk or a Chinook helicopter to spend about three hours trainign soldiers how to run a computer system (sorry, I can't be more specific), and then a repeat of the seven to ten hours of travel on the way back. My hours in general are long: even in the office at beautiful Camp Slayer I'm expected to be in my seat for twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

Also, there's a real bias against blogging, the media, and the rest of the non-U.S. military world here. I could well imagine losing my job over D&F, especially considering how much angrier I've become at this stupid war, our stupid President, his stupid party, our stupid military, its stupid defense contractors, and our stupid country. Some of the things I've wanted to write here have bordered on treason. This is why I am writing this at 4 o'clock in the morning.

But such is the heat of the moment. On more careful reflection, I do still think that America is essentially good, in its ideals if not its actions. Most republicans don't want to destroy everything that's good about America, they are merely mistaken in the way they approach problems, and some of those ways can only lead to, well, destroying everything that is good about America. And the military is, still, largely peopled by those who would rather be anywhere but here, and don't actually think that the solution to the world's problems isn't nuclear.

If that last one sounded a bit far-out to you, as in, "I'm sure there aren't any soldiers who would advocate that," I assure you it's an opinion that is within the acceptable range over here. I've had the "why nuking the entire Middle East is a bad idea" conversation many times since I've been over here. More mainstream is the idea that we really ought to "take the gloves off" and bomb them Dresden-style.

I am here to tell you that no amount of arguing this point gets through to these people. Tell them that carpet bombing backfired big-time in Vietnam, and they'll respond with, "America didn't lose Vietnam, the news media was responsible for us pulling out when we were on the verge of victory." Tell them it's morally repugnant to kill innocent women and children and they will tell you that war is hell and besides, they're all enabling the insurgency anyway, which is to say, there's no such thing as an innocent Iraqi. Tell them that if America does that, it ceases to be American in the truest sense of the term, and they respond that we are fighting the terrorists over here so that we won't have to fight them in America (i.e., there won't be any America at all). At this point they start to suspect that I'm a liberal, and then I know the conversation is going nowhere. Reasoning with these people is useless.

What's interesting to me about this mindset, besides the obvious appeal of getting inside the brains of people who genuinely believe that genocide can make the world a better place, is that these would-be mass murderers tend to all be the sorts of soldiers and contractors who have never actually seen a shot fired in anger. I speak here of the people who sit in their cubicles all day analyzing this war, the people who spend their entire deployments pumping gas or driving around the FOB, the people who will go back to the States after their deployment and wow their friends with stories of the mortar that just barely missed them, the people who were once referred to as REMFs (Rear-Echelon MotherF*****s).

It is these people, the out-of-touch, the wannabe politicians, who are so willing to contemplate sending others to slaughter the "enemies of freedom." Those they would send, the infantrymen and other cannon fodder, generally express something more human when talking about this war. They hate firing their weapons, they hate clearing dead bodies, they hate what they have to do here. It's as if, and I know this sounds unbelievable but bear with me, the people who have actually killed Iraqis find the prospect of killing even more of them unappealing. They see the gravity of their actions.

One more thing: the REMFs tend to be the only ones who still believe Iraq isn't already a completely lost cause, and they generally still think invading Iraq was a wise decision. One even told me that Bush 43 is one of the greatest Presidents ever. You don't hear that very often from the foot soldiers.

I paint here with a broad brush, but this has been the general trend in the discussions I have had here. The computer dweebs are all about carnage, the soldiers just want to go home.

Unfortunately I work with a bunch of REMFs. There comes a point where holding your tongue is necessary to being able to fuction in the workplace. I generally register an objection to this kind of talk and let it go, knowing that pursuing the conversation wouldn't get us anywhere except someplace less congenial. But I have to admit that I die a little every time I encounter this phenomenon.

Labels: Iraq, personal

Just so you don't worry (or perhaps so you may commence worrying), I am now safely on the ground at lovely FOB Slayer, just on the west side of Baghdad. The weather is hot and dusty, although I know from experience that we haven't seen anything yet on that front.

I am still completely exhausted from my trip, and am finding the 12-hour workdays, seven days a week no less, a bit difficult to get used to, and not at all conducive to blogging.

One of these days I'll get into a work rhythm, but that won't be today.

Labels: personal

The life of someone preparing to go to Iraq is a busy one, which is why I haven't "blogged more freely" this past week. Last week was spent at Ft. Benning, Georgia, land of the 56k modem, checking off a bunch of bureaucratic boxes to ensure that I was ready to embark. These boxes included everything from making sure my inoculations were up to date (lucky me I'm not "mission essential," so I got out of the Anthrax shot this time) to learning the latest techniques for spotting IEDs, and attending to a gunshot wound. Let's just say I hope I never have to use my new needle decompression of tension pneumothorax skills.

By the end of the week I should be somewhere in the Middle East, and I will likely have landed in Baghdad by this time next week. Beyond that I don't know much. I'll check in once I'm on the ground in Iraq, if not sooner, and I'll have some analysis up once I've gotten my bearings.

Labels: Iraq, personal

I've kept this blog largely anonymous for some very good reasons, mostly having to do with the fact that up until very recently I was still in the Army interrogation community. But that has changed, partly for the better and partly for the worse.

It's for the better because I now feel like I can add more of myself to this space. That, and I have been looking for a way to get out of that world and back into academia, which is an environment to which I am more temperamentally suited. Along the way, however, I was made an offer that was too good to pass up.

Which is why I find myself in Georgia, going through inprocessing to go back to Iraq, this time as a contractor doing some computer-system training. I'd be lying if I said I was doing this for anything but the money--I have no great love for computers or this war--but I am looking forward to seeing what the country looks like now, almost two years after I last saw it.

Does this make me a whore? Perhaps. If that's what my readership (rarified though it may be) thinks of me, then so be it. The fact is, I have a chance to not only report from the ground on what I see over there, but become entirely debt-free in the process, all while avoiding the occupation that took me there last time, and for which I feel such ambivalence.

So feel free to wish me luck or tell me off. I'll update when I can, and I'll ty to keep up with and post about the things that continue to interest me.

Labels: Iraq, personal

Andrew Sullivan ponders the significance of a study that says conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced than atheists and agnostics. I don't find this surprising at all. I've long thought that the trend toward fundamentalism is a product of the perception that the world is getting worse and that something stringent needs to be done about it. We can see this in the Muslim world, where the increasing liberalization of their traditional way of life is changing their society in new and unseen ways; and we can see it in America, where people are turning more and more toward more radical and literal interpretaions of our version of the good book. People turn to strict observance of age-old dogmas because they are afraid of the modern world.

Add to that the zeal of the newly-converted, and you have set the conditions for fundamentalism to flourish.

My own parents serve as an object-lesson in this. Both of them lived through the 60's, and while neither participated fully in the "tune in, turn on, drop out" culture of the bay area in those days (Dad was a grad student at Berkeley and Mom lived in San Francisco in 1969), they didn't reject it out of hand, either. After the societal degradation they witnessed during the 70's, they were searching for something real, something to make sense of the crazy world they had seen change before their eyes. When Christ came a-knocking (in the form of their 6-year-old son, yours truly, who wanted to go to church because the girl down the street did) they grabbed at it. It was what presented itself in their moment of need.

A couple of years later, they were homeschooling me in the ways of Christian fundamentalism: we watched the 700 Club every morning, we learned all about the "holes" in the theory of evolution, and we learned about the "Christian History" of America, as taught by charlatans and faux-historians such as Rousas John Rushdoony, David Barton and Peter Marshall. Mom even chaired the Pat Robertson for President campaign in our area. They indoctrinated me into the religious right, which, to their credit, was what they believed to be the truth.

I was able to escape that dogma through keeping an open mind and doing research of my own, but I often wonder if part of the reason I was able to see behind that curtain was simply a function of having never had it as bad as they did; at least in terms of world-upheaval. I didn't grow up in the post-war boom, I never saw the Eisenhower years, I missed Watergate entirely, and I never had to deal with the excesses of the drug culture.

My parents did, ultimately, teach me to seek the truth behind the way the mainstream presents it. This bit of skepticism turned out to be the foundation of my own skepticism, which has led me to atheism (or at least agnosticism, which in my case is practically the same thing), distrust of government, and distrust of authority, even religious authority.

I well remember learning about how John Wycliffe bravely challenged the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy to publish the Bible in English. I managed to translate that lesson into challenging the puritanical American orthodoxy's stranglehold on what constitutes "Christian" behavior. I also learned to be scrupulous about telling the truth and being humble about my estimation of my own abilities. I also learned to value the American experiment for its focus on the reason ("God's viceroy," to quote John Donne) of the average person. I was brought up to be a child of God, I ended up being a child of the Enlightenment.

Another thing about my parents: one was a divorcee (the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree there) and the other had a child out of wedlock. So they had made mistakes they weren't keen on repeating. In a lot of ways this caused them to rear me correctly, which has ultimately, ironically, made enough of an independent thinker of me to make a free thinker of me.

So I'm not surprised that conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced. It is precisely that sort of foundational experience (or "Primal Scene," to use Freud's term) that lends itself to such an abrupt and total change in outlook.

Labels: fundamentalism, personal, reason, religion

A former interrogator in Iraq has said in public what I have known to be the case since I was over there: prior to the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American interrogators was systematic and officially sanctioned, the interrogators themselves knew better, and they did nothing.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency.

I have heard this whispered in back corners, accompanied by winks and nudges from people who were there at the time and knew what was going on.

I know this because I too was an interrogator there. I arrived the week the scandal did, and spent my year-plus as an American interrogator in the post-scandal atmosphere of, "don't let the next scandal happen on my watch." My attitude was always that I didn't want to be the person who made the mistake, and I reported every claim of abuse that I heard.

There were many claims. A lot of them were false, as evidenced by what I have referred to as "waves" of abuse reports: we would go months without hearing anything, we'd hear a dozen reports per day for a few days, and it would quiet down again. People were so scared of another scandal that they would halt the interrogation to report the claim. The detainees figured this out pretty quickly, so word would get out and all of a sudden everybody had a tale of abuse to tell. Our policy was to document the claim and forward it to the proper authorities (who were also eager to make sure the next scandal didn't happen as a reult of their inaction) but not to allow the claim to interfere with intelligence collection. This tended to put the brakes on the waves of abuse claims, and put the question of whether the claim was accurate or not in the hands of others, which we were only too happy to do. I do not believe, however, that every report I heard was a fabrication. There were too many of them, humans have a tendency to go along with whatever horrors are de rigeur, and far too many people believe that the end justifies the means.

I never witnessed any violations of the Geneva Conventions. Again, I got there when the Geneva Conventions were all the rage. But who among my colleagues did, and failed to act? Who participated in cover-ups? Who secretly pined for the "good old days" when you could do a lot more to squeeze information out of an unwilling detainee? I don't know the answer to this question, and I frankly don't want to know. But the story must get out. Not to demonize those who participated in it, Milgram Experiment-style, but to have a full reckoning. To do whatever we can to ensure that this never happens again.

I am thankful that I didn't witness what Eric Fair witnessed. His story of sleepless nights resonates with me, because I have no doubt that I would be in the same boat were I witness to, and participant in, the horrors that he saw. I am also thankful that the timeline of my employment in Iraq shields me from suspicion on that count, if only a bit. It's a question I always have to answer whenever people find out what I do for a living.

What continues to disturb me, however, is the fact that I often get a very disturbing reaction: they're all a bunch of terrorists so they don't have any rights, and "they would do it to us, so why is it wrong for us to do it to them?" As if our yardstick for ethical behavior is Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, personal, torture