From Iraq....

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Us Versus Them

I am a manipulated stooge who sold his soul to exploit the ignorant with the proud lies our own leaders.

I am told on a regular basis “The Army is not like it used to be.” Most of the lifers think that the military lacks discipline and blame the new “Nintendo generation” soldiers for the weakness. However, I think a hard look should be given at the uses of America’s advanced military in the modern era. Do to the operations the military has been tasked in the last forty years the nobility of the professional soldier has been destroyed. From Vietnam to Iraq the Armed Forces has been a chess piece in a game for money and power by elite Americans. Back in the world wars the military represented every citizen’s will. Today the people are duped with lies and phoney values to support imperial progress.

Weapons of mass destruction, links to the two towers tragedy, and the ousting of an oppressive dictatorship are all bait for a revenge hungry over patriotic American. I doubt that the men in power are as incompetent as the world imagines. For that reason I dismiss the apparent failures in Iraq as not the true goals of this war. After these errors are eliminated you are left with the truth behind the media smoke screens. This war is about money. Most people believe that dollars are being handed over to Iraq to rebuild their country on the backs of the American tax payers and under the protection of US troops. However, the money never sees Iraq. It leaves your wallet and goes through the system in DC and ends up in a corporation with the sizeable government contract. Sure the product is a new road, a school house or AK-47s for the Iraqi National Guard, but the money is only making a rich man richer.

Even the soldiers are brain washed into hating the “rag heads”. I have overheard soldiers telling racist jokes like “Why do Iraqis smell so bad? So blind people can hate them too.” It becomes easy to hate the Arab people. We don’t understand their culture, their religion and their language. They are a poor people with a lesser quality of lifestyle and standard of living. The average soldier can not relate to living without electricity, plumbing, and toilet paper. If we see them as inferior it makes it easier to kill them. Just as one might kill a dog that digs through his trash. As a soldier gets into combat situations the prejudice grows as they blame every Middle-Easterner for the conflict. The Joes hate Iraqis because the command hypes about being in Iraqi to stabilize a democracy and fight terrorists on their own ground. The leadership never explains the fact that a majority of Iraqis don’t want a republic that is just a branch of the Western materialistic culture and that they see America as an tyrant equal to the fallen Saddam’s Baath Party. Most soldiers mistake the word insurgent to mean a person that is inserted. As if we are fighting men from other countries than Iraq. When, insurgent means rebel.

The common GI won’t investigate why the insurgent will sacrifice himself, because most soldiers would never do the same. But somewhere in the back of the GI’s mind he has a sense that what he is doing here is wrong. It gives him doubt and discourages his morale. The lifers hold on to the lies of the system because the truth would destroy the core of their beliefs. The fact that the stars and bars is only an illusion for the real power behind the throne could ruin their psyche and crash their egos. They will never let go of their pride and us it as an excuse to cover their fear.

A war backed by our nations cowards. What else would a preemptive strike be good for. Americans get so afraid they will kill in cold blood and thump their chests to claim it for a good cause. History is written by the victors and might makes right. After all is said and done it will go down that way in the books. We will kill communists, drug dealers and terrorists. Next will be homosexuals and atheists. Then full circle back to Jews and Blacks. Fear and prejudice is destructive and we dominate using it. Every country folds to American policies afraid their homes will become the next Baghdad. And, our leaders use media to force the United States people into anxiety using colored threat levels, video of violence, and worse case scenarios presented as emergency updates. We even had Colin Powell lie to the worlds most powerful council, the U.N., about Iraq’s malicious intent with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. America intimidates the world while calling the insurgent freedom fighters terrorists.

So Americans can’t let go of their fear. Like it is a security blanket from a childhood memory. Just as most people can’t relax their guard, in Nam lifers couldn’t relate to the men that was turned on to marijuana. To let your mind and body go and become open to the chaos of the world is impossible for a person who lives in constant fear of the unknown truth. Drug usage isn’t as much of a problem here in Iraq amongst the soldiers, yet. However with a draft, the inactive reserve and more stop-loss it won’t be long before more soldiers discover the potency of Arab hashish and opium based narcotics. There will be a division between lifers and the heads again. It has already started with the stop lossed soldier obviously not wanting to be in service any longer. Many of them get court marshaled or chaptered out with dishonorables saving the military from paying an already deserved Collage GI Bill and other veteran benefits. As war here in the middle-east gets more violent the soldiers will become less afraid of punishment. Prison will become a more sane option than trying to take Fallujah for the fourth time.

Most the soldiers I have talked to have joined for selfish reasons. They wanted money for collage, travel the world, get out of a dead end, avoid going to prison, or had no direction in life. The boys who joined up to defend the red white and blue are few and far between. I met some soldiers that were motivated by September 11th, but not many. It is a need in today’s society to find alternate advantages to enlist, and when kids learn what they really signed themselves up for it is a rude awakening. Many soldiers are counting down to their last day in the military from the first few hours at basic training.

For all these reasons, whether the G.I.s are conscience of it or not, the military personal have a decreased motivation and intensity. We fight for lies, are alienated by our chain of command and are only trying to ride out the clock until we can finish our contracts without losing what we have worked for or seeing the inside of a prison cell. The Armed Forces will never have a loyal troop base until it’s goals change. If there was something worth fighting for, something the common man can gain, rather than just being underpaid mercenaries for some elitist, then the soldiers would have more encouragement to join in work hard.

I myself find it difficult to have discipline in an Army full of ass kissing lying hypocrites who enforce a wicked US policy with a violent war I disagree with.
I serve in shame,

The Heretic,
Baquaba, Iraq
http://www.ftssoldier.blogspot.com/