Why I oppose the
US ‘war on terror’: an ex-Marine speaks out
By Chris White
The more I juxtapose logical world opinion with the Bush administration’s
actions in the war on terror, I realize one overwhelming theme:
hypocrisy. No one in any of the branches of government runs
a physical risk to themselves by entering a war with Iraq, and
we can bet that none of their family members are at risk, either.
That is, until the next “terrorist” attack. I put
“terrorist” in quotes because its definition is subjective,
and I myself used to be in the Marine Corps, part of the most
powerful “terrorist” organization on the planet: the
US government. Of course, we never call our operations “terrorism”
because every operation is considered legitimate to us. When
found guilty by the World Court for violence in Nicaragua, we
ignore the decision. Too bad the nations we hurt can’t
just ignore what we do to them. When the planet condemns us
for killing between 2,500-4,000 people in Panama, we’re
too busy planning the next invasion of a country that can’t
fight back.
I oppose this war as a US citizen, a veteran, and a doctoral
student in history. While my military experience is what first
made me skeptical about our government’s motives in the
developing world, it wasn’t until I went to college and
began reading hundreds of books and thousands of articles that
I was able to truly grasp the profundity of our leadership’s
contempt for the freedoms they claim to protect. As a rule,
we have worked hard to prevent the rise of democracy in the
developing world, all the while claiming legitimacy as “the
world’s police force” because of our so-called “democratic”
values. The hypocrisy is astounding. When one investigates our
complicity in death squads, torture, massacres, rape, and mass
destruction, one realizes that freedom often threatens the current
power structure in this country.
I used to consider those incidents as anomalistic in comparison
to the “protection” we offered the planet at seemingly
no charge. But then I joined the Marines, and I realized why
I had believed in the government- they were experts in manipulation.
Barely out of high school, the Corps broke us down and built
us up in order to shape us into machines, willing to defend
the ideals of the power elites in Washington and corporate America.
Just look at the companies, which are funding political campaigns,
and benefiting from war: weapons producers, technologies, food,
clothing, munitions, oil, pharmaceuticals, etc… US interventions
since WWII have not been done in the name of the world’s
people (although that is always the claim), but for the preservation
of concentrated power. The fact that they have been carried
out against the tenets of international law (i.e. the rights
of non-intervention and self-determination), in itself deflates
their validity. If the US government were held to the FBI’s
official definition of terrorism (“the unlawful use of
force or violence against persons or property to intimidate
or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment
thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”),
their list of victims since WWII alone would include:
Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras,
Guatemala, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Granada, Colombia, Bolivia,
Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Zaire, Namibia, Lebanon,
Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Iran, South Africa, the Philippines,
Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Cambodia, Libya, Israel, Palestine,
China, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia, East Timor, Turkey, Angola,
Mozambique, and Somalia.
In boot camp, deceit and manipulation accompany the necessity
to motivate troops to murder on command. You can’t take
civilians from the street, give them machine guns, and expect
them to kill without question in a democratic society; therefore
people must be indoctrinated to do so. This fact alone should
sound off alarms in our collective American brain. If the cause
of war is justified, then why do we have to be put through boot
camp? If you answer that we have to be trained in killing skills,
well, then why is most of boot camp not focused on combat training?
Why are privates shown videos of US military massacres while
playing Metallica in the background, thus causing us to scream
with the joy of the killer instinct as brown bodies are obliterated?
Why do privates answer every command with an enthusiastic, “kill!!”
instead of, “yes, sir!!” like it is in the movies?
Military indoctrination could be said to prepare men to use
disrespect for all living things as a means of destroying the
enemy’s morale. Boot camp itself is mostly a series of
chaos-surrounded tests of will and strength, meant to eliminate
a human being’s ability to feel weakness, in order for
military leaders to harness obedience to their orders when it’s
time to kill. The topics covered in motivational songs are tools
for desensitizing men who would be predisposed to respect women,
so as to create an animal within him that can be activated when
necessary to carry out any barbaric assignment. An example of
these lyrics follows:
“Throw some candy in the school yard, watch the children
gather round. Load a belt in your M-60, mow them little bastards
down!!” and “We’re gonna rape, kill, pillage
and burn, gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn!!” Could the
bar be set any higher on the level of atrocities that the military
wants its men to be capable of? I say “men” because
these kinds of songs are generally not repeated in the presence
of women. These chants are meant to motivate the troops; they
enjoy it, salivate from it, and get off on it. If one repeats
these hundreds of times, one eventually begins to accept them
as paradigmatically valid.
The violation of women in war is a weapon, just as are conventional
arms. The movie “Casualties of War” illustrates this
clearly when actor Sean Penn holds up his rifle and says, “The
army calls this a weapon, but it ain’t,” then, grabbing
his crotch with the other he says, “This is a weapon.”
The movie, based on a true story, involves a small US combat
unit that kidnapped, raped, and murdered a Vietnamese woman
during the war. I assert that times have not changed with respect
to the mentality of sexual assault in the military. Although
soldiers are given sensitivity classes that tell the men to
respect civilians and especially women, another message pervades
everything else one learns and trains for, which effectively
obliterates all notions of respect during war. This is generally
speaking, of course, but sensitivity inherently conflicts with
the identity of a killer, which is what infantrymen are conditioned
to be. They are trained to thrive on the blood of humans, and
this is used to create a lustful sensation when conditioning
for combat.
Wartime rape may be used by men who have convinced themselves
that they must be able to do anything to a person in order to
be comfortable with participating in the horrific acts that
surround them. The extreme nature of war itself seems to breed
the mentality that makes people surpass the limits of desired
reality. War makes criminals of ordinary men, who can not easily
switch off the killer within them when off the battlefield,
as the training manuals espouse. This certainly does not excuse
the atrocities they commit.
The environment of the military is pervaded by sex. When out
in the Fleet Marine Force, sadistic initiation rituals are surrounded
by sex and physical pain, often together. Although I never experienced
this myself, initiation rituals often force men to fondle other
men’s genitals, and devices such as broomsticks are used
for rectal insertion. This often happens in the presence of,
and with the participation of the higher ranks. The Tail hook
scandal of 1991 exposed a ritual dating at least back to 1986,
where women naval officers were made to walk a gauntlet of male
officers that grabbed their buttocks and breasts. It certainly
does not end there. In the case of Okinawa, three men planned
every detail of the kidnapping, beating, and rape of a twelve
year old girl in advance.
The military’s desensitization against a person’s
natural inhibitions to hurt people is a way of toughening them
up, or making them “hard core.” Thus, it makes sense
that because this is encouraged by superiors, then it should
translate into destructive behavior in combat, and to a lesser
extent, in peacetime. This is definitely not to say that the
soldier is innocent; far from it. But if we subscribe to the
concept that one is shaped largely by their environment, then
we can largely blame the institutions which have created this
particular proclivity within the men who commit these horrible
crimes against women, while supposedly serving to defend the
freedom of the world. The demonization of the enemy is crucial
to wartime planners, and the above examples of indoctrination
are relevant to the present. Before carrying out a security
exercise in Qatar, my unit went through “Muslim indoctrination”
classes. The level of racism was unbelievable. Muslims were
referred to as “Ahmed,” “towlheads,” “ragheads,”
and “terrorists.” We were told that most Muslim males
were homosexual, and that their hygiene was so primitive that
we shouldn’t even shake their hands. The object was demonization
through feminization and dehumanization, so as to make it easier
for us to pull the trigger when ordered to. But Qatar is our
ally, so imagine the language being used today in these indoctrination
courses about Iraq and Afghanistan. The question is, how can
we claim to be intervening out of a desire to protect people
that we train troops to feel contempt for? The Iraqi population
has suffered countless US supported atrocities over the past
eleven years. Not only were between 100 and 200 thousand people
killed in 1991, but the bombing has continued ever since then,
and sanctions have led to the deaths of possibly 1 million people,
in a nation of 17 million. Former UNSCOM execs assert that they
destroyed 95-98 percent of Saddam’s weapons by 1998, and
that a nuclear weapons capability is extremely unlikely due
to their devastated economy. According to this morning’s
New York Times, the US reasons that Saddam’s gassing of
his own people and his hatred of the US are what warrant our
harder stance toward Iraq in comparison to North Korea. While
we pursue diplomacy with North Korea (who has admitted to having
nukes), we prefer to invade Iraq, who we claim is only looking
for nukes. Have we forgotten the 1994 Congressional report revealing
that we supplied Saddam with biological and chemical weapons
during the 1980s? Although US casualties will be lower than
that of Iraq, let’s not forget the danger we are placing
squarely on the shoulders of US troops, who have been indoctrinated
as I was. Funny how the people who are least likely to go to
war are the ones working the hardest to convince others to fight
it for them.
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