With all of the hell re-surging in Iraq due to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the possibility of our re-involvement, there is something I would like to remind the American people before they start drawing their lines of opinion regarding the people of that troubled region.
I saw this video posted a few weeks back on Facebook, and the person posting it commenting "Word" with a host of others praising this soldier's harsh criticism to the Iraqi policemen.
I understand what he is doing. In war, this is the way you talk, the way you get a point across in the static of bullets and treachery. I don't fault him at all. He is doing his job and doing it well.
I fault the people here at home with their "Hell Yeah"s and the "Right On"s. It's the same attitude when Bin Laden was killed. It's the mob mentality. People of America, shut your mouths please. War is war, your opinions and judgments have no place to the people involved on the ground. We are talking about a region of the world where one war is replaced with another like an assembly line from Hell itself. Right on their own doorsteps, where every family is a widow in one way or another to the atrocities of bloodshed.
Before stating your opinions of the people over there (which truly have no value; only facts have value) please take into consideration this excerpt from Dexter Filkins' book The Forever War (p.73-74). You may begin to understand why it may be so hard to retain Iraqi cooperation when it is needed:
"Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people clutching themselves and burying their heads in the corners and sitting in their own filth. It was useful to think of Iraq in this way. It helped in your analysis. Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people's brains.
"Sometimes I would walk into the newsroom that we had set up in The New York Times bureau in Baghdad, and I'd find our Iraqi employees gathered round the television watching a torture video. You could buy them in the bazaars in Baghdad; they were left over from Saddam's time. The Iraqis would be watching them in silence. Just staring at the screen. In one of the videos, some Baath party men had pinned a man down on the floor and were holding down his outstretched arm, while another official beat the man's forearm with a heavy metal pipe until his arm broke into two pieces. There was no sound in the video, but you could see that the man was screaming. None of the Iraqis in the newsroom said anything.
"I tried to recall these things when I got impatient with the Iraqis. Sometimes, when readers from America sent me e-mails expressing anger at the Iraqis--why are they so ungrateful? why can't they govern themselves?--I considered sending them one of the videos."
