I’m going to tell another piece of the story of how I became who I really am.
They say war changes people. I was spared mostly from horror because I was a logistics specialist in a combat support hospital when I was sent to Iraq. I never learned to dehumanize the people we were ostensibly protecting, as sometimes happens when you are kicking civilians’ doors in and ordering screaming women and children to their knees at gunpoint while you ransack their homes and take their fathers and husbands away to god knows where.
You learn that type of cruelty when the people you are fighting are indistinguishable from the people you are protecting. This is why “wars of liberation” and conventional tactics against a guerrilla resistance fail. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. America doesn’t go to war to liberate people as a fairly steadfast rule-what’s usually being liberated is resources. And if we aren’t doing that, we’re looking to project our empire’s reach against direct and parallel competitors like Russia.
I was a true believer in our cause. I was a hard-nosed conservative in 2003. I thought that Dick Cheney was brilliant even as he conflated the WMD charge with the liberation of Iraq’s people from all-around horrible guy Saddam Hussein. And I though it was great geo-strategy that we were going to box in Iran (next on the kill list) since we had control of Afghanistan. And we were going to turn Iraq’s oil spigots on full blast to make sure that the Saudis didn’t have too much control over the world market, because let’s face it, all of our alliances are temporary and short-term and serve a narrow set of objectives. I’d tell you to ask Saddam about that, because…
But he was convicted of war crimes by a star chamber and is no longer among the living, so you cannot ask him. I mean, even as a lib I ain’t sorry that dude is dead. We did him dirty, but whatever. He and his diseased brood were as vicious and bloodthirsty as they come. He had a hard time leaving other countries that bordered Iraq alone thinking that he was a 21st century Saladin, and gassed his own people when they got out of line and other atrocities.
Clearly, there were so many good reasons to invade Iraq in my mind. It was a grand gamble and it was ballsy as fuck and I really thought we were going to get away with it.
The past 14 years since the invasion has shown us that all of that PNAC reasoning and pie-in the-sky thinking was total shit. We were liberators very briefly, and then became an irritant-an occupying army which, if you think about it, you wouldn’t put up with either. We shot ourselves in the foot every step of the way after the four day blitzkrieg to Baghdad. Don Rumsfeld tried to do it all on the cheap by not sending enough troops so that when we were victorious in a city, all of Saddam’s guerilla fighters merely had to blend in until we moved on to the next town. Then we further goofed by making patronage appointments to the provisional government. People were appointed not for what they knew, but how they voted. And then we fired the professional Ba’ath-dominated military class of Iraq. Anybody who knew how to use a gun in the country was suddenly unemployed. Those people joined the armed resistance, which was not called that because that imputed their struggle with the air of righteousness. They were instead called the ‘insurgency’, a more foreign sounding term.
I was stationed at Fort Bragg when we got the call to deploy. I had just had a beautiful, happy, joyful baby boy with my wife in November of 2002 and I was utterly crestfallen that I was leaving my new family so quickly, but that is the sacrifice everyone in the armed forces must be prepared to make. Up until Iraq Part Deux, the standard deployment was six months. But like I said, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wanted to use as few troops as possible, so rumors swirled that the new deployments would last a year. I’m trying to think of and remember reasons why he chose to do Iraq in this manner. Perhaps there was partly a need to shape perceptions that this wouldn’t look like Vietnam to the Iraqis with half a million armed soldiers patrolling the streets (it also wouldn’t look like Vietnam to us at home either, even though it came damn close for those first five years). Some of it was doctrinal-if memory serves, Rumsfeld was trying to make it so we were able to fight two wars at a time if we had to. That second war never materialized, and Rummy decimated the National Guard and Reserves trying to come up with poorly trained bodies while the regulars took stock of their casualties and readied for redeployment as the occupation spiraled into chaos.
Anyway, in late February, the soldiers of my unit and their families packed into a gym and waited for a general to come and explain what was about to happen. And really, even though he talked to us for about 20 minutes all I can remember is the audible discomfort amongst all of us when he confirmed that yes, it was gonna be a year.
The Illogical Seminary 
