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 http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79865/ 

What this is, is a 6-7 minute video of Iraq veterans testifying about their experiences in theater, dehumanizing the ‘detainees’ via racial and religious slurs. Two serious difficulties arise as a consequence. First, ostensibly the purpose for the US being in Iraq is to stabilize social conditions to an acceptable level so that we can leave. This in turn demands that we secure the willing assistance of the Iraqis; Sunnis and Shiites. And that means winning their hearts and minds. These are made exponentially more difficult, if not impossible, and absolutely more perilous, when our behaviors treat all Iraqis, regardless whether they may actually be guilty of anything other than being Iraqi, as our guilty enemy. Second, as the video clearly demonstrates, like it or not, the racial and ethnic and religious slurs begin as approved policy from the shiniest brass at the topmost reaches, and travels down to the lowest ranks.  

     My exigent fears here are, first, that not all who receive this request will take the time from their busy schedules to actually view it. Even those who protest how they care about what’s going on “over there” — the tragedies involving our military and the Iraqi population — limit the expression of their concern to precisely that: like George Bush, a vocalizing of their concern.

     My second fear is that even those who do take the less than 10 minutes out of their day, and are emotionally troubled by what they see, are of insufficient courage to bring the matter to the attention of their so-called friends, family members, and associates whom they either know or strongly suspect do not share their views.  

But as this video clearly demonstrates, what we are doing to both the Iraqis and our soldiers is without redemption. Reading about it, or suspecting it are not enough. You must see and hear what these veterans have to say!

However the distillation that follows is an effort to explain how and why all military units, from whatever country and locale, work to dehumanize both their own troops and their potential adversaries, most important, it’s essential that the video be viewed, then forwarded to as many as possible.

— Ed Tubbs  

      It doesn’t matter whether you’re a gang-banger from one of America’s mean streets or a member of our uniformed combat military. The task of assaulting and/or killing another human being is made much easier if the target object of the assault is objectified, dehumanized, and that the perpetrator of the assault has also been dehumanized, stripped of civility and his or her nascent inclination to behave civilly.

      As a veteran of the Army Infantry I know this is why Army basic (and I suppose Marine boot camp) is an experience suffuse with the most coarse argot. Everything, from the moment the new recruit steps off the bus, even down to one’s own mother, is referred to brutishly — B***h, most often prefaced by the “F’ gerund (A gerund is any adjective, adverb ending in ‘ing.’), usually itself prefaced by “G**-D****d.” 

      That’s also why the potential enemy — anyone command or the prevailing social group says is THE enemy — must be reconfigured as subhuman via whatever epithet seems most efficacious to that task. If the potential enemy is characterized by genetic physical or social or language or religious features that are even the least distinct from the majority of Americans, the entire host population is dehumanized, objectified. In Korea, every Korean was a “chink,” and, in Vietnam every Vietnamese was a “gook.” Unless it began a sentence, the racial obscenity wasn’t even entitled to first-letter capitalization.

      And before any of us takes a single step farther, before anyone attempts to condemn any part of America for this blasphemy, it has been deemed a prerequisite necessity of every modern society; the Germans upon Jews, the Japanese upon everyone, the heads of the condemned are covered with a bag or their eyes by a blindfold. If somehow we do not see them, somehow we do not see they too are, just like us, human.

      These basic truths, however, do not bleach the intrinsic evil from stain. It cannot because the stain is insinuated into our hearts. It is in our minds. It is in our very souls.

      It’s not only what is done to others, or how those others are perceived that is itself so terribly evil. Indeed, perhaps the most vile evil is what is done to our military, what they have been forced to become: less than human.

      Once that transformation has been accomplished, simply leaving the geography where it was perceived as acceptable and necessary does not erase the attitude or the knowledge the soldier or Marine has descended and debased him- or herself. That guilt remains lodged in the psyches, and the cost to the him- or herself, to the family, and to our society ripples beyond the time and space that are estimable or capable of being seen.

       — EJT