"We're like America's little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody."
A marine chaplain tells Wright that "many of them have sought my counsel because they feel guilty . . . but when I ask them why, they say they feel bad because they haven't had a chance to fire their weapons.”
These Recon Marines behave according to the attitudes and conditioning of their training which reflects on everyone up and down the chain of command. Considering their blitzkrieg tactics, they care as much about Iraq as the warders of Abu Ghraib prison care about the Geneva Conventions. Senior commanders refer to Muslims as "hajjis".
Maybe it’s partly the gallows humor of combat fatigue, but Wright reveals one Marine’s view of Iraq's religious civil war differences thus: "Let a motherfu#ker use an American toilet for a week and they'll forget all about this Sunni-Shia bullsh#t."
The Iraqi Army habitually wore civilian clothing; this and the presence of foreign jihadists complicated the Marines' mission. The Marines could not know who occupied a farmhouse or a city dwelling. Was it a terrified family or an enemy equipped with cell-phones calling in mortar attacks?
On any given day a crowd might welcome the Americans and then turn against them the next day. Wright shows how this placed a frustrating pressure on the Marines. All too often innocent civilians paid the price of this "fog of war."
Urban guerrilla combat blurs the lines between innocent civilians and any true enemies no matter how much care is taken. Seemingly an inherent aspect of urban combat, indiscriminate slash and burn attacks would eventually transform the entire Iraqi population into our enemy. As we see in later war reports (e.g. The Deserter’s Tale), these attacks continue throughout the duration of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Did we forget that the invasion’s goal was to assure “Iraqi Freedom” for the regular civilians? Or were we all too focused on some ulterior goal such as oil? These destructive tactics could only have arisen from top of the Pentagon and ultimately from the Bush administration because senior commanders permit it to this day. This approach alone explains why our so-called "war on terror" was doomed to fail from the first days of the invasion, March 2003. Bush's so-called war on terror has little to do with applying justice against the 9/11 guerrilla warriors and everything to do with siezing the world's second largest oil reserves.
The fog of urban combat obscured the distinctions between innocent civilian and enemy “terrorist.” It provoked the build up to the current armed resistance and terrorism in Iraq where once there was none.
Toward the end of Wright’s report, Fick's platoon nears Baghdad where fighting intensifies. Heavy bombing and artillery have shredded towns and hamlets are torn apart. At roadblocks, confusion often prompts Marines to shoot unarmed Iraqis. Wright tells how, in an incident, some Marines rush to help an overwhelming crowd of dirty, hungry refugees although the Marines don’t have the equipment to do anything.
On April 6, the Marines reach the outskirts of Baghdad after a long harrowing trip north. Wright describes what they see as a “horrorscape of human corpses and of dead cows—bloated to twice their normal size—lying in ditches.” Sergeant Espera swerves his Humvee to avoid hitting a human head lying in the road. Farther down the road they see a dog eating a corpse. "Can it get any sicker than this?" One Marine reflects on the mission saying, "Do you realize the sh#t we've done here, the people we've killed? Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison."
The Bush administration supported a US foreign policy that gives greater privilege to military power than to persuasion, and to force rather than to diplomacy. Under Bush, It raises anti-American sentiment globally.
This book reveals raw truth about how Operation Iraqi Freedom takes place on the streets and forces us to reconsider America's self-defeating strategy, top down.
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