Soldiering
Surely the greatest difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraqi misadventure is the realignment of the military's symbolism. The armed forces no longer provide a banner that only conservative supporters of the war are likely to wave. "Support the troops" has become profoundly ambiguous, as much an anti-war slogan as pro-. My primary objection to what we're doing in Iraq has always been the outrage of invading a country in order to effect regime change, but my concern for ill-equipped and poorly-trained soldiers is a very close second.
Robert Wright writes today about how growing up on Army bases informed his liberal outlook. ("My Life in the Army.") He also discusses the love that good officers have for their troops - a love that has been constrained by political interference in Iraq.
Sending people into battle isn't something a good person does with detachment. Before the Iraq war, when the Army chief of staff, Gen Eric Shinkseki, testified that the postwar occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he was showing not just prudence but devotion. He didn't want his soldiers needlessly imperiled.
As a reward for his devotion, General Shinseki was disparaged by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld wanted to show how cheap war can be, and now our soldiers are paying the price. I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn't where the most consequential disrespect has come from.
The crowning indignity was Abu Ghraib, an outrage that was initiated by civilians high in the Bush administration and has stained the US military's hard-earned honor, strengthening stereotypes that I know are wrong.
In the Vietnam era, I would not have been likely to sympathize with the perpetrators of such an outrage, but now I regard the soldiers who ended up taking the rap at Abu Ghraib to have been no less victimized than the unfortunate prisoners by a situation in which remote corporate interests had placed them.
Abu Ghraib comes up in the Times's Science section as well. Claudia Dreifus interviews Philip G Zimbardo, the social psychologist who devised the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 - only to call it off when a colleague complained to him, "It's terrible what you're doing to those boys." Dr Zimbardo more recently testified on behalf of Sgt Chip Frederick, a soldier who was ultimately sentenced to an eight-year term as a prisoner himself. When asked if his was not, in effect, absolving Sgt Frederick of personal responsibility, Dr Zimbardo explains that
"... human behavior is more influenced by things outside than inside. The "situation" is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you're not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
