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"War Is Not A Noble Enterprise"
An interview with New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges on the Iraq war, the trauma facing returning soldiers and the killing of innocent Iraqis.

...Morality does play deeply into that sense of trauma, because when you’re in a combat situation (and I think you have to go there to understand), your reactions have to be instantaneous. If you hear a sound behind a door, you don’t have time to ask questions, so often you shoot first and ask questions later. And this we have seen in Iraq, where soldiers and Marines at road blocks have fired on cars filled with children and families that they initially feared were hostile.

When you are in a combat situation like that, you realize how easy it is to commit murder, how easy it is to commit atrocity, because you are so deathly afraid — and with good reason. But the consequences are devastating, because what you have done is to shed innocent blood, and often the blood of children. So you bring back not only the trauma of the violence, but that deep darkness that you must carry within you for the rest of your life — that you have been responsible for the death of innocents.

So it isn’t just an issue of trauma; it is, as well, an issue of morality. This is a horrible burden to inflict, especially on a young life. It’s why war should always be waged as a last resort, because the costs are so tremendous, not only to families who lose loved ones and will spend the rest of their lives grieving, but for those who return and for the rest of their lives bear these emotional and psychological burdens.

People cope with that in different ways. Some of course deny it. Some, even combat veterans, will try to perpetuate the mythology of glory and honor and heroism and patriotism. Others, who have more courage and more honesty will confront what they did by trying to live a life of atonement, by seeking a kind of redemption for the acts they carried out. I think that leads them to a much healthier response, and hopefully sets many on the road to recovery. I think we saw this with the conflict in Vietnam, although not exclusively with Vietnam, because my father and all my uncles fought in World War II — the supposedly “good” war — and they hated war when they came back....

...Abu Ghraib is the natural consequence of war and has happened in every single war that has ever been fought. What you are doing in war is turning human beings into objects either to provide gratification or to be destroyed, or both. And almost no one is immune from that — the contagion of the crowd sees to that.

In wartime, perversion and hedonism spiral out of control. The comradeship of soldiering seeks to turn the very act of love into something akin to defecation. This is because the great “that which cannot be subsumed into communal life” is love. So much of the psychosis of war involves an active effort to destroy feelings of tenderness and compassionate love.

In a wartime society, the moral order is flipped upside down; prostitution, rape, and abuse all rise as the levels of violence rises. That happened in every conflict I was in. In Serbia, for instance, as the violence proliferated you also had a proliferation of pornography and snuff films. It always goes hand in hand, because what you are destroying is the humanity of the other; you are turning the other into an object, which is precisely what torture or pornography does.

So what we saw in Abu Ghraib was a window into the kind of perversion that is always the case in war. This flies in the face of the image that we are given of war by the entertainment industry, or even quasi-historians like Stephen Ambrose who want to ennoble war.

War is not a noble enterprise. I’m not a pacifist; I think there are times when war is a sad inevitability. But it is certainly not noble. ...

...One of the frustrating things for those of us who have spent so much time in war zones is to come back and see how those who are guiltiest — those who pushed the country into war, who told the lies that perpetuated the war — are never held accountable. And those who suffer the most, those who endure the trauma and have to live with the memories for the rest of their lives, are blamed unjustly.

I think that part of the tragedy of Vietnam is that we blame the wrong people for the war. It’s not the fault of the 19-year-old kids who were sent there. It’s the fault of the politicians who sent them. And years after the war, people who should be culpable — the Henry Kissingers, the Robert McNamaras — are our elder statesmen writing big thick tomes about diplomacy or their years of government service. ...

...I don’t know that there’s an organized force that can stand up to the allure of war, which gives us a sense of empowerment — allows us to be part of a cause, to ennoble ourselves, to rise above our small stations in life....