[Peace-discuss] War is an atrocity…

[Brussel Morton K.]

This is a grim and passionate jeremiad. Perhaps it is not worth  
reading for members of this list, but I found it moving.
--mkb


Collateral Damage: What It Really Means When America Goes to War

Tuesday 03 June 2008

»

by: Chris Hedges, TomDispatch.com


     Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza  
or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations." Being  
surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going  
to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push  
troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is  
compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard  
to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes,  
killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed,  
over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

     Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops,  
merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with  
soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq  
nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They  
are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap,  
but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing - the shooting of  
someone who has the capacity to do you harm - to murder - the deadly  
assault against someone who cannot harm you.

     The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very  
little killing. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is  
tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports  
have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in  
2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides,  
as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught  
veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool  
that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they  
did to innocents in Iraq

     American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to  
atrocity. The killing project is not described in these terms to a  
distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of  
glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world,  
in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill  
large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to  
rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of this  
rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will  
vanish.

     The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The  
reality and the ideal tragically clash when soldiers and Marines  
return home. These combat veterans are often alienated from the world  
around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the  
virtues of the nation. They confront the grave, existential crisis of  
all who go through combat and understand that we have no monopoly on  
virtue, that in war we become as barbaric and savage as those we oppose.

     This is a profound crisis of faith. It shatters the myths,  
national and religious, that these young men and women were fed  
before they left for Iraq. In short, they uncover the lie they have  
been told. Their relationship with the nation will never be the same.  
These veterans give us a true narrative of the war - one that exposes  
the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq. They  
expose the lie.

     War as Betrayal

     "This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year- 
old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-cal¬iber machine  
gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the  
42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and  
he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he  
presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less  
than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and  
two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.

     "And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they  
briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to  
him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and  
says, 'If these f--ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't  
happen.'"

     Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans suffer not only  
delayed reactions to stress but this crisis of faith. The God they  
knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue  
or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country,  
did not prepare them for the awful betrayal of this civic religion,  
for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the stories of  
heroism used to mask the reality of war.

     War is always about betrayal: betrayal of the young by the old,  
of idealists by cynics, and of troops by politicians. This bitter  
knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of America's Iraq War  
veterans. It has unleashed a new wave of disillusioned veterans not  
seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin,  
again, to see war's death mask and understand our complicity in evil.

     "And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of, 'What the f-- are  
we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq,'" said Sgt. Ben Flanders, who  
estimated that he ran hundreds of military convoys in Iraq. "It's the  
sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think  
war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in  
my compassion for people. The only thing that wound up mattering is  
myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned,  
whether you are an Iraqi - I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here, I'm  
sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to  
deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and  
shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff."

     The Hobbesian world of Iraq described by Flanders is one where  
the ethic is kill or be killed. All nuance and distinction vanished  
for him. He fell, like most of the occupation troops, into a binary  
world of us and them, the good and the bad, those worthy of life and  
those unworthy of life. The vast majority of Iraqi civilians, caught  
in the middle of the clash among militias, death squads, criminal  
gangs, foreign fighters, kidnapping rings, terrorists, and heavily  
armed occupation troops, were just one more impediment that, if they  
happened to get in the way, had to be eradicated. These Iraqis were  
no longer human. They were abstractions in human form.

     "The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in  
Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffel bag in  
each hand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've  
got a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired.  
You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then you're  
scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you're  
not in the States anymore... So fear sets in, too. And they sit you  
into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how,  
you know, you can't trust any of these f--ing hajis, because all  
these f--king hajis are going to kill you. And 'haji' is always used  
as a term of disrespect and usually with the F-word in front of it."

     The press coverage of the war in Iraq rarely exposes the twisted  
pathology of this war. We see the war from the perspective of the  
troops or from the equally skewed perspective of the foreign  
reporters, holed up in hotels, hemmed in by drivers and translators  
and official security and military escorts. There are moments when  
war's face appears to these voyeurs and professional killers, perhaps  
from the back seat of a car where a small child, her brains oozing  
out of her head, lies dying, but mostly it remains hidden. And all  
our knowledge of the war in Iraq has to be viewed as lacking the  
sweep and depth that will come one day, perhaps years from now, when  
a small Iraqi boy reaches adulthood and unfolds for us the sad and  
tragic story of the invasion and bloody occupation of his nation.

     As the war sours, as it no longer fits into the mythical  
narrative of us as liberators and victors, it is fades from view. The  
cable news shows that packaged and sold us the war have stopped  
covering it, trading the awful carnage of bomb blasts in Baghdad for  
the soap-opera sagas of Roger Clemens, Miley Cyrus, and Britney  
Spears in her eternal meltdown. Average monthly coverage of the war  
in Iraq on the ABC, NBC, and CBS newscasts combined has been cut in  
half, falling from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in  
2005. And newspapers, including papers like the Boston Globe, have  
shut down their Baghdad bureaus. Deprived of a clear, heroic  
narrative, restricted and hemmed in by security concerns, they have  
walked away.

     Most reporters know that the invasion and the occupation have  
been a catastrophe. They know the Iraqis do not want us. They know  
about the cooked intelligence, spoon-fed to a compliant press by the  
Office of Special Plans and Lewis Libby's White House Iraq Group.  
They know about Curveball, the forged documents out of Niger, the  
outed CIA operatives, and the bogus British intelligence dossiers  
that were taken from old magazine articles. They know the weapons of  
mass destruction were destroyed long before we arrived. They know  
that our military as well as our National Guard and reserve units are  
being degraded and decimated. They know this war is not about  
bringing democracy to Iraq, that all the clichés about staying the  
course and completing the mission are used to make sure the president  
and his allies do not pay a political price while in power for their  
blunders and their folly.

     The press knows all this, and if reporters had bothered to look  
they could have known it a long time ago. But the press, or at least  
most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of  
mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth.

     The Legions of the Lost and Damned

     War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled  
with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of  
the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in  
lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private  
interiors of our fantasy lives. It allows us to destroy not only  
things and ideas but human beings.

     In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of  
the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on  
this Earth. The frenzy of this destruction - and when unit discipline  
breaks down, or when there was no unit discipline to begin with,  
"frenzy" is the right word - sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous  
elixir that our power to bring about the obliteration of others  
delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects -  
objects either to gratify or destroy, or both. Almost no one is  
immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

     Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air,  
automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high- 
powered explosive devices, and convoys race through Iraq like freight  
trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips  
the heady ability to call in airstrikes and firepower that obliterate  
landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or  
deprive human life, and with this power they become sick and  
demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings  
are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected.

     War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It  
thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human  
life is cheap, and the gratification of the moment becomes the  
overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of  
another's dignity or life.

     "A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you  
know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're  
not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Spc. Josh  
Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, 20  
year-old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg, and we're  
picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day for having  
a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40 year- 
old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can - do you know what I  
mean? - we have this power that you can't have. That's really  
liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you  
know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the  
next sleep or the next patrol, and to stay alive.

     "It's like, you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman,"  
he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is  
how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None  
of that bullsh-t."

     It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers.  
Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to  
destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle,  
find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a  
battlefield. Moral courage, which these veterans have exhibited by  
telling us the truth about the war, is not.

     Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us  
obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak to its  
reality. They push aside these witnesses to hide from a public eager  
for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative of glory and heroism  
the essence of war, which is death. War, as these veterans explain,  
exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface  
within all of us. This is the truth these veterans, often with great  
pain, have had to face.

     The historian Christopher Browning chronicled the willingness to  
kill in Ordinary Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in  
Poland during World War II. On the morning of July 12, 1942, the  
battalion, made up of middle-aged recruits, was ordered to shoot  
1,800 Jews in the village of Józefów in a daylong action. The men in  
the unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and  
one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including  
women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close  
range.

     Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option  
only about a dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved  
once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning  
says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men  
returned to the barracks they "were depressed, angered, embittered  
and shaken." They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the  
event, "but they needed no encouragement in that direction."

     Each generation responds to war as innocents. Each generation  
discovers its own disillusionment, often at a terrible personal  
price. And the war in Iraq has begun to produce legions of the lost  
and the damned, many of whom battle the emotional and physical trauma  
that comes from killing and exposure to violence.

     Punishing the Local Population

     Sgt. Camilo Mejía, who eventually applied while still on active  
duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of  
American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived  
in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style  
toilets because they would be "sh-tting like dogs." The troops around  
him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose  
culture was alien, little better than animals.

     The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in  
much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and  
"raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. Soon those around  
him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music." Bewildered  
prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids,  
were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the  
baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and  
physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejía remembered,  
"not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what  
would happen to me if I did anything to help them."

     These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the  
American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism.  
Mejía watched, not daring to intervene yet increasingly disgusted at  
the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and  
unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and  
spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When Army units raided  
homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to  
huddle in the corners at gunpoint, and helped themselves to food and  
items in the house.

     "After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose  
whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans,  
and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.

     "But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I  
stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course,  
my own cowardice," he also noted.

     Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close  
to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving  
a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his  
small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold  
alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools  
to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot sh-t up," a soldier said. Some  
opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised  
explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into  
densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who  
became, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."

     "We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the  
risk of being hit by an IED," Mejía said of the deadly roadside  
bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road  
and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid  
being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade  
under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over  
garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of  
the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."

     At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd  
protesting the occupation. Mejía and his squad opened fire on an  
Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejía  
checked his clip afterward and determined that he had fired 11 rounds  
into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in  
crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4  
launchers, and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.

     "The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at  
those who were attacking us," Mejía said, "led to tactics that seemed  
designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting  
them."

     The Algebra of Occupation

     It is the anonymity of the enemy that fuels the mounting rage.  
Comrades are maimed or die, and there is no one to lash back at,  
unless it is the hapless civilians who happen to live in the  
neighborhood where the explosion or ambush occurred. Soldiers and  
Marines can do two or three tours in Iraq and never actually see the  
enemy, although their units come under attack and take numerous  
casualties. These troops, who entered Baghdad in triumph when Iraq  
was occupied, soon saw the decisive victory over Saddam Hussein's  
army evolve into a messy war of attrition.

     The superior firepower and lightning victory was canceled out by  
what T. E. Lawrence once called the "algebra of occupation." Writing  
about the British occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire's  
collapse in World War I, Lawrence, in lessons these veterans have had  
to learn on their own, highlighted what has always doomed  
conventional, foreign occupying powers.

     "Rebellion must have an unassailable base it must have a  
sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of  
occupation too small to dominate the whole area effectively from  
fortified posts," Lawrence wrote. "It must have a friendly  
population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of  
not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by  
2 percent active in a striking force, and 98 percent passive  
sympathy. Granted mobility, security time and doctrine victory will  
rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end  
decisive."

     The failure in Iraq is the same failure that bedeviled the  
French in Algeria; the United States in Vietnam; and the British, who  
for 800 years beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hanged  
hundreds of thousands of Irish patriots. Occupation, in each case,  
turned the occupiers into beasts and fed the insurrection. It created  
patterns where innocents, as in Iraq, were terrorized and killed. The  
campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has  
given rise to a culture of terror and hatred among U.S. forces, many  
of whom, losing ground, have in effect declared war on all Iraqis.

     Mejía said, regarding the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, "This  
sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest  
or even comment."

     Mejía also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of  
Iraqi dead. He related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an  
Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and  
this motherf--er," said one of the soldiers who had been in Mejía's  
squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.

     The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man  
wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

     "Damn, they really f--ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

     The scene, Mejía noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers  
and cousins.

     The senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds,  
rarely experienced combat. They sent their troops on futile missions  
in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition,  
Mejía noted, "was essential to their further progress up the officer  
ranks."

     This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually  
got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to  
contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges - bearing an  
emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak  
wreath - were finally awarded, the commanders brought in Iraqi  
tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert  
combat uniforms.

     "This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front,"  
Mejía noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors  
to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."

     War breeds gratuitous, senseless, and repeated acts of atrocity  
and violence. Abuse of the powerless becomes a kind of perverted  
sport for the troops.

     "I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white-collar family,"  
said Spc. Philip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in  
Kirkuk. "So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And  
it starts with the psy-ops [psychological operations] vehicles out  
there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or  
Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically,  
saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in  
your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had  
Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a  
good show of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few  
houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad  
leader, and maybe a couple other people, but I don't really remember.

     "And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area;  
they're, like, built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they  
have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and  
then they have like a storage-shed-type deal. And we were  
approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking  
ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just  
out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't - motherf--er - he shot  
it, and it went in the jaw and exited out.

     "So I see this dog - and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals  
- and this dog has like these eyes on it, and he's running around  
spraying blood all over the place. And the family is sitting right  
there, with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And  
I'm at a loss for words. And so I yell at him. I'm like, 'What the  
f-- are you doing?' And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without  
a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so  
I told them, I was like, 'F--ing shoot it,' you know. 'At least kill  
it, because that can't be fixed. It's suffering.' And I actually get  
tears from just saying this right now, but - and I had tears then,  
too - and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got  
the interpreter over with me and I get my wallet out and I gave them  
twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him  
give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did  
that. Which was very common.

     "Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever  
done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."

     The Plaster Saints of War

     The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of  
those who use the abstract words of "glory," "honor," and  
"patriotism" to mask the cries of the wounded, the brutal killing,  
war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the  
victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war  
memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage  
and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self- 
important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war.

     The vanquished know the essence of war - death. They grasp that  
war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin,  
with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters  
alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from  
the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war  
too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence as  
well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the  
license to kill with impunity.

     But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after  
the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured  
as children: what it was like to see their mother or father killed or  
taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community,  
their security, and to be discarded as human refuse. But by then few  
listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are  
assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the  
glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And,  
lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer  
not to look.

     We are trapped in a doomed war of attrition in Iraq. We have  
blundered into a nation we know little about, caught in bitter  
rivalries between competing ethnic and religious groups. Iraq was a  
cesspool for the British in 1917 when they occupied it. It will be a  
cesspool for us as well. We have embarked on an occupation that is as  
damaging to our souls as to our prestige and power and security. We  
have become tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. And we believe,  
falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the  
right to wage war.

     We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and  
give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chests for the acts  
of violence they committed or endured. They are our false  
repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of  
patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about  
ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to  
defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our  
civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right  
as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak, and rule.  
This is our nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has  
corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations,  
making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will  
of the state.

     Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits  
- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to - but are the  
battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the  
halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to  
and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They  
have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and  
an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the  
redemptive power to save us from ourselves.

     --------

     Chris Hedges is the former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New  
York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Senior Fellow a the Nation  
Institute. He is the author of several books including War Is a Force  
That Gives Us Meaning. This piece has been adapted from the  
introduction to the just-published, Collateral Damage: America's War  
Against Iraqi Civilians (Nation Books), which he has co-authored with  
Laila al-Arian.

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