Dehumanization and War

[noamnety]

Repost: I posted this in 2006 in a discussion about Iraq, but it's not really about Iraq, it's about war. Some of this is from my own experience, some is explained much better and in much more detail by LTC Dave Grossman (former Army Ranger and Psychology Professor).
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That racism is a factor in the military troops themselves is no longer really debatable. I say that with a lot of love toward many if the Iraq vets, and a recognition of the exceptions, and most of all an understanding of how such things come to be. The rape and sexual abuse going on there, by our troops, is not atypical of an invading army - it's the norm. For an occupying force NOT to engage in rape as a weapon of terror would be the anomaly.

Likewise, for an invading force not to dehumanize the enemy would be abnormal. You can't train troops to consistently shoot at a person they view as their brother. In earlier wars (against primarily white people, it should be noted), less than a quarter of our riflemen actually shot at the enemy when they were supposed to. So the military, as a culture, needs to get troops to a place where they can 1)see the enemy, and 2) shoot the enemy. Just like that, without the moral hangups and decision making process that will get a soldier killed while they're thinking. See, shoot.

We do that in a variety of ways. We no longer use bullseye targets with the big red circle for training. We use silhouettes. See a person, shoot a person. We move up to simulators, where we're holding a rifle, shooting at video dehumanized people/objects. I've used those. We're building and reinforcing those pathways in the brain.

We use simulators for vehicles, with all kinds of scenarios and opportunities to do things we normally wouldn't do. I caught myself falling into that mindset at one point. I was in a simulator, I forget if it was a tank or a bradley, it's been too many years now, but I was flying through a field, and there was a church. I wonder what this would do to a church? And bam, next thing you know, I'm driving it into the church, just to see ... just to see how that would feel.

I was outraged at the reports that we attacked mosques in Iraq, attacked people praying in mosques ... that's unfathomable, inexcusable. And yet, I know it's not such a big leap for a person to make, when they're training in a way that lets them destroy those buildings without any consequences, just to see how that would feel.

Anyone expecting us to fix Iraq by keeping our troops there needs to come to terms with all of that. The original justifications for the war contributed to that culture of racism (or Islamophobia, xenophobia, whatever label one wants to use). We hear talk about how the goal was always "to liberate them" or to "give them democracy" or, now, to rebuild their society. But we need to remember that this was a war started as revenge. Revenge for something Iraq didn't do, but that doesn't really matter - what matters is that the soldiers that first went in, the ones that set the tone for everything that followed, went in with a certain amount of rage and a taste for revenge. This was never, from the start, a humanitarian effort. To pretend the culture of the troops in that region grew out of such a thing, or can convert to that now, after seeing their friends killed and being trained to view the Iraqis as "hadji" is unrealistic.