This was a recent Facebook exchange I had with a US soldier in Iraq who attacked my friends and I through a Facebook group that disapproves of the War and Occupation of Iraq. Though our responses to each other were haphazardly constructed, I think the exchange serves as an interesting testament to the mentality of the soldiers serving in Iraq. What’s more, the soldier in this exchange is a self-identified Christian.

Hey [Soldier],[1] thanks for letting us pay 78 billion dollars a year so that you can play hero in someone else's country. Keep up the good work. I feel much safer now that you and your buddies destabilized Afghanistan, reaped havoc in Iraq, and incited wide spread hatred of the US in Western Asia...way to go! All at the cost of 440 billion dollars from the federal budget--you really are a hero.

[Soldier] C

11:07am July 9th

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hey [Dude][2] i was just responding to apoligize to you. i now see that our budget could be spent on much better things such as educating the less informed people of america. im glad that you took notice of afghanistan. we destablized the government who supported the terrorists who attacked us and terrorized many of their people. we then replaced it with a govt that has brought positve changes that were never even begun by the previous regime as well as significantly weakening al queda. as for iraq yes we did wreak havoc that resulted in the elimination of a despot who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. now the new govt might not be very stable but it is growing stronger. the quality of life in iraq is on the rise and their currency has one of the fastest growing values in the world which has been estimated to rival western europe's and america's currency within a few decades. also id like to share with you this little fact. the former insurgents who were loyal to saddam have now joined forces with the americans in many parts of the country because they are sick of their respective people, both sunnis and shiites, being killed in the terrorist bombings. now they may still hate each other but they like americans becaues we kill al queda. as for western asia you obviously need to study your history. there are two main roots to the hate of americans. the first is that all radical muslims hate america, and any country that does not agree with them for that matter, because we do not live as they do and refuse to convert.that refusal equals our death and our military does not have that much affect on culture in this country so that one is on you and other civilians. the second is the occupation of the phillipines and several other islands during the turn of the 20th century. this occupation resulted in several revolts and thus the hatred of america. so there you go.

[Dude]

7:48am July 10th

I think you are right, education would be a worthy investment of the 400 billion dollars wasted on your misadventure, we could start by teaching US soldiers how to do basic research and discern from the outright propaganda they read in Stars and Stripes magazine. For example, your response is rife with errors and half-truths (an obvious sign of indoctrination). Take your first claim about Afghanistan, you profess that the Taliban supported terrorists and terrorized many of its people. Your later statement is true, but of little interest to US lawmakers, and to claim otherwise is dishonest or naïve (pending to how much you really believe this rational.) I don’t have to go through the litany of despotic regimes the US supports or has supported in the past (including Iraq under Hussein incidentally at the peak of his crimes) with atrocious human rights records. This consideration weighs little in US foreign policy making and to cite it as a justification for your actions is disingenuous at best. The first claim, that the Taliban supported terror, this is true to the degree that they let al-Queda operate in its territory. But on a broader sense, both al-Queda and the Taliban were supported and trained by the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With the [Soldier]e professed radical-Islam, the CIA had know qualms in supplying bin-Laden and the Taliban with arms. In fact the Taliban was just one of the many warlords the US supported in overthrowing the former Moscow friendly regime—despite the fact that the Moscow friendly regime stood for many of the greater freedoms from tyrannical religious devotion that you all now claim as a justification for US actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It would be like if Iran openly, financially and militaristically supported the Shiite-clique in Iraq against the Washington-friendly regime present in Iraq today---or wait maybe they do…but this is the [Soldier]e thing the US did in Afghanistan, with many of the [Soldier]e people currently serving in the Bush administration, why is it just in one circumstance and not in the other? That really is perplexing—maybe Stars and Stripes or Fox News can provide you with some more misleading firing points to justify this gross imbalance in the application of force and power. Anyway, these warlords are currently running the government in Afghanistan, and to pretend it’s a western-style democratic utopia is wrong, or to claim that such a regime is an improvement is to attempt to mitigate the US-caused suffering in the region. It was announced yesterday that more civilians were killed by US and NATO operations in Afghanistan than by Taliban insurgents…but this information doesn’t justify childish war-hero fantasies so you and your comrades disregard this type of information. Or take the non-disputed fact that US and NATO operations against Afghanistan after Sept. 11 directly killed 9,000 civilians, this is three-times as many who were killed during Sept. 11 for a population that is a fraction the size of the US, disproportionately more suffering for the Afghani people. What were the alternatives, first the US could have more vehemently pressed the Taliban government to turn-over bin Laden, in fact all Afghanistan asked was for proof of bin-Laden’s involvement in the attack, the normal reaction of any sovereign government when asked to turn-over someone residing in its territorial boundaries, but the US flippantly disregarded this request and resorted to military invasion.

In Iraq the country is in shambles and the quality of life is in continued decline—regardless of the prospect of the Iraqi currency in the next few decades (hahaha). The government is split between two warring factions, and the US presence there destabilizes the situation further. Also, al-Qaeda wasn’t operating in Iraq before you hotheads arrived, and there is still no justification for US actions in Iraq today, all official reasons for invading Iraq (e.g. weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda) have become evanescent. But this doesn’t fit the hero narrative you and your buddies create for yourselves so it’s evidently immaterial. Also, you history on so-called radical Islam is completely wrong. This stream of thought is rooted in the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the second half of the 20th Century and has nothing to do with the Philippines. Your claim that these Islamic radicals are attacking the norms and values of the US (i.e. its culture) is ridiculous, I can’t believe you even make this part of your argument, most people dismissed this as poorly constructed Bush propaganda. Or maybe like you said, money needs to be invested into education.

[Soldier] C

8:51am July 12th

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ok so buddy ill attempt to be kind as much as i can. right now i am IN iraq so dont fucking try to tell me what it is like cuz you dont know shit. the quality of life HAS gotten better, it IS a common occurence for Iraqis to come up and shake our hands and say pro american statements, the govt is not split though the militias controlled by the imams are. and this is all in ramadi one of the former hotspots. so dont tell me things are better when i am here experiencing it. and as for the US destabilizing it youre once again completely wrong. yes we're often the scapegoat and attacked by both sides yet at the [Soldier]e time the imams are coming to us to try to get support for their respective sides and to have us mediate in between them. so apparently your "rebel alternative media" seems to have a little taint.

now as for afghanistan. yes the US has supported many tirannical regimes. no this is not right. however that policy is formed by the president at the time and therefore you cannot fault one for the mistakes of the other. also by providing this support the results may be terrible but often it is a nescecerrary evil that is the lesser of two bad situations. as for the support of the taliban and al-queda by your own admissions it was done with qualms. the cia was concerned yet the alternative, letting the ussr increase in influence, resources, and land, was obviously more imminent then the threat of a terrorist attack on US soil which had never happened once in the history of america. the benefits of the move far outweighed the after affects forseen at the time of the decision.

also by your own admission the taliban knew of and allowed al-queda to operate and supported them financially and logistically and now militarily as well. we told the world what would happen to any one that harbored the people that attacked us. they had warning. how can you argue against attacks in retaliation to aggression and a terrible loss of life on our known enemies?

now as for your question of why we should be angry at iran for supporting the people fighting us when we did it to the soviets. once again i can not comprehend what would happen to our country if your kind of thinking ever had an affect over the government. i never said that we should be able to use those tactics and noone else. however unless you havent noticed they are our de facto enemies. that is the difference. it is a modern tactic of international conflict used commonly and it is being used against us. it does not mater whether it is just or not its being used against us. if you want to argue that way then you'd have to fault us for using weapons as well.

yes we may have handled the initial invansion in afghanistan however iraq got fair warning. arguably because of peoples opinoins such as yours that there should have been warning.

next the reason why i brought in the phillipines was because i got confused and was thinking of that area for some reason when you said western asia. that was my mistake. however your facts are once again wrong and typically naive of liberals. the terrorists are not interested in winning a war in the traditional sense. for them to win means that every western ideal and person has been killed or converted to Islam. to believe anything else is naive and stupid. why would they be attacking us if not for the reaons they proclaim so often of themselves? if you listen to any of the several major terrorist groups you will find a common theme. complete disgust with america and its culture and the immorality they see here. also as to your claims of the hate for western culture being started in the 20th century once again your wrong. the tradition of war as part of the religion was started by Muhammed himself. though islam started as a peaceful religion as his ambition and power grew he abruptly changed his views on war and began using his religous position to gain support for his wars against the rival rulers. both the slaughetering of convoys as well as the capture of cities. now as for the struggle specifically against the west it began far before the 20th century during the invasion of europe and the byzintine empire during the middle ages. in reprisal europe invaded the muslim empire and thus the struggle began. now over the course of time europe gained strength and progressed quickly while the muslim empire crumbled and splitted and was no longer a threat until now again. for centuries there has been animosity between muslims and the western world, note i say western world not the US because the whole western world and culture is the enemy of the radical muslims not just the US as proved by their attacks even on countrys that refuse to criticize them, it did not simply start in the 20th century. finally i leave you wiht these quotes from the Quran itself. this is the exact verses from their religous texts. The disbelievers wish that you would disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you may become all alike. Make not, therefore, friends with any of them, until they emigrate in the way of Allah. If they turn away, seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take no friend or helper from among them except such of them as are connected with a people between whom and you there is a pact…therefore, if they do not restrain their hands, seize them and kill them wherever you find them. Against these we have given you clear authority. (4:89-90)

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. (9:29)

and that is why it is so misguided to believe that they will ever stop until we are all dead.

[Dude]

10:56pm July 16th

[Soldier], let’s begin with the last part of your response first. I feel as though you hold negative and racist attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims, not a healthy temper to have if you are suppose to be their benevolent guardians and guide into the democratic process.

I don’t think a cherry-picked quotation out of the Qur'an serves as a good justification for aggressive US foreign policy against Muslim nations. We can find equally disgusting quotes from the Torah and the Bible. Let me lend you one example found in the Old Testament. From Michel Onfray’s book, “The Atheist Manifesto,” I will quote at length a passage that I think is telling:

“Nonviolence, peace, love, forgiveness, mildness, an entire program rejecting war, violence, armies, capital punishment, battles, the Crusades, the Inquisition, colonialism, the atom bomb, assassination—all things that believers in the Bible have been practicing shamelessly for centuries in the very name of their holy book. Why then the blatant logical contradiction? Blatant because only a few verses later [from “though shall not kill”] in Deuteronomy 7:1 the [Soldier]e Yahweh steps to justify the Jews in their extermination of certain peoples explicitly named in the Torah: the Hittites (settlers who came from Asia Minor), Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Hivites, and Jebusittes, no fewer than several peoples, consisting most of the population of Palestine. Against these tribes, Yahweh authorizes anathema, racism—mixed marriages is forbidden—and a ban on contracts. Spurning compassion, he demands the demolition of their alters and monuments and legitimizes book burnings. His reason: the Jews are the chosen people (Deuteronomy 7:6) singled out by God and exalted above all others.” (Onfray, 163)

Now are you going to use this to tell my all Jews and Christians who endorse the Old Testament, as all denominations do, are racist and of a genocidal mentality—simply because of this disgusting passage, among many other misogynous and racist passages, can be found in their holy books? Now that is ridiculous logic, just as using one passage out of context from the Koran is a shoddy way to characterize an entire belief. Also, I feel obliged to remind you that Islam is the world’s second-largest religion with up to 1.4 billion believers, do you really feel that confidently in your judgment from that obscure reference you cherry pick? It’s of course absurd.

Not let me remind of recent history, in regards to the US and its relation to the Middle East. Prior to the 1980s, there were only four instances of so-called “militant Islam.” According to Colombia University Anthropology professor, Mahmoud Mamdani:

“…the practice of…jihad as central to a ‘just struggle’ has been occasional and isolated, marking point of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan—until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s.” (Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” 53)

These previous instances were 1) the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the First Crusade in the 11th Century, 2) in the West African region of the Senegambia in response to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 17th Century, 3) the First War of the Marabout in 1677 in the [Soldier]e area and 4) in the Sudan in the late-19th Century against “Turko-Egyptian/British” colonialism. Mamdani writes, “Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades proceeding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the Cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A’la Mawdudi….and Sayyid Qutb.” (Mamdani, 53)

The US supported Islamic-radicalism as a force to fight the supposed influence of the Soviet Union. This radical brand of Islam was forged out of a conflict with Westernization, but it had few subscribers and wasn’t a dominate force in the region during the era of Pan-Arabism and cuddling, especially by Nassar in Egypt, to the Soviet Union. It is equivalent to fundamentalist Christianity today in the US that essentially calls for a theocratic state, an end to the division of church and state, and hostility toward science and evolution. The [Soldier]e blood of thought that flows through the veins of the radical Islamist can be found in the fundamentalist Christian (who incidentally condone terrorism against Planned Parenthood and homosexuals.) A good case in point is Ronald Reagan, the ideological source of this current administration with many of the [Soldier]e personal (including some who were convicted for perjury in the Iran/Contra scandal) in this administration, so it is utterly disingenuous for you to claim that this administration is separate from the crimes of Reagan and Bush I. Take Richard Pearle for example, Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense who helped finance al-Queda and then part of Bush’s team in 2000. (I am not a Clinton apologist, he had just as atrocious crimes, but with a different staff.)

Ronald Reagan welcomed the mujahideen in 1985 on the White House lawn and proclaimed, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” As Mamdani writes, “[t]his is the moment when America tried to harness extreme versions of political Islam in the struggle against the Soviet Union.” (pg. 119)

Another one of your claims is outright wrong, that the proxy-wars against the USSR was to prevent them from increasing in influence. In fact the strategy was aggressive, not defensive as is evident in its name “roll back.” The idea was to dislodge the Soviet Union from existing sphere of influence, not prevent them from increasing. And even if this were the official justification, it is not permitted under international law and is not pertinent to the security of the US. In fact it did the opposite. It involved the US in Islamic response to colonialism and set it up for a target of “terror”—though what the US has done to Central America, South America and the Middle East is much more terrible than all the accrued radical Islamic campaigns in history. You cannot justify rollback against ideological foes with the real objective of waxing US influence (and control over resource-rich areas) at the expense of thousands of civilians. Would you sacrifice a member of your family for increased corporate hegemony? Probably not, so why should an Afghan suffer so Unocal can access to Central Asian gas?

As for your claim that Iraq had plenty of warning? Warning for what? To prove that it didn’t have weapons of mass destruction? In fact, if you didn’t suffer from absolute amnesia, you would recall that Hussein supplied all the documents (17,000 pages worth) of documents required by the UN and Security Council days before the invasion and those who had been weapons inspectors before Clinton pulled them out opposed the invasion. In addition, the US invasion was a flagrant violation of international law. And as you know there were no weapons of mass destruction, and even if there were, the US is not legally allowed to invade unless the threat is imminent, not suspect. And don’t tell me about your stupid examples of Iraqis showering you with praise. Sappy anecdotal stories are no justification for the scale of violence you participate in? How do you justify this to yourself, when you are obviously giving misleading information and are really, really stretching in your justification of war? You and your comrades are the moral equivalent of Nazis, coming-up with the most extreme racist and obviously fabricated reasoning for continued aggression against an already suffering population. But if it boosts your shallow ego to walk around someone else’s homeland with a gun than I hope you get the most from it.


End Notes:


[1] The name of the soldier was withheld to protect his identity.

[2] My name was withheld for the same reason