The Things We Do Not Know

I shouldn't be posting this.

Today I learned that a friend of a friend of mine was court martialled and released from the Army for the alleged torture of Iraqis.

I'm not close with this person, it would be safe to say that we met once, very briefly, and exchanged maybe five words the entire time. I can't say much more than that.

The legal documents are accessible online, but out of a (passing) respect for the privacy of the situation, I won't link to them. There were so many US soldiers found guilty in those trials that it doesn't give much away to admit to this acquaintance.

Let me be brief. It's shocking - and uncomfortable - to be in the presence of someone even dimly associated with this. The pictures of prisoner abuse horrified America, but what was worse was that we most likely didn't see the worst.

Looking through the trial documents of multiple soldiers online, however, what emerges is a more fragmented and difficult picture: a portrait of the moral no-man's-land of war. There are several facts that, by virtue of their historical persistence, we can accept for the truth.

1) Some of the US soldiers who were punished were innocent.
2) Some of the guilty soldiers went free.
3) Some of the torture incidents were exaggerated in later reports.
4) Some of the torture incidents were underexaggerated, brushed under the rug, or never reported at all.

But the question that remains, long after perusing the online archive, is this: was this part of the general hideousness of war, which permits abuse in a world where the consequences of someone's actions depend on national or ethnic origin rather than on absolute morality? Was it a systematic element of US operations in Iraq, an element implicitly encouraged by Pentagon higher-ups as a method of demoralizing a difficult enemy? Was it a demonstration of the ugliness of the race and class barriers that lurk within all people? Was it Heart of Darkness?

These are all things that, years later, we do not definitively know. They are things that some people would say do not matter. Except that war has an aftermath. Iraqi memories are going to be longer than ours, perhaps because their innocents suffered in this war even more than ours did (after all, the war took place on their soil. Saddam, for all the rumors, did not launch an official attack on the United States).

What this all boils down to is that years from now, some Americans will be scratching their heads, wondering "Why do they hate us?" A lot of the media like to mock these Americans. Who is "they" ask the mockers. Do those poor shmucks even know?

But we know who "they" are. Do we know who "we" are? Do we know, any of us, what exactly has or hasn't been done in our name? Is it easy to be moral when you don't have to fight for your life? Or is it harder?

A nation should be aware that its conduct in wartime is a part of its spirit. In a few short years, we squandered a (perhaps mistaken) reputation built on years of staunch advocacy of certain "universal rights." Wars, by their nature, erode those rights.

What I am saying, of course, is that the toll on all concerned is almost too vast to comprehend. The United States has paid for Iraq in the lives of US soldiers (those who died, those who lost their reputations, those who were rightly or wrongly accused, those who served and were injured), the lives of Iraqi civilians, the lives of Iraqi soldiers, its international reputation for human rights and the massive opportunity cost (education, scientific research, Social Security) of the billions and billions of dollars we've spent on it.

We've paid a lot. That kid I met once, briefly, has paid a lot. And by extension, so have most of us. What did any of us get out of it? That's another thing we might never exactly know.