Good news and bad news on ethics among US troops in Iraq

A front-page story in today’s Washington Post says that US soldiers are “at odds with ethics standards.” The story cites a Pentagon survey showing that “one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq … believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents,” while 40% “said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier” and 10% said they had “mistreated civilians in Iraq.”

I don’t know how those numbers compare to the population at large. I suspect that they’re roughly equal now, when the war is in disfavor, but I remember that when torture was a major issue in 2004 and 2005, polling showed that a majority of Americans were willing to countenance torture either in general or in specific circumstances. While it’s unfortunate that a third of our troops feel that way, it’s also pretty remarkable that after a year or two or three of guerrilla combat, more of them don’t.

What makes it even more remarkable is that the soldiers are in Iraq on behalf of a US administration that shows little or no concern for anyone’s human rights, including those of the soldiers they send into combat. If a third of soldiers think torture should be countenanced, that means two-thirds don’t, and that’s way higher than the corresponding percentage of top White House and Justice Department officials, and probably higher than the one in Congress, too.

From a practical standpoint, having 50 or 60 thousand troops in Iraq who think torture is justified under some circumstances is a disaster (the good news, says the Army surgeon general, is that for the most part “they’re not torturing the people”). And although the 10 percent who admit mistreating civilians seems like a relatively low number — probably artificially low, since two thirds of surveyed Marines and half the Army troops said they wouldn’t report abuse if they saw it — in absolute terms it amounts to an entire division: somewhere around 15,000 troops, which is a lot of Americans doing bad things to a lot of Iraqis. But when you consider that 100% of the handful of people who put them there think the same thing without ever having been subjected to the conditions the troops endure, it’s understandable.

At any rate, it’s no surprise to anyone that when you invade another country and occupy it in the face of violent resistance, bad things will happen on both sides of the fence. That’s one among a host of very good reasons for not invading and occupying countries when it’s not a matter of survival: if you don’t commit a war, you don’t commit war crimes.

Of course most Americans don’t really care what happens to Iraqis, and the numbers in the survey relating to bad outcomes for Iraqis won’t be causing much of a ruckus beyond some ritual political tut-tutting. The results showing what the occupation is doing to Americans, though, will probably elicit some outrage.

Let me say now that the people who are presumed in our warped national political narrative to care about the troops, who are also the people responsible for placing the troops in an untenable situation and keeping them there and using their plights for base political purposes, will be accusing the people who actually regard the troops as human and cite the survey in support of better treatment for the troops of manufacturing outrage for base political purposes. You know the argument; it’s the one that goes “If you truly cared about the suffering and hardships of our men and women in Iraq, you’d subject them to even more of it.”

What the authors of the survey concluded is that Iraq is the most stressful combat duty required of US troops in modern history, because you’re behind enemy lines as soon as you cross the border and you stay there until you cross it again on your way out, and that the troops should be provided in-country breaks from combat along with 18-36 months between tours. The trend is in the opposite direction; when the Pentagon extended tours from 12 to 15 months, the ostensible reason was to guarantee 12 months between deployments. The reason that the down time was slipping below 12 months is that we don’t have enough troops to meet the requirements of the current escalation without extending the combat tours.

Since there’s not the slightest chance that US troops in Iraq will ever get 18 months between deployments unless we double the size of the Army, the natural response from war supporters to anyone who points out that the Army’s own experts think this is necessary will be something along the lines of what I described above: “You don’t care about the troops; you just want them to stay home for 18 months because they can’t unless we leave Iraq.”

That’s excepting someone like Michael Ledeen, who once said that “we may not need new troops, just better use of the ones already there,” by which he meant that far too many of our coddled soldiers were frittering away their tours in coffee shops and gyms. And no, I’m not making that up. Ledeen would probably argue that any Army shrink who has the time to sit around whining about the mental health and emotional well being of our troops should pick up a gun, buy some body armor and head off to the war.

I’m glad that two-thirds of our troops haven’t completely slipped their ethical moorings. I wish the Post writers had examined the difficulties of maintaining a sense of proportion in alien circumstances, and had thought to favorably compare the sensibilities of that two-thirds with those of Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and other luminaries who have endorsed and in some cases mandated torture and lesser forms of brutality.