Veterans weigh in on whether Afghanistan and Iraq invasions were worthwhile

In a poll conducted by the Washington Post, veterans weighed in on their attitudes regarding the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These poll results are an embarrassment for those politicians who urged Americans to go to war. Here's the bottom line:

Despite their overwhelming pride and negligible regret, the veterans look back on the necessity of the conflicts with decidedly mixed feelings. Only 53 percent of them believe the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, and just 44 percent say the same for Iraq. Slightly more than a third — almost 900,000 vets — “strongly” believe the Iraq war was not worth it. Those figures are moderately higher than the population as a whole, but they nonetheless reveal a fundamental nuance in attitudes among the all-volunteer military: Many among this generation of vets regard their service as a profession — almost half signed up intending to serve for at least 20 years — and they have divorced their individual missions from the worthiness of the overall wars. “Right, wrong or indifferent, it was something we signed up to do,” said Kenneth Harmon, a retired Marine master sergeant who served for 23 years and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. “It was our job. We got orders. We followed them.”
In other words, about half of the soldiers thought that each of these wars was not worth while. That is a stunning percentage for wars that took such a physical, emotional and financial toll on the United States. For instance:
More than 600,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have become partially or totally disabled from physical or psychological wounds are receiving lifelong financial support from the government, a figure that could grow substantially as new ailments are diagnosed and the VA processes a large claims backlog.
Further, anyone who knows anything about cognitive dissonance sees other huge problems with these results. Those who volunteer for even worthless endeavors will be inclined to say that those endeavors are worthwhile. Service in a fake war for "freedom" for which one has volunteered to sign up, leavse one's family and is personally endangered falls into the "Effort justification paradigm":
Dissonance is aroused whenever individuals voluntarily engage in an unpleasant activity to achieve some desired goal. Dissonance can be reduced by exaggerating the desirability of the goal. Aronson & Mills had individuals undergo a severe or mild "initiation" in order to become a member of a group. In the severe-initiation condition, the individuals engaged in an embarrassing activity. The group they joined turned out to be very dull and boring. The individuals in the severe-initiation condition evaluated the group as more interesting than the individuals in the mild-initiation condition.
Those veterans taking the survey would also be subject to the confirmation bias, which is a form of cognitive dissonance:
Reaffirm already held beliefs: Congeniality bias (also referred to as Confirmation Bias) refers to how people read or access information that affirms their already established opinions, rather than referencing material that contradicts them.[21] For example, a person who is politically conservative might only read newspapers and watch news commentary that is from conservative news sources. This bias appears to be particularly apparent when faced with deeply held beliefs, i.e., when a person has 'high commitment' to their attitudes.
In short, when asked whether the war was worthwhile, many soldiers will seek to find reasons it was worthwhile.  Who wants to admit that they spent a huge part of their lives in a war that was a mistake? In light of all these reasons why veterans would be inclined to find that these wars were worthwhile even while they weren't, almost half of them maintained that they were not worthwhile. There is an even bigger problem with this survey. It is a form of sleight of hand. What the soldiers think about their service has no relation to whether their service furthered any stated national goal. Politicians were told that the soldiers were going to war to "protect America," and to "protect our freedom." Numerous other objectives were stated by American politicians. That was after we were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which it didn't. For the war in Afghanistan, we were told that we needed to destroy the base of Al Qaeda. Where is any evidence that any of these many objectives have been achieved? In the case of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda merely shifted to other countries, to the extent that Al Qaeda is a meaningful entity at all. I would challenge the news media to develop a meaningful metric regarding the reasons that were stated for these wars at the beginning of each of these wars. Once we gather this evidence, we should provide it to our veterans and only then let them weigh in. My suspicion is that we didn't accomplish any of the stated goals for either of these wars. Tell this information to the veterans first, and then ask them whether the wars were worthwhile. Warn them that this question is a MUCH different question than any of the following: 1. Did it make you feel good to wear a soldier's uniform? 2. Did you want to believe that the war you fought in was worthwhile? 3. Did you develop a sense of camaraderie with your fellow soldiers during the war? 4. Did you have some dangerous/exciting experiences during the war? 5. Would you prefer to believe, aside from any evidence that these wars were worthwhile?

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True war heroes

Many of us "Support the U.S. Troops" in the Middle East even though we have no idea what they are doing on a day to day basis. There is no significant news reporting from the areas where the soldiers do whatever they do, so many Americans fills this vacuum with hopeful imagination. I don't. I assume the worst. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and there is no sunshine where the U.S. military is operating in the Middle East. At any time over the past ten years, you could read 100 consecutive days of most any local newspaper, and you wouldn't know anything about the day to day conduct of members of the U.S. military. You would barely know that we were at war. There have been no meaningful photos and no stories to advise us of what is really going on, where our heavily armed military encounters civilians. Nonetheless, in our ignorance, we declare ALL troops to be heroes, clapping for them at baseball games and other social events, having no idea what they are actually doing. Imagine honoring any other profession, not having any self-critical information with regard to that person's activities. "Ladies and Gentlemen, let me hear a round of applause for Joe, who is a great musician,"imagine everyone in the room clapping, even though none of them had ever heard of Joe, and none of them have heard him play even one note. Sometimes we do learn what a soldier has actually done, and sometimes it is a actually the story of a hero. Take the case of Hugh Thompson, who stepped up to do what was right, at his own risk:

Returning to the My Lai area at around 0900 after refueling, he noticed that the people he had marked were now dead. Out in a paddy field beside a dike 200 metres (660 ft) south of the village, he marked the location of a wounded young Vietnamese woman. Thompson and his crew watched from a low hover as Captain Ernest Medina (commanding officer of C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment) came up to the woman, prodded her with his foot, and then shot and killed her. [More . . . ]

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Situational morality and its consequences

Huffpo has a long article on the "moral injury" suffered by combat troops.

It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation. In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which springs from fear, moral injury is a violation of what each of us considers right or wrong. The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding. Moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department. But it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families. Moral injury raises uncomfortable questions about what happens in war, the dark experiences that many veterans have always been reluctant to talk about. Are the young Americans who volunteer for military service prepared for the ethical ambiguity that lies ahead? Can they be hardened against moral injury? Should they be?
I'm still trying to sort this out. I'm tempted to engage in a lot of finger pointing--American society happily celebrates warmongering--just try to think of a holiday where we don't stir in the idea of a soldier fighting or a soldier coming home from battle. We see and hear war images and sounds at many public events, especially sports events. On the other hand, though they are young when they sign up to join the war machine, members of the military are not children. To some extent, they know or should know what they are getting into. They know that they are willing to accept money in order to kill or to support killing on behalf of the United States. Some of them go because they will get to wield weapons and kill. Those people are getting exactly what they want. Those members of the military who don't actually shoot the weapons are complicit. Those of us who are civilians who fail to speak out are also complicit. Perhaps we should be said to be suffering moral injury too, but that's a hard argument to make, because most of us don't give a shit that our soldiers are overseas invading other lands and killing people who are typically poor and brown-skinned. Most of us don't call this kind of killing, where soldiers kill, "murder." After all, there are self-defense murders, and in some cases military actions, including some large-scale military actions do seem like acts of defense. The military PR machine has tapped into this idea by renaming the war machine the "Department of Defense," even those most U.S wars are wars of choice, acts of strategic aggression to suit the needs of banks and businesses. To get us reoriented, we should rename the Defense Department. As stated at Common Dreams,
America's discerning have long recognized that the country can never live without war. It is a country made for war. Small detail: Up until 1947, the Defense Department was called Department of War.
I do think we ought to reframe what it means to kill in uniform. That means that we should stop glorifying the act of killing in uniform unless the reason for the war itself is edifying. We should rename the act of killing in uniform as "situational murder." The analogy is situational homosexuality. Killing in war is a brutal act of ending lives that we are working hard to see in a special context. Akin to money laundering, we could call such killing "murder laundering." It's a matter of killing where innocent lives are blithely written of as collateral damage, something that is really hard to sell back home when police kill innocent people. I am keenly aware of the consequences posed by determinism. Embraced fully, it is an excuse for any action, because we were not really "free" to make our choices. This sets up a monumental paradox, because to keep order and sanity we are forced to assume that we are "free." It is in this crazy context that I resent the attempt to turn non-medical problems into medical problems. "Moral injury" is the suffering one experiences for making choices that are often bad choices. Why did you sign up for the military? Yes, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but only on the battle field did you realize that you were engaged in (I'm speaking of all of America's recent wars of choice) gussied up murder. Back when you signed up, you failed to think things through. The banality of evil was at play--Hannah Arendt's notion that the failure to think causes much more damage than intentional wrongdoing. "Moral injury" is not a medical problem. It is coming to grips with one's choices. It is usually a good thing that one focuses in on one's moral compass, even when the result is self-condemnation. Perhaps the occurrence of moral injury is to be applauded as an awakening of conscience, a terrible lesson learned, and a chance to take public positions warning others to say no to the seduction of wars of choice.

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Pentagon waste should be a top headline every day

Everyone knows that a lot of money is wasted by the Pentagon, but the amount of this waste is staggering, making most of the fraud reported by the media paltry by comparison. Scot Paltrow puts things in perspective: The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery. The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.

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Shocking Video: Afghan villagers attack defenseless U.S. drone

I can't say it any better than Lee Camp: Why do we do these things? it's the same reason the NSA is out of control, and corporate spending on politicians. it's because we CAN.  That's a sorry excuse for doing anything at all. In the case of our drone that are "defending our freedom," it's warmongering run amok. Shame on us, and it's hurting us in the long run, despite the momentary excitement that our military must feel when they blow some to bits from their control board back in Las Vegas. All in a day's work, as is the job of trying to justify why that man (or that wedding party) was a danger to America.

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