We are the Thought Police

Few other publications, however, were willing to explore this. Doing so would require acknowledging that U.S. soldiers in Iraq are not necessarily paragons of virtue, that they do not always show respect for Iraqi civilians, that at times they harass, abuse, injure, and even kill them. It would require acknowledging that the Iraq war, like most wars, is a savage, pitiless affair in which American soldiers have been forced to do many un-American things. Most Americans prefer not to confront this. They want to be able to maintain their belief that Americans are an exceptionally virtuous, freedom-loving people and that their soldiers are a uniquely compassionate, well-meaning force. Any assertions to the contrary can rouse the beast, and the press, well aware of this, tends to tread warily around it.

Needless to say, many U.S. soldiers do behave in an upright fashion. Intent on doing good, they have distributed toys to children, cleaned up streets in poor neighborhoods, and arranged medical help for the injured and ailing. But these soldiers have been placed in an extraordinarily perilous environment with minimal preparation, and as the security situation has deteriorated and the population has grown increasingly belligerent, they have responded in ways that do not always conform to the standards taught in Army field manuals.

For a truly unsanitized look at the nature of the occupation, one must consult the many books that have been written about it. Just as the most graphic footage from Iraq has been tucked away in documentaries, so has the rawest reporting been relegated to books that only the most motivated will seek out. Especially revealing are the many firsthand accounts produced by ordinary soldiers. Among them are "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," by Colby Buzzell, a pot-smoking admirer of Charles Bukowski, Ralph Nader, and George Orwell and the operator of one of the most widely read milblogs (until it was shut down by the military); "Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army," by Kayla Williams, a freewheeling, foulmouthed military intelligence specialist; "The Deserter's Tale," by Joshua Key, a private from Oklahoma who, appalled by the brutality and cruelty of his fellow soldiers, left his unit and fled to Canada; and "Operation Homecoming," a collection of eyewitness accounts, private journals, and short stories by U.S. soldiers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. In these books are recorded not only many acts of courage, self-sacrifice, and benevolence but also many deeply disturbing aspects of the U.S. presence in Iraq -- realities that tend to get airbrushed out of news accounts. Among them:

The prevalence of drug use among U.S. troops. From these books, it seems clear that heavy drinking, hash smoking, and pill popping (especially of Valium, which is widely available in Iraq) are commonplace among U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Near universal is the use of "dip," or smokeless tobacco, which causes soldiers to spit out thick gobs of brown goo everywhere they go.

The ubiquity of pornography. Before the invasion, porn was all but unavailable in Iraq, but the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops has helped create an active market in it. Many Iraqis have since developed a taste for it as well, and soldiers freely trade porn for alcohol and pills. They also use it to motivate their Iraqi counterparts, promising a peek at a skin magazine in return for their going out on patrol.

The frequency of stealing from Iraqis. Despite strict prohibitions against this, U.S. soldiers on raids or at checkpoints sometimes unburden Iraqis of cash, jewelry, knives, electronic equipment, and sunglasses. Cars and motorcycles are sometimes seized as well.

The widespread contempt in which Iraqis are held. This is evident in the lexicon of racially charged terms used to refer to them: ragheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers, terrorists, and "the fucking locals." Many soldiers come to regard Arabs as "smelly, awful people," Kayla Williams writes. The labels for Iraqis are but a subset of the raw, thoroughly profane language many soldiers in Iraq use, a trait that generally goes unmentioned in journalistic reports from the field.

The routine mistreatment of Iraqi citizens during house raids. U.S. forces have undertaken thousands of these actions, hoping to find insurgents, weapons, and intelligence. In carrying them out, they often break down doors, bust up furniture, rip up mattresses, round up sleeping children from their beds, and arrest and zipcuff every able-bodied male in sight. These men are frequently punched, kicked, burned with cigarettes, and generally roughed up. In these books, a Marine brags of punching prisoners in the face or groin when no one is looking; a detainee is repeatedly kicked in the face in an effort to make him stop laughing; a prisoner suffers a broken jaw; another dies in custody. The vast majority of those detained turn out to be innocent. From these accounts, it seems clear that the types of abuses committed at Abu Ghraib were not the work of "a few bad apples," as most Americans insist on believing, but common occurrences throughout the archipelago of detention facilities maintained by the United States in Iraq.

The killing of innocent Iraqis at checkpoints. Throughout Iraq, U.S. soldiers set up roadblocks to check for weapons and prevent car bombs, but the sites are often so poorly marked that Iraqis do not realize that they are supposed to stop at them. When they fail to do so, they are often fired on and not infrequently killed. These books are filled with gruesome accounts in which U.S. soldiers, worried that they were coming under attack, gunned down innocent Iraqis.

The high civilian death toll in Iraq. Checkpoints are but one type of encounter in which innocent Iraqis die at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Convoys of U.S. military vehicles frequently run Iraqi cars off the road, causing injury and sometimes death. U.S. soldiers, when shot at, routinely respond by opening up fire and pumping round after indiscriminate round into hamlets, towns, and urban neighborhoods. When a location is suspected of harboring insurgents, it is often pounded by artillery rounds or air strikes, with often devastating results for civilians. In "The Deserter's Tale," Joshua Key observes that each military company in Iraq is responsible for dealing with the bodies of the civilians it has killed, and it fell to him to build a shack to hold the bodies of Iraqis slain by his unit until someone came to claim them.

Next page: The American public is its own Ministry of Truth