Fairlures of Occupation

Failures of Occupation

There is an inexorable trajectory to this process. An army vanquishes another army, only to find that wars don’t always end when generals surrender and capitals fall. When a few locals take up arms because they object to being occupied by “aliens,” the occupiers act like armies, which are designed to kill people, not to win their hearts and minds.

So the occupiers break down doors and search for weapons, terrorizing and humiliating people in the process. They call in air strikes, which kill innocent bystanders. They choke off commerce and impose curfews to teach the locals a lesson, lessons that are never learned. For over 800 years the English beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hung hundreds of thousands of Irish, and it made the natives not the slightest bit quieter or more respectful. Indeed it made them quite the opposite.

In this process of trying to get the occupied to accept defeat, a certain corruption of spirit begins to seep into the soul of an army, transforming it from a war-fighting machine into a kind of monster.

Listen to some of these voices.

Reporter Chris Hedges, who talked with solders, officers, and medical personnel in Iraq, said his interviews “revealed disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops: innocents terrorized during midnight raids, civilian cars fired upon when they got too close to supply columns. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of fear and even hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom, losing ground and beleaguered, have, in effect, declared war on all Iraqis.” Sgt. Camilo Mejia told Hedges that, as far as the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, “This sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.”

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4766