SPEAKING FREELY*: GI Joes Who Just Want to Go Home

By Sarah Whalen

*Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.

"Rogues!" screamed Frederick the Great at the 1757 battle of Kolin, berating his soldiers for hesitating in battle. "Do you want to live forever?" They decided they didn't and went forth, sacrificing themselves for an immediate battle defeat, Frederick's first. But still, Frederick pressed on, won a great victory, and Prussia created the trappings of modern Germany.

That's the difference between 17 soldiers of the US 343rd Quartermaster Company fuel platoon of the 13th Corps Support Command based in Tallil, Iraq, and the frothing mix of Iraqi insurgents and jihadis who want them to leave. US soldiers increasingly want to live forever, or at least for as long as it takes to get home, whereas insurgents and jihadis are increasingly willing to die - to be killed and kill themselves and also their own, to make sure the Americans go. President George W Bush's Pentagon destroyed Fallujah in order to save it but received a glancing blow from its own forces last month, heralding a far more serious future wound when those 17 soldiers refused to embark on what they called a "suicide mission" convoy. They claimed their vehicles were inadequately armored, poorly repaired and running on contaminated gas that could cause them to become victims of roadside bombings and sniper fire.

And then they called home to their mommies to complain. One man even called his grandpa.

Imagine Frederick the Great calming mommies and grandpas on CNN's Sunday news show, as was US Brigadier General James E Chambers, patiently addressing each and every soldier's complaint, explaining that every five convoy vehicles are escorted by a five-ton truck operated by heavily armed contractors or military police, that every US soldier on the convoy is heavily armed regardless of position, that convoys generally receive air coverage by army rotary aircraft, that special quick-reaction forces are often attached to convoys, and that all gas is carefully filtered and tested. And still, regrettably, insurgents kill and maim them.

Frederick the Great would go out of his mind. If he didn't die laughing first.

Do insurgents call their mommies to complain? Does their leadership appear on al-Jazeera Sunday news shows, explaining why they have no shoes, no socks, no latest anything? No. Why? Because they're busy fighting.

Insurgents don't need much because they've never had much. And still they fight. They don't get scared delivering the gas. What gas? What food? They were born into a harsh world. They know they're not going to live forever. Twenty years is good, 30 is better, 40 is old in a lot of places on Earth.

Bush sent America's military and its international coalition into Iraq ostensibly to rid the world of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But he now fights a war with people armed with homemade bombs and kitchen knives who seem unstoppable. Why?

It started with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its American continuation. In fighting a comparably unarmed enemy with overwhelming force, America accidentally created within the "enemy" a new class of killers through naturally selecting out the most extraordinarily talented fighters. Israel has unwittingly done the same in its creation of a Palestinian state as an internment camp. These natural-selected fighters survive not only their surrounding poverty and hostile environment, but a murderous onslaught from the most powerful militaries on Earth.

US Army General Charles Dunlop saw the coming wave years ago while serving in Somalia: "I was struck," Dunlop says, "by the resourcefulness, cleverness and fierceness of the Somalis in confronting us" even though they had only primitive weapons and were often starving. Dunlop warns, America underestimates "the combat capability of societies we had considered too resource-poor to challenge us."

The insurgents will go far, break even their own taboos and religious law. They want us to leave, and finally reportedly shot aide worker Margaret Hassan full in the face. Almost simultaneously, a US soldier not under any threat fired his weapon murderously into a crumpled, captured insurgent lying in a mosque awaiting medical attention. Hassan, a British citizen who obtained Iraqi citizenship through her Iraqi-born husband, was killed by anarchists to achieve a political end - forcing the West to leave Iraq.

The unfortunate insurgent was killed for no particular pressing reason other than his status as one of "them" and the shooting soldier simply decided to do it. Are both murders the same kind of thing? Not really. Both are horrendous tragedies. Two people were killed, but for very different reasons. And while the insurgents are answerable to themselves, God, and eventually the Iraqi state, our soldier is answerable to all these and our laws, which abhor what he did. War may be hell, but if we are using it to deliver democracy, as we claim, we must make it less hellish.

While Bush says he can win in Iraq by pressing ahead as is, and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promises to reduce troops by adding "smarter" weaponry, neither strategy is impressive. Iraq's insurgents wage not limited textbook war, but "a vicious form of confrontation" focusing "on shattering the will of an opponent by employing brutality openly and unapologetically against combatants and noncombatants alike," Dunlop observes. It doesn't cost much or require any special training to take someone hostage, cut off a head, shoot a woman in the face, or rig a booby trap. The terrifying effects are profound; pretty soon US troops won't even want to take out the trash, let alone deliver the gas. Or they will become so contemptuous of Iraqi human life, and of "them" that no Iraqi will be safe in their own country as long as we are there. They will shoot off the weak and defenseless, as our soldier did.

How to save the situation and still fight the "war on terror"? Cutting off the money isn't the answer, although forcing the charade through our courts will definitely make a handful of trial attorneys richer. While the US Senate Intelligence Committee spends millions "following the money" to link terrorism with a supposedly diabolical international banking system, new warriors don't spend much. Technology gets cheaper all the time, just as it gets easier to use. Dunlop predicts: "Realistic new combat simulators and self-paced computerized teaching technologies will make sophisticated training available to the masses in the less-developed world." US Federal Aviation Agency officials say off the record that American flight schools did not likely train the September 11, 2001, terrorists half so well as Microsoft's $30 flight simulator computer program.

That's why getting into Iraq was far easier than getting out will be. Give General Dunlop another star for being so right.

Sarah A Whalen writes a weekly column on US foreign policy for Arab News, and is an expert in Islamic law.