Iran Nuclear Coverage Echoes Iraq War Media Frenzy

Posted: 02/17/2012 8:29 am

NEW YORK — Military strikes expected! Weapons inspectors called in! A murky al Qaeda connection! And Cheney says time’s up for Ira…

Wait. Haven’t we seen this movie before?

It’s already been a decade since the media hyped bogus WMD claims prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it sure feels like 2002 for anyone who was around then and is now scanning newspaper headlines or watching TV talking-heads discuss a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities — an act which could pull the U.S. into another thorny Middle East military conflict.

Some of the media’s more overheated Iran coverage bears an eerie resemblance to Iraq coverage, but instead of former Vice President Dick Cheney we have his daughter Liz Cheney making the Sunday show rounds.

“A nuclear weapon in the hands of the world’s worst sponsor of terror, one of them, is something we can’t stand for,” Cheney said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Iran nuclear story has also led several network newscasts this week. On Tuesday, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer talked of a “shadow war being waged by Iran,” followed by chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross describing a “violent series of attacks by Iran,” which may be retaliation for the recent killing of Iranian scientists.

CBS News anchor Scott Pelley kicked off Wednesday’s broadcast by saying that Iran is “defying the world,” while NBC’s Brian Williams asked if “the U.S. about to get dragged into a new confrontation.”

One national security reporter, who has covered the intelligence community and Iran but was not authorized to comment, says that pre-Iraq War coverage and recent Iran coverage are “terrifyingly similar.”

“I don’t think we are falling totally back into where we were before, but I do think you’re seeing, in some corners of our profession, we’re making the same mistakes we made a decade ago,” the reporter said. “We’re taking things at face value and we’re rushing to get ahead of a story that we don’t know where it’s going.”

While questions have loomed for years about Iran’s nuclear intentions and ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, we’re now in the midst of a full-scale flood of stories suggesting that Iran is on track to build a nuclear bomb, and even some speculating that the Iranian regime may strike the United States, perhaps in collusion with terrorists.

On Wednesday, British broadcaster Sky News — citing intelligence officials — claimed that Iran and al Qaeda “have established an operational relationship amid fears the terror group is planning a spectacular attack against the West.” The Daily Telegraph, another British outlet, published a similar story attributing the link to what “officials believe.”

National security and intelligence reporting often requires quoting anonymous officials, of course, and is subject to the same pitfalls that other source-centric beats face (like Wall Street dealmaking, for example). Even a piece on coverage of that coverage — like this one — includes one anonymous source. All of which begs a very germane question: To what extent is this community of foreign policy background sources spinning the media on Iran? And does the media really have any way of meaningfully assessing the merits of what those sources are saying?

Exhibit A from the pre-Iraq invasion days for why more caution may be in order: the false reports of a “Prague connection” between 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and Iraqi officials — a thinly-sourced story promoted in the media and seized upon by officials from the administration of former President George W. Bush.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, is an inviting target. He has long spoken about confronting Israel, and he routinely makes outrageous statements that commentators have seized upon to justify a preventive strike to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

“I cannot imagine the Israelis are going to allow Iran to go nuclear and to hold the Damocles sword over 6 million Jews all over again,” columnist Charles Krauthammer said last week on Fox News. “Israel was established to prevent a second Holocaust, not to invite one.”

The idea that Iran is currently in pursuit of — or even already has — a nuclear bomb has become accepted wisdom in much of Washington and amplified by the media. But the reality is much more opaque. When James Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, appeared before the Senate last month, he told lawmakers that “we don’t believe they’ve actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.” Clapper’s statement reflected the conclusions of some in the intelligence community that Iran suspended its nuclear warhead program in 2003.

Both the latest U.S. assessments, and the most recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which actively monitors the sites of Iran’s nuclear energy program, buttress this viewpoint: While there is ample reason to fear Iran might acquire a nuclear weapon, and is capable of doing so, there is no definitive proof that they have yet decided to try.

The November IAEA report itself, initially touted as offering the first “credible” evidence of a nuclear weapons project, later turned out to be a far weaker document, offering allegations that The New York Times described as “not substantially new, and [which] have been discussed by experts for years.” Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ public editor, later took the paper to task for overstating the conclusiveness of the IAEA’s findings.

Perhaps as a consequence of the murkiness of these assessments, public misinformation about Iran’s nuclear project remains exceedingly high: in a 2010 poll, 7 in 10 Americans said they believe Iran already has the weapons. (In the Iraq War’s early days, 81 percent of Americans said they believed the country likely possessed WMD’s, an understandable conclusion given Bush administration statements and the media’s coverage).

There’s an important difference between then and now, though, even if the media drumbeat sounds familiar. The current White House isn’t in a rush to go to war.

Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, says “the major difference is that the [Obama] administration is not orchestrating this the way the Bush administration was in driving selective leaks of intelligence.”

Several other journalists, in interviews with The Huffington Post, pointed out that the Obama administration appears intent on seeing if sanctions work and finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, especially after over 10 years of conflict following the attacks of Sept. 11.

In 2002, Bush administration officials raised the specter of mushroom clouds on Sunday morning shows if the U.S didn’t act and the White House press secretary openly encouraged Iraqi citizens to assassinate Saddam Hussein. In contrast, the Obama administration has been relatively cautious in its statements about Iran. But to be sure, the White House doesn’t have to be any more aggressive when Israeli officials, in conversations with reporters, are always ready to dial up the threat or play down the consequences of a strike.

“I don’t think it’s anything like the Iraq war,” said Newsweek’s Eli Lake, who co-wrote the magazine’s in-depth story this week on the “dangerous game” playing out between Israel, Iran and the United States. “The most aggressive actor is another country, not America.” The question now, Lake said, is, “will Israel bomb Iran because they don’t expect Obama will take the action if the sanctions don’t work?”

“The Obama administration,” Lake added, “takes great pains to say their policy isn’t regime change,”

That’s why Iran-watchers took note when the Washington Post published an explosive claim online last month by an anonymous “senior U.S. official” that the goal of Iranian sanctions is regime collapse. But the Post soon scrubbed the claim about regime change for the next day’s print edition. (Reporter Karen DeYoung told The Huffington Post that the initial story was based off handwritten notes, which she found to have misquoted the source when later listening to a recording of the interview.)

The U.S. military isn’t enthusiastic about the military option, either. The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported Wednesday on the military’s concerns about getting dragged into a “war many believe would be messy, bloody, unpredictable and ultimately inconclusive.”

“I think it’s a different kind of media frenzy because it’s not one that the Obama administration necessarily wants to have,” Foreign Policy’s Hounshell added. “The Israelis want to have it and the Israelis want the coverage to be more aggressive. The thing we don’t really know is how serious the Israelis are [about striking Iran].”

But some have their suspicions. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June,” according to a much-discussed Feb. 2 column by the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius. When asked about the uptick in recent Iran coverage, Ignatius told The Huffington Post it’s appropriate for there to be a “growing discussion of the danger of military confrontation.”

“I think the thing I have learned from the experience of 2003 is that it’s important to raise questions of whether a military attack makes sense,” Ignatius said, “and to try to pull from U.S. government officials information that challenges the assumption that a military attack would be easy, would deliver the intended result.” (While U.S officials are unlikely to say the military option would be easy, Israeli officials have suggested to journalists that Iran is “bluffing” about retaliating).

“It’s important for there to be an open discussion of whether this makes sense,” Ignatius added, “even if that seems to be, at times, hyping or overdramatizing the possibility of war.”

New York Times reporter David Sanger, who has written extensively on Iran and nuclear issues, said that he’s “discovered that even the most scrupulously neutral story prompts emails from some readers who argue, in essence, that by writing about the subject we are somehow encouraging an attack on Iran.”

“I reject that view — after all, simply because we write about atrocities in Syria or nuclear tests in North Korea does not mean we are prescribing American military action,” Sanger continued. “My job is not to advocate an approach — it is to make sure we explore and explain each option, and its pros and cons. And in Iran’s case there are many alternatives to military action — diplomacy, sanctions, covert action. We have written extensively about each of them, and noted that in the eyes of some experts, each may buy more time than a military attack.”

Some reporters have done admirable work in describing the complexity of the situation in Iran and how it’s different from Iraq — even if on the surface, the frenzy looks remarkably similar. Even so, there have been plenty of reports that appear to be hyping Iranian threats rather than proceeding more cautiously, including scary headlines that get shot down later in the same article the headline touts.

For example, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that “U.S. officials say they believe Iran recently gave new freedoms to as many as five top al Qaeda operatives who have been under house arrest.” But following several qualifiers around sourcing — like “say they believe” or “may have provided” — the Journal later quoted a U.S. official saying the following: “There is not significant information to suggest a working relationship between Iran and al Qaeda.”

Three days earlier, Foreign Affairs reported that “virtually unnoticed, since late 2001, Iran has held some of al Qaeda’s most senior leaders.” The Foreign Affairs lead suggests a hidden Iran-al Qaeda connection, and the headline on the piece is even more blunt about it: “Al Qaeda in Iran: Why Tehran is Accommodating the Terrorist Group.”

As a counterpoint to this perspective, the Associated Press published a deeply reported investigation two years ago on the “enduring mystery of al Qaeda leaders and operatives who fled into Iran after 9/11 and have been detained there for years.”

The AP reported that some al Qaeda’s leaders had moved around Iran, or even left the country, while cautioning that “intelligence officials don’t fully understand” the, at times, fractious relationship between the Sunni terror group and Shiite regime. “Monitoring and understanding al Qaeda in Iran remains one of the most difficult jobs in U.S. intelligence,” the AP reported.

It’s not only the Iran-al Qaeda connection that’s led to hawkish headlines. On Jan. 31, the Washington Post ran this ominous headline: “Iran, perceiving threat from West, willing to attack on U.S. soil, U.S. intelligence report finds.” Several paragraphs into the story, however, the Post notes that “U.S. officials said they have seen no intelligence to indicate that Iran is actively plotting attacks on U.S. soil.” The headline-grabbing assessment appears to stem solely from an allegedly Iranian-linked plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington D.C. that was foiled in October. The bungled scheme, and what it could indicate, was back in the news because National Intelligence Director Clapper discussed it — among various other national security issues — in Congressional testimony. But it’s the Iran threat that got the most attention.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who has written extensively on U.S. media coverage of Iran in recent weeks, described the Post story as a “monument to mindless stenographic journalism” and — along with a Foreign Affairs piece on an al Qaeda-Iran connection — as part of “a concerted media-aided fear-mongering campaign aimed at Iran.”

“So, to recap: Iran is working closely with al Qaeda and is ready to launch Terrorist attacks inside the U.S.,” Greenwald wrote. “Is it that hard to come up with new propaganda? Is recycling scary storylines really the best that can be done?”

When reached, Post national security reporter Greg Miller said the story speaks for itself.

NBC investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, who co-authored “Hubris,” a 2006 book on the selling of the Iraq War, said that “it’s unfortunate that the experience in Iraq has so colored the debate on Iran, as to perhaps make it more difficult to focus on what the real issues are.”

“People who are skeptical about claims about an Iranian nuclear program will point to the Iraq experience,” Isikoff added. “That doesn’t mean they’re right and it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. It just means, it’s just a historical fact that we’re going to look at these issues through the lens of the misleading claims that were made about Iraq.”

The Huffington Post’s Joshua Hersh contributed reporting.

The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the president takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

Speaking of the troops, President Obama began: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.”

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president’s comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news — of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama’s next phrase, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.

The president chose to celebrate the US military; the press chose not to raise a peep about the spread of US militarism. Yet US targets proliferate — abroad – with unmanned drones assassinating unconvicted suspects in innumerable undeclared wars. And militarism spreads at home. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial a permanent feature of the American legal system. It’s kind of the critics not to mention that – or the president’s four-year-old pledge to close Guantanamo, and to restore the “rule of law.”

“They’re not consumed with personal ambition… They work together,” continued the president (again, speaking of the troops.) There are surely plenty of troops who would disagree. The tally is long of commanders and pigeon hawk commanders-of-commanders who’ve dodged responsibility, fingered underlings and permitted rank-and-file “bad-apples” to take the heat for US war crimes.

“Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops,” the president concluded.

There are indeed things we can learn; things that many US troops have begged us to learn. That war dehumanizes the killer and the killed, and that war tactics have a habit of spreading from the war zone to the home. Successive generations have told us that military recruiters lie, and that “rules of war” exist only in legal minds. (Ninety percent of casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were civilians.) Troops have begged us to learn just what we are celebrating when we celebrate “winning” and war.

As far as I can see, Ralph Nader on Democracy Now was the lone voice of disgust on national TV.

Clearly we have a lot to learn.

Last night at a wonderful Patty Larkin concert in Ashfield, which is actually experiencing winter, Patty spoke about her 1st grade daughter asking her, “What is war, Mommy?”  She told the audience how she tried to answer this and subsequent questions only to realize how monumentally hard it is to talk about what war is, what causes war, whether people die – “Yes, sweetheart,” she said, “people are dying in war somewhere on the planet right now.” But we must talk about war with our young people.  Are the students I teach in sixth grade too young?  I don’t think so.

We need an anti-war curriculum, K-12, in this country since we persist in seeking an empire and pretend we’re being the world’s cop over and over again, seemingly perpetually.  I am presently teaching media literacy as part of my Human Growth and Change Unit and I am trying to undo the past damage and prevent future damage to the psyches of young people as seemingly intentionally sought by the media.  The next post this morning discusses the ubiquitous YouTube and connects the dots between the urination atrocity and Abu Ghraib.  Young people at ages we need to determine need to see images of war that they can learn from and what I want them to learn is what the soldier below tells us at the end of his piece:

“But we shouldn’t let ourselves be fooled that an immoral mission and immoral war could ever be conducted in an honorable manner. War crimes were implicit in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and they are abundant in the continued occupation of Afghanistan.”

During the second siege of Fallujah, blatant war crimes were committed, yet the corporate media reported them with indifference. The siege itself was a war crime, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross Summary of International Law, because indiscriminate tactics were used, constant care was not taken to protect the civilian population, proper distinction between civilians and combatants was not made, medical personnel and medical units were not protected, indiscriminate weapons were used, and recent research about the current health crisis in Fallujah suggests that poisonous weapons may have been used as well.

Many of these war crimes were reported by the corporate media, though they were not described as such. For example, the New York Times reported on 8 November 2004 that American forces “seized” the Fallujah general hospital. An incident that I witnessed, as did Paul Wood and Robbie Wright from the BBC, was when my unit fired grenades into a house until it collapsed – with full knowledge that there were two resistance fighters and a young boy (roughly 10 years old) inside. Paul Wood interviewed the lieutenant at the scene, and he acknowledged that they had killed the young boy. In both of these reports, war crimes and Geneva Conventions were never mentioned, and the façade of honorable conduct was preserved.

What did not make it into the news was my behavior in Fallujah and the behavior of others in my unit, which I am certain would have elicited outrage equal to that elicited by this video of the urinating marines. I believe that the second siege of Fallujah can correctly be characterised as an “atrocity-producing situation”. Our false beliefs about who we were fighting, our dehumanisation of Fallujans, our desire to “see combat” (a cute euphemism) and to get a confirmed kill, and our longing for revenge for lost comrades against a faceless enemy all conspired to create a bloodthirsty and lawless atmosphere.

I witnessed marines stealing from the pockets of dead resistance fighters and looting houses. I’ve heard firsthand accounts of marines mutilating dead bodies, of a marine who murdered a civilian, and of a marine who slit a puppy’s throat. As the days of the siege passed, we used increasingly indiscriminate and illegal tactics – like “reconnaissance by fire”, which is when you fire into a house to see if anyone is inside. The violence, the hate and our distorted sense of morality made many of us sick, including myself. I stole a black ski mask out of someone’s home, because I wanted to take it home as a trophy, as evidence that I had fought against the “terrorists”.

My behavior and the behavior of others in my unit was despicable, as was the behavior of these marines urinating on corpses. But we shouldn’t let ourselves be fooled that an immoral mission and immoral war could ever be conducted in an honorable manner. War crimes were implicit in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and they are abundant in the continued occupation of Afghanistan.

Yet, many of us choose not to see these war crimes, even though they are right in front of our faces. Only when a shocking YouTube video comes along, do we choose to look. And even then, what we see is the urinating.

So here’s what the writer, Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower” has to say about the film and why we need to see it:

A MOVIE FOR THIS CHRISTMAS

By Nicolaus Mills, Special to CNN

updated 7:54 AM EST, Fri December 23, 2011

Cinematographer Gregg Toland, left, William Wyler, Dana Andrews and Virginia Mayo on “The Best Years of Our Lives” set.

(CNN) — This Christmas season the classic film most of us will watch on our televisions is Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” With good reason: It’s the perfect feel-good Christmas movie. In celebrating the quiet good works that Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey has done in running his family’s savings and loan bank for the benefit of the residents of Bedford Falls, “It’s a Wonderful Life” tells the story of American modesty at its best.

But the movie we ought to be watching this Christmas season is another 1946 classic, William Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives.” With a script by playwright Robert E. Sherwood, who also was a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt, “The Best Years of Our Lives” tells the story of the difficulties three World War II veterans overcome on returning to their peacetime lives in the fictional Midwestern town of Boone City.

What makes the Academy Award-winning “Best Years of Our Lives” so relevant are the problems today’s veterans — now coming home in increased numbers with the end of the Iraq war — are having finding a place in civilian life.

Veterans in the 20-24 age bracket have an unemployment rate of nearly 30%, more than double the 14.5% unemployment rate of nonveterans in the same age group, and veterans of all ages have an unemployment rate of 11.8% compared with the civilian unemployment rate of nearly 9%.

Equally alarming are the mental health figures for today’s returning vets. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, veterans account for about one in five of the more than 30,000 suicides committed annually in the United States, and the problem is only getting worse. This year 10,000 combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder entered Veterans Affairs hospitals every three months, pushing the number of vets ill with PTSD to 200,000, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“The Best Years of Our Lives” does not present us with a programmatic answer for how to help returning vets. Wyler does not even mention the GI Bill of Rights, which eventually made it possible for 4.3 million vets to purchase homes at low interest rates and for 2.2 million vets to attend college. But what “The Best Years of Our Lives” does emphasize is that for those who fight them, our wars continue long after they officially end.

In “the Best Years of Our Lives,” Al Stephenson, a banker played by Fredric March, is the best off of the three vets, but only because of the patience of his wife can Al settle back into the routine of office work.

Fred Derry, an Air Force bomber captain played by 1940s leading man Dana Andrews, discovers his wife has been unfaithful to him, and gets back on his feet only because he persuades a compassionate local businessman to give him a job turning old B-17 bombers into scrap that can be used for building houses.

And Homer Parrish, a sailor played by real-life veteran Harold Russell, who lost both his hands in a World War II training accident, is able to accept the notion that he isn’t a freak because the girl he left behind finally convinces him that his wounds don’t repel her.

The result is a series of bittersweet endings that are inseparable from the film’s implicit belief that most vets can’t succeed on their own when they return home. They need help.

The release of “The Best Years of Our Lives” in November 1946 made it possible for Wyler to deliver his bittersweet message during America’s second post-World War II Christmas season. The timing was perfect for a director whose three years of service in the U.S. Army Air Forces did not blind him to the harsh realities that followed even a “good war.”

I’ve been seeking wisdom and compassion for the men and women our country, for a host of often comprehensively wrong-headed reasons, keeps sending to war.  This morning thanks to an e-mail from Robin, I have found both of these qualities in abundance in a piece she found on a blog by Carolyn Baker.

The article by Michael Meade clearly expresses the responsibility we have and have for far too long sought to avoid or minimize to re-integrate those who served into our society, by first acknowledging the damage that has been done to their psyches and souls as well as their bodies by having to participate and to witness the horrors of war.  He argues that what we need to hear is not the political in-fighting about when to bring the troops home, but rather the anguish of those who fought and now are in danger of not finding their way back home.  The same can also be said for their family members whose lives will never be the same.  Meade talks about the effects of sending drones off to kill on the spirit of the sender, of the bizarre and other-worldly capacity to go from combat to a cell phone conversation with a loved one and of the incalculable toll on the psyche of having to constantly try to tell the difference between innocents from combatants.

It is my hope that reading such words will resonate in our hearts and make us want to demand more from our government and our Veterans Administration.  It is my hope on this Black Friday that the kind of energy that is devoted to unceasing consumption can instead demand an end to war and a start to providing what is needed for our warriors to heal.

THE SPIRITUAL BACKFIRE OF WAR

BY Michael Meade

I want to give a report on a recent retreat with a group of veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and Vietnam. I want you to know how courageous they were in telling them. I’d like their voices to be heard over the din of the political battles and the mostly abstract arguments about whether it is too soon to bring troops home. The problem is that too many of those who go off to war fail to find a way back from it. The problem is that the war continues to live inside the wounded bodies, the rattled nerves and the battered souls.

The depth of sorrow in a woman’s voice pours out as she struggles through tears to read her poem about losing her husband after he returned from the war. It may be her first poem ever, born of palpable tragedy and honest grief. She doesn’t think she could read it in public, yet she knows that she speaks for many others stranded on the road between life and death. She knows because she was in the military herself, because her husband committed suicide after years of battling with PTSD. She calls them the “walking dead” — the ones who make it back from the war but can’t make it back into life.

“The war was over, that’s what they said;
but not for the warriors and the walking dead.
Dropped back into life, like they were never gone,
the war still raging, hidden deep inside.
The horrors, the killing, just learning to cope;
the anger and fighting, alcohol and dope.

The hole in our family, the loss that we feel;
they say it gets better, with time we all heal.
The war was over, that’s what they said;
but not for the families of the walking dead.”

People take different positions about the necessity of going off to war, but everyone will be affected by the ways in which the war comes back. After the battles have concluded, after the speeches have been given, the war continues to reverberate in the hearts and minds of those who endured it. The war keeps coming back on those that went to it and on those closest to them. A young Iraq war veteran in bare-boned, bitten-lip honesty goes through his “checklist” of demons that make each day a new kind of battle as he struggles to be again “a loving husband and role model to my son, a loyal brother and caring friend.”

“Horrific memories… check.
Survivor’s guilt… check.
Night sweats… check.
Isolation… check.
Anxiety, abandonment, anger…
check, check, check.”

An older vet tells of the first time he pulled the trigger that ended in a direct kill. He has relived it many times and is old enough, seasoned enough, caring enough to explain how something dies inside when the bullet hits its living target. There is a back lash in the soul, an emotional, spiritual back-fire that not only burns away all innocence, but also alters one’s natural sense of self. Everyone nods heavily and wants to check in on the loss of innocence and the battering of the soul that only becomes evident when the adrenalin recedes, the smoke dies down and the danger moves from outside to inside.

There is a split in the psyche, an inner division born of war that separates returning soldiers from civilians. In the current wars it can be impossible to distinguish “innocents” from combatants and that makes the separation upon return even greater. The inner split keeps resurfacing in hopes that healing and wholeness can be found.

“I want to forget those fragments not meant
for viewing, and remember bodies whole.”

“Home” is a word for the feeling of being whole, of being at peace with oneself, and with the world. Home was a reason for going off to war, yet it is becoming more difficult for the warriors to find a way home again. Modern wars are not simply more lethal, they are also more confusing and soul-battering. The enemy can be anywhere, can be anyone. IED’s can erupt at any time and reverberate in the brain for years making it impossible to simply drive in traffic or enter a shopping mall. A city street or parking lot can become a “war zone” simply because of an unexpected noise or a sudden peripheral movement. The war fragments the soul and makes the peace-time fragile at best.

The wounds of war are deep and intimate and trying to be intimate again with others can trigger the unseen wounds, the hidden trap doors in the psyche, the nightmares and the night sweats. No one can count the wounds of war or the effects that war has on the soul.

“Physical wounds may be addressed,
but the hole in the soul is an abscess unchecked.”

There are new kinds of weapons and new forms of battle, so there are new kinds of wounds as well. There are damages to the brain both broad and subtle and affects on the soul never possible before. A soldier can be in the line of fire one minute and be “online” the next or be on a “smart phone” speaking to a spouse or family member. War and home are becoming more entangled and more confused — both closer together and further apart. What is the unseen damage in the soul of those sending drone strikes from the deserts of Arizona to the deserted hills of Afghanistan?

“Mass efficient kill from 20 thousand feet,
computer guided warheads; mission statement changed from
exploring space to enhancing war.”

Often it is the common humanity of a person that is sacrificed in the dark doorways where life and death are decided instantly. In the aftermath of all the devastation, bravery and fear, when the smoke clears and the bodies are removed from sight, it is the deep humanity in a person that must be sought for and fought for and be found again. Otherwise, there is no coming home, but only a long season in hell, an endless and repetitious tour that keeps the war alive while the soul slowly dies.

In our temporary community of veterans the older vets instinctively become mentors to the younger ones and all contribute to the healing process. A nationwide “vets mentoring vets” process is desperately needed, especially with so many troops coming home in the coming months. There is also a great need for the community that sends its men and increasingly its women off to battle to play a greater role in the healing of the souls of those who sacrifice parts of themselves at the altars of war. Putting politics aside, putting aside the saber rattling for the next war, it is time to learn meaningful ways of welcoming veterans home and in doing so learning to heal the torn tissues of the soul of this country.

“Look into their eyes, if the eyes are still there.
Look into their hearts if they aren’t…
Look at their missing limbs… their burns, their scars.
Changed forever, but still the same…
And if you must use words like hero or enemy,
Then whisper them. It is all too easy to destroy.”

Veterans Day, and once again I’m shouting in my head: You people want to honor veterans? How about we dump the patriotic tinsel and give them something they can use — like all the effort it’s going to take to heal their wounds for years to come.

I’m working on the anger. I’ve been reading Paul K. Chappell’s “The End of War,” a shining little book that gives me hope. Mr. Chappell is a young West Point graduate who served in Iraq and now goes about the country making the argument — kindly, intelligently, unflinchingly — that peace is something we can actually achieve.

Veterans Day, and here comes a friend with news of the Wounded Warrior Project, an organization that advocates for injured service members in order to foster “the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded warriors in this nation’s history.” How can I tell my good friend that even though I applaud these efforts, it seems to me the very need for such an organization is proof that our nation allows its enormous military machine to bear down on its most precious components — real men and women — and then to drop them carelessly back into our communities all busted up, depressed and increasingly suicidal. Meanwhile, billions upon billions of our taxpayer dollars are quietly funneled into the pockets of war profiteers, who are all too happy to go about their business of oiling the other components of the machine.

Veterans Day, and another friend forwards a mass email: “Please pray for and honor our military.” I scroll through photos of soldiers holding up under awful burdens — separation from loved ones, violence, fear and physical privation. I read the captions that feed the underlying message, which is that after all the hardships these soldiers have endured, they cannot help but take offense when we whine about potholes, bad weather, and our everyday, crappy jobs. The email exhorts me to keep my life “in perspective” and to reach out to returning soldiers with tolerance and compassion. I note that an Army mental health nurse is the original sender.

I want to hit “reply all” and type furiously that even though I agree that returning soldiers need our compassion, I find the manipulative sentimentality of the photographs disturbing. Maybe this is because I once served as an Army nurse myself (not overseas but in Texas), where soldiers suffered from wounds no amount of “tolerance and compassion” could ever heal — soldiers who really needed our outrage. But I know my good friend meant well, and so I hit “delete.”

Veterans Day, and a friend who is a member of Veterans for Peace suggests I take a look at another “warrior” program, the Warrior Writers Project. I take a look — a long one — and have my heart ripped up by warriors, both women and men, who express themselves with courage and honesty about their experiences. I support them by purchasing their anthology. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

This time last year, I attended a conference for writers and medicine professionals who use the humanities to help combat soldiers through the “aftershock” back at home. The keynote address was delivered by Tim O’Brien, Vietnam veteran and acclaimed author of “The Things They Carried.” I recall how warmly Mr. O’Brien was applauded, and how, when the applause died down, he joked grimly that he might not have any friends in the audience by the time the speech was over. He looked truly unnerved (later he confessed to being “terrified”), but he waded right in, admonishing us not to turn veterans into victims. You could have heard a pin drop.

There can be no healing, Mr. O’Brien argued, if healing just means forgetting. A soldier needs not only to remember, but also to accept responsibility for the matter-of-fact “nastiness” of war. He then told us how he once stood by and watched a fellow soldier, just a fresh-faced kid from Minnesota, do something unspeakably cruel to an old, blind man in Vietnam. He didn’t spare us the appalling details. He said that, to this day, the face of that old man returns to him in his dreams.

A combat veteran is entitled to the depression and anxiety and sleepless nights, Mr. O’Brien said, and we ought not dole out coping mechanisms that deny them their humanity with the old excuse, “That’s war for you.” He added that he didn’t mean to denigrate either those who serve their country in the military or those who care for them. He kept a grip on his own guilt for the “bad stuff” he did in Vietnam, refusing to allow his own humanity to be whisked away by any falsehood or shallow coping mechanism.

In the end, Mr. O’Brien had some “layman’s advice” for medical professionals dealing with PTSD: You want to ameliorate post-war suffering? Practice preventative medicine. If you can tell people to stop smoking, you can tell them to stop making war.

Veterans Day, and I will tell my beloved nation: Stop making war.

99 to 1: Six Pictures From the Wall Street Culture War

After the Q&A, which included some difficult questions about whether healing is possible, let alone desirable, and whether war is inevitable, a man approached me and asked if he could send me a poem he had written about the draft.   I welcomed Howard Faerstein’s offering, which he proceeded to send and which I have chosen to include on this blog since it captures very powerfully yet another experience of the draft and its effects on our behaviors and our psyches.  Here it is:

DRAFT INDUCTION DAY, 1969

by Howard Faerstein

Because I had no plan to run for President

& was not yet a felon

I walked into Fort Hamilton armed

with drugs & a therapist’s letter.

Ed was there, scratching his thighs furiously,

blood pooling beneath the legs of the stool

& I watched Johnny strip down,

peanut butter spread about his cheeks,

even in the valley of his hole.

I failed the physical’s every test

& by the end how exhausted I was

by the boys waiting to kill, longing to die,

gathered around to copy my answers even as I told them

every one was wrong.

Then the news I was “fit as a fiddle”

but had to return next morning to see the shrink.

Nothing of what I recounted made a bit of difference–

homo, junkie, opposed to the imperial conflict–

but when I explained how I cured myself of syphillis

while living in a California commune

by cutting the tip of my penis into four symmetrical parts

he hesitated then said It’s against my better judgement but I’m giving you

I leaped off the chair in great joy,

grabbing the paper,

            a 4F

& headed for the discharge desk where I was jeered & scowled at

& hand-in-hand with Johnny

I skipped out on the pavement of Shore Parkway,

scows plying the Narrows,

carriers taking the boys from Sunset Park & Bed-Stuy

to Chu Lai, to Hua Ky.

GROUNDS FOR RESISTANCE
a new documentary about contemporary G.I. resistance

Friday 9/16
7:00 pm
Frances Crowe Community Room
Media Education foundation
60 Masonic Street, Northampton

co-sponsored by the Northampton Committee to Stop the War in Iraq (& Afghanistan & …)
& Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Amherst Chapter

In November 2008, a group of U.S. veterans opened COFFEE STRONG, a coffee shop located outside the gates of the U.S. Army base Fort Lewis in Washington, inspired by the Vietnam-era G.I. coffee house movement.
This fifty minute documentary film is about Coffee Strong: its importance for its most active members, active duty soldiers and their families, veterans of recent and past conflicts, and regional and national political movements. At the center of the film are the men and women whose experiences in the military and war compel them to commit themselves to help others who are serving or have served in the past. Each individual featured in the film exists within a nuanced tangle of conflicting emotions tied to pride, dedication to service, friendship, anger, disillusionment, sadness, and guilt. The film examines each one’s stories from their decisions to join the military, their experiences of war, and their motivations for devoting themselves to Coffee Strong. It explores how their relationships with one another and their activist efforts to make a more peaceful and just world help them cope with their own experiences.