Our military campaign to improve conditions in the Middle East is only making things worse

By Miriam Reinhart (MFSO-Oregon member) for The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Sunday, Nov 29, 2009

My son is a U.S. Army helicopter pilot who already has been deployed twice to Iraq, for a total of 27 months. He will be deployed to Iraq for a third time next spring.

Like every family member of a deployed soldier, I worry about him constantly when he is overseas. But my worry for his welfare would be more bearable if I thought that what he had done or will do in Iraq was in some way protecting the security of the American people.

The problem is that I don’t think he is protecting the American people by being in Iraq. It is not that he is doing anything personally that is a problem. It’s that our entire strategy and reasons for being in Iraq have been totally counterproductive to our security since the day we invaded.

To protect ourselves against what were at most a few thousand al-Qaeda members, we sent hundreds of thousands of our best men and women halfway around the world. The result was many more dead and injured than occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, many more angry people around the world who want to harm us, and the danger that we are bankrupting our economy with our military expenditures.

At the beginning of the war, I naively thought that at the very least, the American invasion would bring a better life to the people of Iraq. It is now clear to me that the American invasion of Iraq has created a level of mayhem for the Iraqi people of a magnitude as great or greater than that created by Saddam Hussein. Imagine that!

The end results of our policies in Iraq, because of unintended consequences and criminally reckless planning, vie in their level of destructiveness with the policies of Saddam — one of the most cruel, if not the cruelest, tyrants of modern times.

And now, the same cheerleaders who were so spectacularly wrong about Iraq — instead of crawling off with their tails between their legs and keeping their mouths shut — have the shamelessness to try to drum up a war with Iran and accuse the president of dithering in Afghanistan. Not once have these dunderheads apologized for the thousands of lives lost and destroyed and the billions squandered in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do the American people believe there is no price to be paid in terms of the psychological health of the soldiers and their communities as we deploy again and again into these war zones?

I keep reading about how there are way too few psychologists to treat all the cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

But even if there were enough psychologists to treat everyone who needed treatment, our understanding as a society about how to heal and treat trauma is limited. We repeatedly send our soldiers into the most horrific situations, and it is pure fantasy to expect that with a little more therapy and meds they will be OK again.

Maybe some soldiers will heal enough to keep their lives together, but many won’t. As a community, we will be dealing with the aftermath in terms of services needed for at least a generation to come.

The United States needs to defeat the jihadists. But this war is not going to be won through bravado, recklessness and emptying the treasury, but through cunning and through applying no more than necessary force. Sending our soldiers on a fool’s errand signals our weakness, not our strength.

An elephant easily can brush off a flea with a quick flick of its tail while it continues to watch for any sign of danger. Or instead, the elephant could panic by bellowing, charging other elephants, rolling frantically on its back in the mud — all the while blind to the lion creeping stealthily closer.

Which elephant do we want to be?