On the Ground in Iraq

There were more statistics from Iraq this week:

• 100 Iraqis died standing in line for jobs when a car bomb exploded in their midst;
• 2 more American soldiers died when a roadside bomb blew up their convoy;
• 540 soldiers dead since the war began;
• 8000 Iraqis killed in the process of being liberated

All the numbers are squiggles on a page, scores on a ledger, ammo in the battle between the pro- and anti-war factions. They’re symbols of something, but nothing in and of themselves, and it’s difficult to discern the personal tragedy behind them.

But there was a piece on last week’s 60 minutes that really brought it home for me. Christiane Amanpour took a microscope to the conflict, and focused on small stories from both sides: an American soldier wounded on patrol, and an Iraqi family decimated by American gunfire.

The first time we see the soldier, he’s talking soberly about the myriad dangers he and his platoon face every day, about how he had just recently escaped injury when one of his fellow soldiers came back to save him. Three days after the interview, his convoy is destroyed by a remote-control bomb. The top of his head is blown off, and much of the left side of his face ripped away. When we see him next, his head is wrapped in gauze, and the reconstructed side of his face is puckered and cratered and raw, his speech slurred sightly by the damage that’s been done to it. He’s talking about going back to Iraq, and rejoining his fellows.

Amanpour focuses next on a family whose truck, which they used to transport chickens, was completely destroyed by an American artillery unit who thought they were being fired upon. Five people killed, including one boy. Another boy missing. She went to the military and asked about it, and after a bunch of denials and hems and haws finally got them to admit that it happened, although not that they did anything wrong. They found the boy, finally, and there was a horrible scene where he asked his Mom about his brothers and his Dad, and she had to leave the room because she couldn’t bear tell him that they were all dead.

This was difficult to watch. You can see the seeds of hatred being sown, on both sides, and there’s a real danger that this whole thing is going to degenerate into Algeria-style guerilla warfare. It’s hard to blame anyone on the ground for this. The real credit goes to Saddam Hussein, first and foremost, and then to the Bush administration, and the incompetent way in which it went about the process of removing him from power. It boggles the mind that an organization with as many resources at its disposal as the military could screw this occupation up so badly, especially in light of the fact that the State Department undertook a massive post-occupation planning effort, the results of which were completely ignored by the defense department.

There’s no question that the Iraq debacle has damaged our credibility in the world, and made us seem like a dangerous, blundering superpower, not to be trusted. But what’s also true, and more tragic still, is that it has ended or destroyed the lives of thousands of people. It didn’t have to be this way.

Update: The New York Times Magazine ran an article this weekend on wounded soldiers returning from Iraq, and the physical and psychological trauma they’ve experienced, are experiencing, and likely will experience for the rest of their lives. And it’s not just them. Their families are suffering as well:

At night, in the quiet of their rented farmhouse, Robert Shrode lets Debra pick the shrapnel out of his body. Over the last six months, she’s tugged out 15 pieces as they have worked their way to the surface of his skin. She has picked them from his legs, from his neck, his face. Sometimes he will study them, these twisted aluminum chunks that have managed to escape while so many more will forever live inside him. Barely out of her teenage years, Debra Shrode never pictured her life this way. Never imagined the Army would be calling her up and asking her to hand out advice as some kind of expert wife. Yet someone from the Army’s Family Readiness Group wanted her to call another wife whose husband had come home injured. She sighs and dials the number. ”I don’t know what I can say to make you feel better,” she says into the phone. ”If he doesn’t want to talk, don’t take it to heart.” She adds each new piece of shrapnel to the collection they keep stored in a Tupperware container. For a while, the container sat on their coffee table, but recently Robert moved it into a spare bedroom drawer. If it seems as if he might be moving on, Debra has only to ask, What’re you thinking about? ”Iraq,” he’ll say. And then the silence falls again.

Shrode might one day get all the shrapnel out of his body, but I doubt he’ll ever really be rid of it.