The brilliant American comedienne Lily Tomlin once observed that “nine out of ten psychiatrists agree: reality is the leading cause of stress for those who are in touch with it.” Reality is starting to push through the resilient layers of denial, illusions, lies, and wishful thinking that have insulated official Washington and London from the consequences of an illegal and immoral war. No one can wish away the current debacle and looming disasters in Iraq, although President Bush is still trying his best to spruce up the flimsy rhetorical window dressing of “democracy and freedom,” a tattered scrim that no longer hides the horror of daily events on the streets of Baghdad, Balad, Basra and Kirkuk.

 

Iraq has plunged into a civil war that can easily explode into a regional conflagration. The number of Iraqis killed in just three and a half years has passed half a million according to a scientifically sound study published this month in the British medical journal, The Lancet. Lawlessness, despair, poverty, fear and danger are the constant companions of Iraqis from all social classes.

 

American soldiers are not faring much better lately: over 70 have been killed in the first two weeks of this month. Some US troops are on their third and even fourth tours of duty. Thousands of those who have come home to stay are afflicted with grave physical and emotional disabilities, which the Veterans’ Administration is poorly equipped to treat in a sustained and effective manner. According to recent army studies of mental health of returning vets, 19.1% of soldiers and Marines who returned from Iraq met risk criteria for a mental health concern, compared with 11.3% for those deployed to Afghanistan and 8.5% for those sent to other locations.

 

Charlie Anderson, of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said the federal Veterans’ Administration relies too heavily on drugs to treat returning soldiers suffering from stress. The deadening and numbing of pains brought on by reality is all of a piece with the official tendency to deny, paper over, or disregard the ongoing damage of this war. Apparently, our young men and women in uniform are every bit as expendable as the laws we have trashed and the conventions we have violated by invading and occupying Iraq and pillaging its resources.

 

Republican senators and British army commanders alike are starting to voice concerns that, until recently, were heard only from alternative news blogs and anti-war protestors. Even an establishment figure like former Secretary of State James Baker weighed in this week with the comment that “There is no magic bullet for the situation in Iraq. It is very, very difficult,” he said in a speech to the World Affairs Council in Houston on October 17th. “Anybody who thinks that somehow we’re going to come up with something that is going to totally solve the problem is engaging in wishful thinking.” Well, anyone who thought that pre-emptive war was going to bring security to the world had already gone beyond wishful thinking to delusion.

 

Realities can no longer be denied or delayed. Consequently, stress levels are rising in Washington as the death toll of Iraqis and Coalition troops skyrockets in Iraq while Republican approval ratings plummet at home. Reality is getting in touch with us, even as we try to keep it at a distance, assuming that faraway Iraq can be pushed farther away from our consciousness, hoping that a pullout of US troops will magically render Iraq unreal and irrelevant to life in these United States.

 

Denial is a powerful defense mechanism, and it afflicts not only supporters of the war, but many of its detractors as well. The reality is that both Iraqis and Americans will be crippled, albeit in different ways, by this senseless war for decades. Both peoples are now inextricably linked by the tragedy, horror, waste, and arrogance of the Bush Administration’s adventures in pre-emptive warfare and attempts to deliver democracy at gunpoint.

 

The war in Iraq is not just a disturbing news story, a crucial factor in the upcoming mid-term elections, or a troubling index of official US ignorance and arrogance. Iraq, the cradle of civilization, is now an omen of a perilous darkness descending on the Middle East and the United States. The war is not just a mistake, a “quagmire,” a dilemma, or a political liability for the Republicans. It is also a crime of immense proportions and multiple dimensions, the full extent of which has yet to be revealed.

 

The war has left Iraq in literal ruins, but it has also laid waste to America morally, financially, and institutionally. And we have not yet seen the full contours of the damage that has already been done, whether the US pulls its troops out in two weeks or two years.

 

The coming calamities

 

The war has already cost the US taxpayer half a trillion dollars. In return, we have received the hostility of the Arab-Islamic world, the anger of traditional allies, the weakening of the checks and balances in our system of government, the complicity of the media, the silence of Congress, and the apathy of American citizens. Iraq is devouring symbolic and economic capital at a frightening pace and producing absolutely nothing in return. This war is bankrupting the United States while spawning even more enemies of America.

 

The Army and Marines are running out of ways to put more “boots on the ground.” Standards that previously might have kept criminals and disturbed individuals out of the armed forces have been relaxed. Last February, the Baltimore Sun carried a story warning of “a significant increase in the number of recruits with what the Army terms ‘serious criminal misconduct’ in their background” – in other words, “aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats.” From 2004 to 2005, the number of those recruits rose by more than 54 percent.

 

Last summer, a New York Times report revealed that members of the Aryan Nation are increasingly visible among troops serving in Iraq, and that some view their military service as training for the coming “race wars” in urban centers of the United States. In July, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist groups, noted that “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” are currently serving in Iraq. “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members,” complained Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator interviewed for the report.

 

One of the only options left to the military is to call up the National Guard for duty in Iraq, leaving the US vulnerable to terrorist attacks or natural disasters.

 

At the daily level of lived emotions and interpersonal relations, the war is taking a devastating toll not only on those who have experienced it first-hand, but also on those who wish to remain out of touch with the realities our government has created – and denied – in the last three and a half years. The twisting of facts and minimizing of damage wrought by the war and all that led up to it is destroying the common, public world we all must embrace and enter in order to repair our country, limit further damage to Iraq and the wider Middle East, and exercise our rights and duties as engaged citizens. The dangers posed by the destruction of our common world by politicians’ lies, journalists’ cowardice, and the desire of too many Americans to have the whole disaster of Iraq magically whisked away is summed up in these comments by Stan Goff, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW):

 

It’s very difficult to be a “productive member of society” when one fears sleep, and when one has lost meaning. I read a book on post-traumatic stress once. Rape is the most common cause, then combat. Trauma disrupts one’s sense that the word is a safe place; trauma destabilizes our sense of meaning.

 

Let me explain something, as a veteran myself of eight conflict areas: the sense that the world is not a safe place is not a “disorder.” It is an accurate perception. And the sense of meaning many of us enjoy is an illusion, a cruel construction that normalizes the orderly activity of the suburb and nurses our children on simple-minded, Disney-fied optimism pumped through television sets in a relentless data stream.

 

[Veterans] have been nurtured on the illusions that secure our obedience, but when the real system needed to demonstrate to the rest of the world just how unsafe our nation could make them as the price of disobedience, the vile carnival barkers of the Bush administration, like administrations before them, did not recruit the children of Martha’s Vineyard or Georgetown.

 

They went, as they have always done, to places like Lee County, Alabama, where simple people have formed powerful affective attachments to the myth of our national moral superiority. When that world view, that architecture of meaning, collapses in the face of realities like “convoy Russian roulette,” and women holding babies up to prevent being shot, and daily stories of slaughter committed by the people one sleeps next to, the profound betrayal of it is not experienced as some quiet, somber sadness. It is experienced like bees swarming out of a hive that has been broken, as a howling chaos.

 

 That howling chaos will reverberate throughout America for years, whether US troops stay in Iraq or not. This reality is here and now, in the USA; it is not a bad dream that can be left behind in the crowded, stinking morgues of Baghdad. Despite the stress it will incur, Americans must face the nightmarish reality that their government has created, and acknowledge that it was forged with their tacit complicity and silent assent. It is time to howl back.

 

Laurie King is a co-founder of Electronic Iraq. A social anthropologist, she is former editor of Middle East Report and the author of numerous articles on human rights and international humanitarian law.

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