Stan Goff - I was a soldier for most of the time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments, with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. I thugged around in eight different places in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign policies; policies controlled, then as now, by the rich. In the course of that career, I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have felt about "loyalty."
www.stangoff.com
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On Loyalty: An Open Letter to US Troops
in Afghanistan and Iraq
STAN GOFF
June 15, 2005
Tricky thing, loyalty.
Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you, I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could, and so did millions of other people around the world.
But that brain-dead piece of shit in the White House who is legally your boss, and all his handlers, starting with Vice President Dick "Halliburton" Cheney they sent you to do this thing anyway.
They talked themselves into believing this would be and these are their words a cakewalk. They surrounded themselves exclusively with others who echoed what was already in their minds; and they punished and villified and isolated anyone who told them what they didn't want to hear. Because they made up their minds to conduct these invasions years ago, and with the attacks of September 11 in which Iraq's role was exactly nothing they figured now was their chance to conduct the re-disposition of the old Cold War military into their new plan to build permanent bases in Southwest Asia.
Since they'd made up their minds, they didn't want to hear anything except rosy scenarios for their plans, because these reptile-minded, preppy gangsters are like spoiled children who can't abide anyone fucking up their toy-emperor fantasies.
But when those fantasies did get fucked up, by the realities they ran so hard to escape, they continued to pursue their grim agenda in spite of the mounting consequences, because they don't pay those consequences.
If I had my way, we would issue the whole shriveled, manicured lot of them their assault rifles, put them aboard an Air Force transport, tighten the leg straps on their static line parachutes, and boot their sorry asses out from 800 feet right over the middle of Ramadi where they could drop their harnesses in the street and explain democracy to the locals.
But that's just ranting, because I do so despise them. I hate people who get away with shit just because they have money and power. And I hate people who sacrifice the lives of others to amplify or protect that power.
But I'm not telling you anything. You all already know by now what generation after generation has learned the hard way. When the rich start their wars, it's not the rich that get sent to fight them. Yeah, a few go get their time as part of putting together a political career, but we know who does the heavy lifting.
And in these conversations that many of you have with me and thousands of other people, we hear you say more and more often now that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to "do your job," because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that you have to back them up; and because if you don't go, someone else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.
But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, and because I care about you, and because my own son is back there for his second go-around.
A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told me, "My platoon sergeant tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that'the Geneva Convention doesn't exist in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.'"
You all know that this is bullshit, and if you didn't know, let me give you a news flash about some not all, but some military lifers; and this is coming from a military lifer. Some of them are dumber than dog shit. Some of them say things when they don't have the foggiest fucking idea what they are talking about. Some of them will say any goddamn thing to get you to do what they want you to do.
But then again, there wasa memorandum that came down that suggested the Geneva Conventions were void in Iraq. It didn't come from the Brigade level, though; it came from fucking George W. Bush's office. And it's a lie. That's why they sat there in front of Congress before they made the author of that memo into the Attorney General of the United States get your head around that and denied that they meant it.
But it is a lie.
You do not have to follow illegal orders EVER, under any circumstances, and you ARE bound by International Law. You should also be bound by what you know is right, by your sense of plain common decency.
One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And "what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq." This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.
And I'm telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.
They know that many ofyouknow that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint). So they know that many of you can't stay committed to this violent occupation out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC, who are busy every day at home undermining the same Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).
They know that you know that plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion, by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know that they can't rely on the loyalty of many of you to the chain of command any more either.
Where do they have to go with this, then, after all? What do they tell you?
"You get out there on that Humvee, and face those IEDs together, as loyal buddies."
"You get out there and ransack people's houses in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry together, as buddies."
"You get out there and set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation where you are tense and don't know, and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their children, and you have to live with that for the rest of your lives together, because you are loyal buddies."
"You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies."
That's the pressure you have on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to Iraq so someone else doesn't take your place.
But let's look at the bigger picture here, and for that I'll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you were born. We heard this same bullshit then. Almost verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing factors was for getting us out of that war?
We quit being good soldiers.
The United States military got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting force, because US soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an officer who was using his men's bodies to chase medals might find himself on the wrong end of a Claymore mine. Now I'm not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it goes that far.
The other thing many soldiers did was become part of the political resistance at home. They looked at this question of looking out for their buddies and for fellow soldiers in the short term, but staying ina barbaric and immoral war. And they realized that the best thing they could do for their buddies not as soldiers, but as human beings was to enlist in the opposition to the war and bring it to an end.
In the process, many of them discovered that it took a lot more endurance and a lot more courage to oppose the war than it did to demonstrate that macho bullshit they were expected to display as they continued to do terrible things to those other human beings whose country they occupied.
Here's how you can exercise a deeper loyalty to the troops there now, and to all those who will continue to go as long as this obscenity continues:
Do everything you can to stop the war.
Question every order, and base those questions on the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare. Let them see you keeping a detailed journal of your experience. Send your stories home in letters. Open up discussions about the legitimacy of the war when you are in your billets, even if it does spark controversy. Spread around information you get about the war from sources other than those loud-mouthed news-mannequins on FOX. And email or mail your anonymous membership in to Iraq Veterans Against the War. The link is at the end of this letter.
The day this war stops and they put the last of you on an airplane home, is when you will never again have to smell that fresh-blood smell that stays in your head for hours after you've loaded someone onto a stretcher or rolled them into that big Ziploc bag. The day will come when you all pull out, because this was a losing proposition from the outset, but Bush and his crew were too fucking stupid to know it.
The best thing is that this war of occupation ends sooner than later, and as an exercise of loyalty to your own conscience, of loyalty to those who are there and those who may go there, and loyalty to the principle of human decency you can find ways to hasten that day. You can find ways to bring closer the day when the Iraqis can get on about the business of taking control of their own destiny, and you and your buddies can sleep in security and comfort in your own homes, play with your children, make love with your partners, and walk down familiar streets unencumbered by the rattling luggage of war.
If bringing this day closer for all of you is the goal, how much more loyal can you get?
Yours for walking unencumbered,
Stan Goff
US Army (Retired)
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
I encourage troops to show this to other troops. I encourage family members of troops to print it out and send it to them in letters, or to paste it into emails. I encourage troops and family members who are on military reservations to make copies and place them everywhere you can think of.
Web sites of interest to troops and their families:
www.bringthemhomenow.org
www.ivaw.net
www.veteransforpeace.org
www.mfso.org
www.girights.objector.org
www.occupationwatch.org
www.nlg.org/mltf
HOW DO WE RESPOND TO THE STATEMENT…
The United States should not have invaded Iraq, but now that we are there, aren’t we responsible to clean it up and ensure that there is no bloodbath when we leave?
Much of the answer to this question begins with a critical look at the premises hidden inside the question.
Premise 1: The “United States” invaded Iraq.
Premise 2: “We” are the United States who did it.
Premise 3: The invasion was a “mistake.”
Premise 4: “We” are better suited to “clean up” Iraq than the Iraqis by themselves.
Premise 5: The violence in Iraq is a reflection of divisions existing inside Iraq.
Premise 6: Iraqis cannot be trusted to guide the reconstruction of Iraq without US supervision about HOW to do reconstruction.
Reply to Premise 1:
“The ‘United States’ invaded Iraq.”
The decision to invade Iraq was not made by any democratic process in the United States. It was made by the executive branch without consulting Congress for a declaration of war, as mandated by the Constitution.
Many millions of Americans opposed the war and still oppose it.
Reply to Premise 2:
“’We’ are the United States who did it.”
The United States did not conduct the invasion, the United States military did, under orders from the Bush government.
The larger “we” has never seen anything but snapshot of this war, and has no real experience of it. The use of the term WE serves to purposes: it masks those who are responsible and transfers responsibility to the whole American people; and it implants in our thinking a sense of “us & them”,” the US being a privileged category.
Reply to Premise 3:
“The invasion was a ‘mistake.’”
This premise ties into the preceding ones, by suggesting WE conducted this invasion out of some sense of righteousness, that was merely misguided. The President was mistaken, or even exercised bad judgment, and we share in this “mistake.” But the invasion was not a mistake or an accident. It was carefully conceived by a group of people in the executive branch, as we now know from the Downing Street memo and a host of other sources, and the reasons for the war were not miscalculations, but carefully calculated deceptions. It was based on those deceptions that large sections of the US were convinced of the need to invade Iraq.
A deception is not a mistake! A deception is something someone does on purpose.
If the reasons given for the war are lies, then we have to ask what are the reasons for the invasion and occupation. There is an overwhelming body of evidence available to show the real reasons for the war, much of it written over the past decade by the architects of the war itself, to show what the real reasons were and are.
Their purpose is to reconfigure the US military from its former Cold War disposition to retain US global power in the future. Their method is to establish permanent US military installations in this critically strategic region to (1) ensure American access to continued flows of cheap oil for American corporations, and (2) to use control over the region as strategic leverage against global competitors, like China, Western Europe, and India.
Reply to Premise 4:
“’We’ are better suited to ‘clean up’ Iraq than the Iraqis by themselves.”
If the reasons for being in Iraq are to control the region with a permanent military presence, and this agenda is determined not by a collective “we,” but by the corporate-controlled American government, why do we believe that the vandal is the person most suited to get the contract to rebuild the house? And by what magical process of transformation will the leopard, the US government in this case, change its spots?
Governments, especially imperial governments, do not make decisions based on morality. They base their decisions on the question of getting and keeping power. The decision to invade Iraq was made with the goal being conquest. The goals later stated by the occupation, like stability and democracy, are no more honest than the weapons of mass destruction. It is still a deception. The goal is still US power and permanent military bases there.
So “clean-up” is not on the agenda, unless clean-up includes American military and financial power there.
More importantly, perhaps, what is the additional premise hidden in this premise? That the Iraqis are somehow less-than, somehow inferior, to us, and thereby incapable of self-governance. In the period of the British empire, there was a similar argument that was more open with its racism; it called this the “white man’s burden to bear civilization to the darker races.” And it was, of course, civilization that included British political, financial, and military oversight.
The same argument by Americans now, for Iraq, fails to remember that Iraqis were civilized for thousands of years before the British or the Americans.
Reply to Premise 5:
“The violence in Iraq is a reflection of divisions existing inside Iraq.”
On of the impressions that the Bush administration has fostered throughout this aggression has been the idea of sharp division between Iraqis. The American corporate press has dutifully echoed this simplistic notion, which supports the related idea that these “violent, irrational Arabs,” if left to themselves, will immolate themselves in an orgy of blood and iron.
Yet when one looks at the various faces of violence in Iraq, the most prominent an d lethal source of violence is the American military itself – which has killed more than 100,000 Iraqis just since the March 2003 invasion.
One segment of the resistance, so-called foreign fighters (that comprises less than 15 percent by reputable estimates) are drawn to Iraq precisely because the Americans are there.
The attacks on Shia leaders in the South and on Kurdish leaders in the North are not “sectarian,” “religious,” or “ethnic.” Statements from various groups within the nationalist resistance – both secular and Islamist – have specifically stated that their attacks are directed at those who are collaborating with the Americans, because of that collaboration… NOT based on ethnic or religious rivalry. In fact, the rates of intermarriage between these groups has always been very substantial, and Shias, Sunnis, Islamists, and secular nationalists have expressed the desire from the very beginning to find a framework for political cooperation and co-existence.
The Anglo-American military presence is the cause of most of this violence. If the occupation ends, no one will be targeted for collaboration, because there will be no one to collaborate with. And it must be restated with emphasis that the American presence is not there to ensure what is best for Iraqis, but to ensure what is seen as best for the American corporate-controlled government.
Reply to Premise 6:
“Iraqis cannot be trusted to guide the reconstruction of Iraq without US supervision about HOW to do reconstruction.”
First of all, who says the Iraqis will decide to remain a unified Iraq? Those boundaries were drawn by British imperialists. Iraqis may decide to become a regional federation, an ethnic federation, or to split into autonomous regions and nations.
That process may involve some fighting, but it cannot be fighting on the scale we have seen with the Americans, if it happens at all.
History sometimes leaves people little choice. The question of slavery in the United States was resolved, after all, by what was at the time the bloodiest war in human history. Nothing of this scale will happen in Iraq, and whatever happens, the history of Iraqis must be left in the hands of Iraqis – not a foreign imperial power.
The main question preoccupying the Bush administration is not “reconstruction” at any rate, but how to ensure that Iraqis don’t have public control over their own oil wealth, and how to prevent – what is already happening despite US attempts to control Iraqi politics – Iraqi and Iranian cooperation in the region.
The notion that the Iraqis CAN not or SHOULD not be left to their own initiative to determine their future is another display of “white man’s burden.”
THE SOLUTION IS TO END THE OCCUPATION AND BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
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