THE LOW POST: Too Much Blood

I'm always wary of these stories about American soldiers acting like hateful, mindlessly violent psychopaths in Iraq, though they're not exactly rare -- from Abu Ghraib of course, to a chilling video of a pilot pointlessly wasting a huge crowd of what appear to be civilians in Fallujah ("Oh, dude!" the pilot chuckles, after the explosion appears to kill dozens), to a gang of squids in the Gulf who lined up on an aircraft carrier deck in a formation that cleverly read "Fuck Iraq," to soldiers running over a cab driver's car with a tank because he was suspected of looting a few pieces of wood to stories about the use of napalm in Tallulah and so on.

It's not that I don't believe these stories, and not that I don't want to hear them. I'm just wary of sullying the debate over this war with a referendum on the behavior of young soldiers who have been placed in an impossible position, sent to fight in a strange and hostile place with no clear mission and no detectable strategy for securing peace or victory. In my mind, all the people in the Bush administration and in Congress and in the media who got these kids sent there in the first place have to be the first ones held responsible for whatever those kids do after being thrown into the fire. I just don't yet have the stomach to start pointing the finger at a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings who never should have been sent there in the first place.

But the letter from this Marine pilot is something different. What worries me about it is this unabashed glee in killing people from high altitudes might not be a psychiatric aberration, but an inevitable consequence of the entire structure of our economy, which is based heavily on government spending in the area of high-technology defense manufacturing. When Spinney focuses on this gruesome and bloody letter from a single Marine pilot, he's not ripping an individual soldier but showing graphically how the tail has, by now, wagged the whole dog -- how a society whose economy is based on high-tech defense spending will first tend to gravitate inexorably toward high-tech defense solutions to policy problems, and then over time will raise whole generations instilled with an implicit belief in and enthusiasm for such lunacies as the "surgical strike." Here's how Spinney put it:

We all know that the American Way of War is to use our technology to pour firepower on the enemy from a safe distance. Implicit in this is the central myth of precision bombardment that dates back at least to the Norden Bombsight in World War II...Of course this is all hogwash, as the conduct of the Iraq War has proven once again. Real war is always uncertain and messy and bloody and wasteful and accompanied by profound psychological and moral effects. But these preposterous theories are central to the American Way of War, because they justify the maintenance of a high cost high-tech military which is so essential to the welfare of the parasitic political economy of the military-industrial-congressional complex that is now seamlessly embedded in our political culture.