International Socialist Review Issue 31, September–October 2003
Interview with David Cline
DAVID CLINE is a disabled Vietnam War veteran. He is national president of Veterans for Peace, a coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and helped initiate Bring Them Home Now!, a newly formed coordinating committee of military families, veterans, active duty personnel, reservists and others opposed to the ongoing war in Iraq. Cline talked to the ISRıs ERIC RUDER.
SINCE JULY, when soldiers in the Third Infantry Division¸spoke to the press about their anger at the U.S. military leadership, the Bush administration has orchestrated a counter-attack on the question of troop morale to put out the message that "things are much better than the media says." At the same time, the number of soldiers killed since Saddam's ouster has now surpassed those killed during "major operations." What's the truth about troop morale now?
WE'VE BEEN getting feedback from Iraq that a lot of the troops right now are just hunkered down in their base camps, and they're getting attacked as they're running supply convoys back and forth between the camps. And the camps are being mortared and sniped at.
There's been an ongoing problem with supplies over there. I was on the radio this morning with a woman whose son is guarding a prison there, and she said that he told her that the delivery of the mail was privatized out to a corporation, but the company said that their employees wouldn't deliver if they were in danger and they're refusing to deliver the mail at this point. So, the GIs have had to run convoys to another camp in order to pick up their mail from home.
This takes a toll on morale, and there's no sense of mission. At first, they had soldiers going out and busting up homes, and they stopped doing that because it was causing so much resentment. So now soldiers don't have any purpose--unless they get a tip that Saddam is somewhere, but that's a Special Operations mission. So most troops are doing convoys between bases that are subject to attack and they are hunkered down in these camps.
People in Washington keep putting out the idea that we need more troops, but for what? And now the U.S. generals in Iraq are admitting that they are facing asymmetrical warfare, that there's a guerrilla resistance. They don't have a way to combat that, because they've decided not to do sweeps through villages. So the troops don't know what they're doing over there. Sitting in 130-degree heat, bored, getting shot at and mortared--how many people can be excited about that? War sucks, but if you've got to fight, you want to have some cause you can believe in. Once your cause has collapsed, you're left with nothing but pure survival. That's what led many Vietnam War veterans to come back angry and protest the war, and I would think that veterans of the war on Iraq will come back and join the movement too.
The other thing that is important to talk about is the wounded. Usually when reporting on war, they talk about casualties, meaning the killed and wounded. Recently the Bush administration has been relatively slick in just focusing on those killed. What they're totally ignoring is how many casualties there are. Right now, Walter Reed Hospital--the main entry point in the U.S. for troops returning with injuries--is full. In fact, in the September 2 Washington Post, there's an article talking about 6,000 people taken out of the theater--1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received "non-hostile" injuries and thousands who became physically or mentally ill.
If I had served in the Second World War, I would have died from the first wound I received. In Vietnam I took a round that caused my lung to collapse and my chest cavity to fill with blood, but they were able to evacuate me to a hospital nearby, and they were able to save me because they got me medical treatment so quickly. Improvements in transportation and medical technology mean that the U.S. military has a much higher ratio of wounded to killed today compared to the Civil War, for instance, where if you were wounded, you would most likely die.
So, the numbers are really skewed, and a lot of the injured are amputees. The main weapons being used over there are landmines and rocket-propelled grenades. These both cause shrapnel-type wounds, which tend to tear limbs off, compared to bullets, which pierce your skin. These wounds cause people to become permanently and seriously disabled, lose limbs and so on.
There are roughly 150,000 troops over there, and anyone who gets sent into combat is changed. Among soldiers, you have to make some distinctions. Some people join the military driven by some patriotic or ideological fervor to go fight, defend the country and avenge 9-11--there's a certain section like that. But the much larger section of people in the military joined because of what we call the poverty draft. They look at it like, "If I go into the military, I can get this college program, and I'm not going to be stuck working at McDonald's or selling drugs." That tells you something about our society--where the main way for poor, young people to improve their lives is to go into an armed force, as opposed to a job program or other alternative. But that's part of the reality of America today.
And when people go into war, even the most gung-ho get changed. It's one thing to talk about fighting. It's another thing when you have to fight, when you have to kill people, when you have to see people get killed, see your friends get killed. That changes people, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically. So a lot of these people are facing the grim realities of what war is. Seeing people that they thought they were liberating saying, "Go home." I'm a Vietnam vet, and to me, it sounds like an old story.
The whole idea is that we're going over thinking that we're helping the people--and then we find out the people don't want us there. That'll lead some soldiers to say we shouldn't be here and turn against the war. And it'll lead other soldiers to begin to hate the Iraqis, and that becomes the basis for atrocities and massacres. It was the same way in Vietnam. I think that this whole situation is shaking the military to its foundations.
One of the main reasons that the U.S. was compelled to leave Vietnam was that there was a GI movement, and the military was beginning to refuse to function like the commanders wanted. I'm not saying that we're doing that, because that would be illegal. But I am advocating that we reach out to those in uniform. Of our countrymen, they're the ones who are suffering the most from this war.
I think they're beginning to be faced with a real challenge to their ability to maintain their manpower requirements, which is why they're so aggressively recruiting today--trying to play to the "kick ass" type of thing, which a certain percentage of people respond to, before they get into the real deal. Afterwards, a lot of those people become some of the most militant against it, because they had such false expectations.
DEFENSE SECRETARY Donald Rumsfeld dug himself a hole when he argued that increases in imminent danger pay and separation allowances shouldn't be extended. Now they seem to be backtracking. How has this affected the troops?
AFTER THE front-page headlines reading, "Pentagon to cut troops' pay," the Pentagon dropped it the next day, because they were so embarrassed. Rumsfeld wanted to cut imminent danger pay by $75 and family separation allowances by $150. These stipends are supposed to make life a little more tolerable for military families with members fighting in Iraq. But basically it's chump change. It's insulting when you think about it. Here are these guys being shot at, and they're talking about cutting their pay.
People like Rumsfeld are constantly in a fight to increase the military budget, but Rumsfeld wants to develop new weaponry that is four generations ahead of anyone else, so they're constantly putting money into high-tech weapons systems. This is part of the problem in this country. We have this defense contracting, which is nothing more than fleecing the American public and giving these corporations lucrative contracts to make weaponry that is actually destabilizing. They want to do weapons in space, which could provoke an arms race in space, because if we do it, someone else will, too.
They have very little regard for the service people or for social programs, such as veterans' health care. They figure they have people in the military, and they can do with them as they will and since they haven't been in those shoes, they have very little compassion for them. They see social programs as obstacles to their spending. Their priorities are at odds with the priorities of bettering their lives, making our lives better, having schools.
THE BUSH administration chalks up all resistance to the U.S. as the work of Saddam Hussein loyalists. What are your thoughts on that?
I HAVEN'T seen anything that is a comprehensive report on the nature of the resistance, so I can't say with certainty what the opposition is. But I think the idea that they are just Saddam Hussein loyalists is a stretch. For instance, I read an article today about Shiites marching at the funeral of the Ayatollah killed by that huge bomb blast, and they were chanting, "Saddam we will humiliate you, America we will humiliate you." In other words, they were defining themselves as not being with Saddam or with America. I have to believe that there is a lot of that going on.
When the U.S. generals ordered house-to-house searches in the villages, they turned public opinion in Iraq against the occupation. I'm sure there were some people who thought life under U.S. occupation would be better, and we can't fight the U.S. anyway. But then people began to feel that the U.S. was treating them in oppressive and humiliating ways, and this has caused people to adopt various forms of resistance. Some of them are using guns, and some are using different tactics. I read about a sit-in by unemployed workers in front of the U.S. Command Center in Baghdad. There are unemployed workers' unions over there. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw an increase in resistance on a broad scale. The U.S. government went in with no plan and virtually no ability to manage that situation. Imperial dreams and imperial realities are two different things.
WHAT KIND of response have you had to the launch of the "Bring Them Home Now" campaign?
WE BEGAN the campaign in July, constructed a Web site, drew up a statement and began to make contacts with people. On August 12, we had a press conference in Washington, D.C., that was carried on C-SPAN, and the following day we did a similar one at Fort Bragg, N.C. In both cases, we got huge press. Since we put up the Web site, we've been getting about 29,000 visitors a week. We get a lot of e-mail from veterans, some from GIs and military families and some from just regular folks, workers, union members, different people.
Responses from military families have primarily been over the Internet, and it's been about 25 percent negative and 75 percent positive. Some of the negative responses are, "Your son volunteered, so shut up," or "You're just whining." But mostly, it's been positive with people saying, "There's no reason these guys are dying, bring them back," that they're dying for Bush's lies and it's an untenable situation.
When we started this thing, we did it at a level that people could relate to through their own concerns, rather than coming into it with our analysis and agenda and saying, "Fit into this." With military families, we've encountered some people coming from a basic place--"I want my son home." We don't look at it as one person, but as bring the troops--all the troops--home. So, we have to work with people on that level.
YOUR CAMPAIGN with its demand to bring the troops 1ome now has sparked a debate in the antiwar move³ent about whether it's "irresponsible" to call for immediate withdrawal. The U.S. has a responsibility, goes the argument, to stabilize and improve things before it leaves. What do you say in response to this?
WHEN PEOPLE say that, they're looking at it from the point of view of policy. Since the government is making policy, we're going to propose an alternative policy that makes more sense. But the one thing that's obvious about the Bush administration is that they're not too interested in alternative policies, especially citizen-initiated alternatives. In the winter and spring, there was a mass movement of people around the world opposed to war. In this country, there were demonstrations in city after city. At one point, polls showed a majority in the U.S. saying don't go to war. Bush ignored them. So, they're not too interested in our alternative policies. The only thing that is going to compel this government to back down is when people will no longer tolerate it, no longer tolerate people dying without a good reason to die.
That's what "Bring Them Home Now" is about. It's not a blindfold, where you forget about the rest of the world, and all you care about is what you need. Some people say that we have a responsibility to rebuild Iraq, and they present Iraq as a failed nation-state. There are countries in the world that we would call failed nation-states where the central government doesn't function, the country descends into militia violence and chaos. To a certain degree, that was the situation in Somalia. The U.S. had a role in bringing the Taliban to power and turning Afghanistan into a failed state. But Iraq was never a failed nation-state. It was a developing Third World country that had a relatively high standard of living, education and health care. It was under the rule of the Baath Party and Saddam, which was certainly a dictatorship that repressed political opponents. But it was not a basket-case country.
It was 12 years of UN/U.S. sanctions and all the bombing that have destroyed Iraq's infrastructure. When people start talking about America's responsibility to rebuild the country, I think a lot of people are coming from the place that we have to do what's right. We have to clean up the damage. But it quickly turns into the idea that we have to do something for them--as if Iraq is incapable of self-government. Iraq is the birthplace of civilization. The Garden of Eden and Babylon are ancient historical sites that existed in Iraq. The history of government and of self-rule is long-standing--they've been doing this for 4,000 years.
The idea that Americans, with 200 years of history, have to straighten out these people--that sounds like colonial chauvinism from the beginning of the 20th century. And again, when there was a decolonization movement after the Second World War, there were also people presenting these Third World countries as being incapable of self-government. That was a justification for the old colonialism, for old imperialism, for the "white man's burden." The Western powers have to bring enlightenment to these "dark" places and peoples of the world.
I think we should not forget the past. The past had to be cast aside, because what the West really wanted was to dominate the underdeveloped world. Now we see the ideology and the practice of colonialism coming back into vogue. They have also developed this rap, which is based on America as the protector and guardian of freedom in the world. We stand for democracy, human rights and things like that. But recent American history is at odds with that image. I'm a Vietnam veteran. Was Vietnam about freedom and democracy? I don't think so. Nicaragua and El Salvador, the wars they conducted against those countries in the 1980s--they weren't based on freedom and human rights.
What the U.S. defeat in Vietnam showed was the limits of imposing our image, our projection of what a nation should be onto another nation. The idea of self-determination is that people do things in their own way and time. After its defeat in Vietnam, the U.S. was gun-shy. They used to call it the "Vietnam Syndrome," where the American public didn't want to be sending its troops around the world on some military adventure. Since Vietnam, those in power have been trying to reconfigure people's thinking and convince them that Vietnam was a noble cause, that it's alright to interfere in Nicaragua, and other places throughout the world.
Now they've come to the point where they think they can go full tilt again. So, we're doing the same thing we did in Vietnam, we're trying to force our image of a nation on another nation, this time Iraq. It just doesn't work.
But the motivation is no abstract ideology. The U.S. government and the people in power have started this war for a dual purpose--regional dominance and control of natural resources. That's their motivation. The rest of this stuff is all window dressing--human rights, democracy. The only freedom they care about is the free market, and they don't want to make it free, they want to dominate it.
The strange thing is that the idea of people's right to self-determination is what this country was founded on. Every Fourth of July, we set off firecrackers to celebrate how we declared independence. In one of Martin Luther King's speeches, he talked about how the American Revolution and the French Revolution sent shock waves throughout the world, that people wanted independence. It's been recognized in international affairs since the League of Nations after the First World War that nations have the right to self-determination. But in recent years, that's become fuzzy because people start to say, "Well, what about what's going on in this country, and what about there with Milosevic?" So, pretty soon the idea of self-determination and people running their own house gets lost on people who want to barge into someone else's house. But for the people whose house is barged in on, it isn't lost.
They made a movie one time called "Red Dawn" about the Cubans and Russians invading America, and how the Americans resisted with guerrilla warfare. For people who saw the movie, they thought that was great, but when we unvade somewhere else, we can't figure it out.
The understanding that people have to have self-rule, self-determination--that people are the masters of their own house--is something we should be more consciously embracing as part of our analysis. We are the country that is going in and doing the occupying, so it's easy for people living in this country to forget that and start looking at it very pragmatically, like how are we going to rebuild this country. Pretty soon you end up with a position, "Bring the Troops Home Soon." That's all good if you're not the guy getting shot at.
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