Which Came First…?

Remember back when The Bush 43 administration was focused on “inserting democracy” in the Middle East by going to war in Iraq?  Remember Paul Bremmer, and US troops protecting the Ministry of Oil while Baghdad burned?  Remember the “Coalition of the Willing”, and “going to war with the Army you have…”, as opposed to the Army you want?  Does any of that stuff ring a bell?  I am sure it does with most of you.

What most of these things have to do with one another is economics.  Bush wanted to do a big thing, war, and wanted to do it as cheaply as possible.  Again, this war was Iraq in 2003, and it was a particularly stupid idea.  For the next 13 years after that, it was referred to as the greatest strategic blunder in US history.  It may still be.  And as such, many knew that it was a bad idea at the time.  One’s willingness to buy into the value of that war had more to do with the cable news station that you valued than the facts of the matter…one of those facts being resources.  So, the United States could not count on our usual allies.  When we asked for help from our normal partners, they just told us, “Fiiiiiish!”  

And since we needed a “coalition” for public relations purposes, the Bush administration came up with the “coalition of the willing”.  The list included, Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Columbia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the U.K., and Uzbekistan.  This coalition was a Potemkin village.  It was a fraud.  Basically, the US was going it alone.  

Now, war is an expensive proposition.  Bandages, beans, and bullets can get very expensive, but most expensive is the human resource.  To fight a war, a nation needs live bodies, and the coalition of the willing provided more in terms of public relations than actual fighters.  So, the Bush administration decided to make some very important changes.  One change was changing the number of deployments a particular fighting man or woman would serve.  In previous wars, fighters served one, two, maybe three deployments to the war zone.  In Iraq, it became common to go five or six times.  That is a lot to ask.  Also, Bush sent married military members, even those with children, to war with deployments that overlapped, rather than keeping one parent at home at all times.  The US needed bodies, and they did not care what it did to families.  Then, one of the most costly changes.  The military began lowering their enlistment standards.  In previous generations there were standards of education, criminal history, and the embargo of recruits with histories in extremist groups, like neo-Nazis, or the KKK.  Once upon a time, prior membership in such organizations barred one from service.  

Bush lowered those to get the people that he needed to “insert democracy” into Iraq.  (Insertion of democracy is a stupid notion if ever there was one). 

So, once the US started normalizing extremists by allowing their presence in the ranks of the military, they created many, many unintended consequences.  First, they made these individuals more familiar to those who had avoided them for their entire lives.  It used to take watching the Phil Donahue show to see and hear a neo-nazi.  Now, young military members could see and hear one in the next cot.  Also, it gave those extremists training and a block of time which could be sold as rehabilitation from their previous beliefs or activities, since what they had done previously would have been disavowed as a condition of recruitment.  Then, upon completion of that tour of service, with a clean several consecutive years, some of those veterans had a much better opportunity to join the ranks of law enforcement.  

When it comes to trying to figure out how to augment the training of existing officers who also happen to be racists, or sadists, or whatever, most suggestions fall way short.  The pipeline for a good chunk of the population is from miles and miles away, and goes back years and years policy wise.  Immediate remedies on the surface are necessary, but far from effective without change that goes to the root of our society.  Even the idea of allowing extremists into the military is not the source.  The absurd notion of democracy by the point of a spear came before that.  The idea of supporting exploitative foreign policy came before that.  The practice of valuing mineral resources, or plantations, or land over human rights came before that.  Extraction economies lead to direct conflicts with human rights.  The more we gird ourselves to have that economy at all costs, the more that the ultimate cost comes out as the loss of life on our own streets.  Those chickens come home to roost.  When they roost, they lay neo-Nazi, KKK, and sadist eggs.  Some of those hatchlings grow into police officers.