06/12/07 – Aaron Glantz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and I apologize, I'm way too little sleep and too much coffee today.
Let's see if I can trudge through this thing, man.
Let's bring on Aaron Glantz.
He's a reporter for Pacifica Radio, and we run his columns regularly, his news reports regularly at antiwar.com.
You can find them at antiwar.com/glantz, G-L-A-N-T-Z, and also you can look him up at his own website, aaronglantz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Aaron.
Good to be with you.
Yeah, good to talk to you again.
Let's start off talking a little bit about your book.
You wrote a book called How America Lost Iraq, and now, that book came out in 2004, right?
Well, it came out in 2005, but all the journalism in it carried us through 2004, and basically what I was contending in the book and what I still believe to be true is that when the U.S. military first went in and toppled Saddam Hussein, that a lot of Iraqi people who were just sick of Saddam and all of the unlawful detentions and prisonments and killings that marked his regime, that Iraqi folks were willing to give America a chance at that time, but that by the end of 2004, you had the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, you had the attacks on major political movements in Iraq, you had really brutal attacks on different cities in Iraq, like the attack on Fallujah, and all of this in an atmosphere of continuing no basic services, no reliable electricity, no reliable clean water.
By the end of 2004, a majority of Iraqi people wanted America to go, and that's why I called the book How America Lost Iraq.
Did it really take that long?
I would have thought that the war was lost in terms of the window of opportunity for the Iraqi people to see us as friends and not just colonial occupiers.
I would have thought that window would have slammed shut by the end of 2003, if not before.
You're saying it really took until the battles in Najaf and Fallujah and Abu Ghraib and that kind of thing, they finally got over it by the end of 2004.
There was a big change between April of 2003, when Sudan was deposed, and the end of 2003, the beginning of 2004, absolutely.
As the months dragged on, there was no electricity, there was no clean water.
To just paint you a picture, Baghdad is a city that's spread out, it's hot, it's dusty, it feels a little bit like a Middle Eastern version of Los Angeles, it has palm trees.
No electricity means no traffic lights.
That means everyone is constantly stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and it means that when an American patrol comes through and they stop traffic to secure that patrol, that exacerbates the traffic jam.
No electricity means it's impossible to run a business, no electricity means that when it's 140 degrees in the summer and nobody has electricity to run a fan, they can't sleep at night and they get grouchy.
Also during this time, there were American patrols going through, arresting people, taking them to prison, and the International Red Cross reported in early 2004 that 90% of prisoners arrested by the U.S. military were arrested by mistake, 9 out of 10, and that's because the Americans would go in and they'd just simply round up all of the men in a particular house or on a particular block and try to sort out later on who was guilty and who was not of attacking American soldiers.
This is not a good way to make friends, but this was all in the background.
This was causing people to become grouchier.
This was causing people to be less tolerant of the American forces, but in April of 2004, there was a palpable sea change.
You could feel it on the street where en masse, the Iraqi people said, enough is enough.
They saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib that confirmed what they had already heard from their relatives.
They saw the daily violence in Fallujah and Najaf in Al Jazeera if they weren't living it themselves, and they said enough is enough, we want to get rid of these guys, and that's when you started to see the level of violence against American soldiers that continues until today.
The top headline on Antiwar.com today is U.S. Signals' Permanent Stay in Iraq, and the little subtitle says, Critics say a long-term U.S. presence may provoke greater Iraqi resistance of the quote, like ironic, silly, that's what they call it, but we know it's not true, quotes are occupier, and I'm thinking, you know, well it sounds to me, Aaron Glantz, who was a reporter in Iraq at the time, that you're telling me that America has been considered by the vast majority of Iraqis to be an occupier, not a liberator, since at least three years ago.
Well, and I remember even before that, even before, you know, I'm saying that America lost Iraq in my book, I remember almost right after I arrived in Iraq, I got there shortly after the fall of Saddam, I remember interviewing this guy in Baghdad, and his brother was killed by Saddam's regime, and he himself had been imprisoned by Saddam's regime for anti-regime resistance activities, so he was no friend of the government, he was happy to see Saddam go, but then I asked him, I said, what do you think about the American presence here?
And he said, if they stay, it's going to be bad for everyone, and I said, what do you mean, aren't you happy that the Americans have overthrown this dictator who imprisoned you and killed your brother, and he said, the longer the Americans stay, the worse it's going to get, because no people in the world can have their dignity crushed by having another country sit on them, you know, how would you like it if England came and occupied America?
We don't want to be occupied by a foreign country, so I pray to God that the Americans go home as soon as possible, and this was a man who, if anyone, should have been wanting an American presence.
I think that we just don't understand this, that it's so basic, the idea that people want to have dignity, they want to govern themselves, they don't want 135,000 foreign troops in their country, I mean, how hard is that to understand, I should say actually now with the surge, they want 160,000 or 200,000 American troops in their country, they want to be able to live their life free of foreign interference.
Now, I'm trying to remember, I think it was probably two years ago, maybe it was only one year ago, but that doesn't seem right, it must have been two years ago that we spoke, Aaron, and you told me that you thought that if America was to just pack up their stuff and go as quickly as possible, that that would be the very best hope, and I think at the time you were saying they're really running out of time, but that that would be the best hope for the puppet government that America created to actually continue to be the government of that country.
You told me then that nobody wants to join it or take part in it or have anything to do with it because they'll just be seen as collaborators with the occupier, but if America were to leave, then all the incentive would be on the people of Iraq to sort these things out.
Well, I mean, I wasn't saying that the puppet government would survive, certainly, I mean, it might.
Well, I didn't mean as a puppet, but I just mean, you know, the Parliament without completely throwing out the Constitution, starting over again, that the basic structure that's been set up so far would remain, I think, as well.
No, I mean, I think that this is a big problem.
The big problem right now is there's not really an Iraqi government.
I mean, there is an American occupation and there are Iraqi politicians who essentially have no power.
I mean, if there's an American contractor in Iraq that runs over and kills, you know, an Iraqi school child, which happens from time to time or, you know, just kind of murders an Iraqi civilian, the Iraqi government can't go and prosecute that person.
The Iraqi government can't set a policy.
The Iraqi government can't tell the U.S. military to behave in a way that the U.S. military doesn't want to behave.
The majority of the Iraqi parliament has voiced that they want a timeline for American withdrawal from Iraq.
And, you know, the American government and George Bush, you know, talks about freedom and democracy but will not go along with the will of the Iraqi parliament that they orchestrated the election of.
So, you know, people look at the Iraqi government and they just kind of sneer.
They're like, who are these people?
They don't consider them to be a legitimate government.
The problem is that the longer that the American occupation goes on, the worse the situation gets on a day-to-day basis and the harder it's going to be for the Iraqi people to put their lives together after we go.
I mean, when I wrote the book in 2004, the problem was primarily a war between American troops and anti-American forces.
Now, the problem is that and, in addition to that, sectarian violence of different groups against each other and, in addition to that, you have armies like Turkey massing on the border in the north.
You have interference from all sides and everyone's intelligence agencies.
And then, on top of that, you have just like the crushing day-to-day insecurity.
I mean, people are fleeing.
You have one and a half million Iraqis who have run away to Syria, you have over a million Iraqis who have run away to Jordan, who knows how many Iraqis have run away to Iran, and then you have millions and millions of Iraqis who have bailed out of the cities and gone back to the small towns that their family originally came from, God knows how many generations ago, where they're staying on the family farm and almost never going out for fear that they might get killed, and who knows what the next negative development will be if the occupation drags on.
So, I'm not saying that when the American military leaves, it's all going to be roses and everyone's going to be happy in Iraq, but it's going to be the point in time when the Iraqi people can begin to try to put their lives back together.
But we know that the longer that we stay, the worse it's going to get.
Right.
And, you know, for something that obvious, it's really too bad that the exact opposite of what you just said is basically the basis for the policy, that the longer we stay, the better it'll be, and we have to stay until it's good enough that we can leave.
But what's weird is that nobody seriously believes that anymore.
I mean, maybe George Bush does in his heart of hearts, but I mean, I don't think that very many American people feel that way.
I don't even think very many people in Congress feel that way.
But this bizarre politics has taken hold where the status quo just kind of perpetuates itself.
And people are afraid.
People are afraid to take a chance on withdrawal.
You know, people are afraid that if we leave, something terrible is going to happen.
And I'm here to tell you that something terrible is already happening.
And it's not like, like I said, it's not like things are going to be good when we leave.
Things are going to be bad, but things are bad right now.
And they're bad because we made them bad.
And it seems like if we leave, the incentive would at least be, you know, go back to where it properly belongs on the people of Iraq to sort out their own destiny and figure out what they're going to do themselves.
I know you talk about it being America's fault.
Had some of the best reporters in the country on here to explain that America continues to back the Iranian factions because basically they're the only ones who need us.
That the Mu'tad al-Sadr is trying to work out an agreement with the former Baathists and create a coalition government, which is supposedly, you know, America's goal here.
And yet we continue to fight Sadr and, and promote the Badr brigades and the Iranian factions.
Well, the U.S. policy towards Iraq is just completely incoherent because at the same time that you have all this saber rattling and nasty talk about Iran, as you mentioned, the main groups that the U.S. government is backing in Iraq are all closely tied to the Iranian regime.
I mean, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the biggest power in the current Iraqi government, the part of the Iraqi political sphere that the U.S. military and U.S. government are most closely allied to in Iraq on the ground, were armed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
And their, you know, just listen, Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, does that sound like, you know, freedom and liberty for everyone?
They're the faction that the United States is supporting more than anybody else.
And then look at the Kurds, you know, the Kurds are another faction that is being closely supported by the American government.
And the current president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is a man that through all of the 1980s, when we were supporting Saddam Hussein, he was supporting the ayatollahs of Iran.
Now you could say we were wrong to support Saddam Hussein, but he was working hand in glove with the ayatollahs of Iran, who were also our enemy at that time.
And so now he's the president of Iraq, and we support him.
So it's a very strange policy where George Bush can go up there and talk about, you know, freedom and democracy for Iraq, and at the same time, give speeches against Iran, and at the same time be supporting parts of the Iraqi political sphere that are most allied with the mullahs who control the Iranian state.
Let me ask you about SADR, you know, all the reports about the Shiite death squads, religious death squads that go around murdering Sunnis and so forth.
Do you have any good way to measure how much of that is the Mahdi army versus how much of that is the Badr Brigade responsible for those things?
You know, it's really hard to measure something like that from here in the United States.
Because when you call over there and you talk to people, of course, everyone blames everybody else.
But one thing that I would say is that everyone's probably, everyone's involved in this.
You know, the Badr Brigades, which is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq's militia, they do this.
You know, the Mahdi army, which is Muqtada Sadr's militia, they do this.
They do the sectarian violence and the ethnic cleansing.
There are, you know, Sunni militia groups as well, and then they're just neighborhood militia groups.
I mean, you have, there's no government in Iraq to speak of.
I mean, getting back to what we were talking about before.
You know, if somebody robs your house in Iraq, you're not going to call the police.
The police are part of the occupation.
The police go out on patrol with American soldiers.
The police don't, you know, try to solve your problems as an Iraqi citizen.
So if you do have a problem, you're going to turn to your neighborhood militia.
I mean, you're going to have a gun, your neighbors are going to have a gun, and you're all going to work together to, quote unquote, protect your turf.
I mean, everything has completely devolved, and it's going to stay that way at least as long as the American occupation continues.
Well, the reason I pick on Sadr is because, well, basically you could substitute his picture for Osama bin Laden as scary seeming foreign guy or what have you on the poster.
And you know, all of our government's propaganda is about how pure evil he is, and I basically, you know, would concede that.
It seems like the guy's pretty evil, you know, in terms of some of the murders and tortures as soon as he's putting drills in people's heads and all this stuff.
But then again, despite the fact that he's no angel, he's no worse or different than the Iranian parties, only he doesn't represent Iran.
Well, exactly.
I mean, that's kind of what I was getting at.
And who knows, really, who is doing these drills to the head and, you know, bodies that turn up with cigarette burns all over them and severe signs of torture.
I mean, we really don't know which factions are responsible for this.
We do know that all these groups have militias that go around beating people up and killing people indiscriminately.
And I guess to a certain extent, I understand that, you know, you're living in an atmosphere where you can't send your children to school because they might get killed.
You're living in an atmosphere where you can't go to work because you might get killed in any way there's probably not any electricity at work to run your job.
You're living in an environment where there's no social services or state services to speak of, where the entire country is in a complete state of collapse.
I mean, these are not the conditions that bring out the best in humanity.
And I think that's really important for people to keep in mind as they're watching TV and they're getting the latest news that we have created the conditions in Iraq for these kinds of atrocities to really take off.
Now, if you think about somebody like Muqtada Sutter, here's a guy, it was completely obvious when the United States invaded Iraq to anyone who has just like a basic knowledge of Iraqi history and culture, that Muqtada Sutter would be somebody who, when Saddam Hussein was toppled, would step in to the power vacuum and try to make a play for power.
He had a lot of support amongst the people of Iraq, especially amongst poor Shia who were oppressed by Saddam Hussein.
His father was a grand Ayatollah who was murdered by Saddam Hussein for fomenting resistance against his regime.
His uncle was one of the most well-known powerful Shiite theologians of the 20th century, and he was killed in 1980 along with his sister for fomenting a rebellion against Saddam Hussein.
And so when Saddam Hussein fell, he had the Muqtada Sutter, a network of mosques around the country, ready to preach his messages and work together to give charity, to give food, to give other basic services, to patrol the streets with his militia since there was no Iraqi police or Iraqi military to keep the streets and since the Americans didn't know what the hell they were doing and allowed looting everywhere.
It makes perfect sense that Muqtada Sutter has garnered a certain amount of power and prestige in this environment, and rather than constantly fighting against that, rather than constantly attacking him and therefore provoking counterattacks and increasing the overall amount of violence in Iraq, the U.S. government should just recognize that he's a real legitimate political force and deal with it.
You know, I hate to sound like a broken record about this, but it's something that continues to bother me, and maybe because I'm partly guilty of the same thing myself.
All this talk about Iraq from Texas and from California, you know, words floating through the ether and that kind of thing, and even when we're focusing on the reality of day-to-day life for these people, I guess it's too easy to just, you know, forget how very real all this is, and, you know, well, let's see, you know, within the last 15 minutes or the next 15, somebody's going to get blown up by a roadside bomb there, and what we're talking about is real blood, real pain, real families who are going to never see their loved one again alive, real mental trauma.
And this is something that you talk about in some of your more recent reports, all of which can be found at eringlants.com, where you talk about the mental stress.
There's a quote from a woman, you take your life in your hands every time you leave the house.
And this is something I heard from Sami Rasuli, too, from the Muslim Peacekeeper team, who told me that this is how it is, even in, you know, heavily Shiite or heavily Sunni areas or whatever, not even necessarily in mixed areas.
Pretty much any time anybody wants to go outside, they basically have to consider that this is going to be their last day on earth, and if it's not, it's only because they're lucky.
And you know, I don't think most Americans have any idea or can even imagine what it's like to really live life like that.
No, it's just incredible.
It's just incredible.
I mean, I couldn't take it.
I left.
You know, I'm lucky I'm an American journalist.
When it got that bad, I picked up and left and went home.
And the incredible thing is that increasingly Iraqis are making that decision.
They're picking up and leaving.
Four million refugees so far, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you're talking about people going to Syria, going to Jordan, going to Iran, you know, lucky few getting to Europe or the United States.
But then, and I want to hammer this home, you also have people who are leaving the cities and going home, millions and millions of people, back to their farm and just trying to wait out this war.
And that's equally important.
But yeah, I mean, I said in the report that you're mentioning that there was a recent study done by Mustansura University, which is in western Baghdad.
They just surveyed the area around the university.
And I have some friends who used to live in that neighborhood, but have since fled to Syria and Lebanon.
They found 70% of elementary school students in that neighborhood suffered trauma-related symptoms.
And the International Red Cross reported that, you know, many Iraqi children passed dead bodies on the streets as they walked to school in the morning, you know, and others have had relatives killed.
I mean, this is the daily life.
This is what life has become like.
And it's just even hard to keep reporting on.
But it's even more unfortunate that it keeps happening.
Yeah, well, unless anyone forget, America started this aggressive war against a country that had never attacked us, that was no threat to us, had nothing to do with 9-11, had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda at all except putting out, kill these guys if you can find them, arrest warrant, you know, for them.
This is all America's fault, these people's lives that have been shattered into millions of pieces.
This is because of the 75% who cheered Go Bush and stuck that American flag on the back of their car in 2003.
Somebody's got to bear some responsibility for this.
It's not okay to just go around smashing people's societies into millions of pieces and, you know, putting five-year-olds through the worst kind of post-traumatic stress, mental illnesses and so forth.
And this is another thing you point out in your article.
All the counselors have fled.
So you've got a five-year-old who walks by bodies on the way to school every morning and is having severe mental problems, who are you going to turn to?
You don't even have any mental health experts because the people who are mental health experts at least could afford to leave town.
Get the hell out of there.
Well, and then, you know, I was talking to this doctor here in San Francisco, a doctor at UCSF who's an expert in trauma and, you know, is familiar with all of these studies.
And he says, normally, if you have a situation where there's been a severe trauma, say there's an earthquake, right, in San Francisco, and half the city fell down, well, where would you give, you know, the counseling to the kids would be in school.
But in the first place, you have a lot of kids who can't even go to school because the security situation is so bad.
And then in the second place, the teachers are going through that same trauma.
So they're hopefully not in any position to give any counseling.
Yep.
Wow.
Yeah, that's a real catastrophe.
Let's switch gears here and talk a little bit about the American soldiers.
They're all individuals, too.
The vast majority of them join the Army, perhaps stupidly, in order to pay for college and so forth.
I can't imagine it's more than a majority of American soldiers who actually believe in this mission.
And they're suffering, too.
Let me share with you an email I got this morning from a friend of mine.
He forwards me emails that he gets from his nephew, who's over there.
And you know, all the names are left out here.
This is just a piece of one of his emails.
He's talking about a convoy that he was in, a roadside bomb going off and blowing up the most heavily armored vehicle that they had.
And here is where he's describing a little bit of his friend dying in his arms here, and the other guy who almost died.
I'm doing a little better now.
I was amazed at how hard he struggled to survive.
His wounds were so severe, he should have been dead when we pulled him out of the truck.
But when the helicopter landed 15 minutes later, he was still breathing.
I just couldn't believe it.
I've never seen anybody live so long with such bad injuries.
I wish I could have saved him.
The real hero of the day was his driver, Airman blank.
His legs were full of shrapnel, his face badly damaged, and his shoulder dislocated.
He was in no shape to do anything except collapse, but he got out of his truck and attempted to pull Airman blank from the burning vehicle.
We were being shot at, so we walked him to the other side of the Humvee and sat him down.
We basically told him that he would survive, but that his buddy was in bad shape, so we'd have to delay his treatment until we could stabilize the other guy.
He just nodded and said okay.
He sat bleeding and in tremendous pain, never making a sound while we fought off the attack and treated his friend.
He never whined for morphine or distracted us.
He just sat there and suffered in silence so we could try to save the other injured guy.
When the helicopter came, we put him on a stretcher and carried him to the landing zone.
He thanked us and complimented us profusely.
It was humbling to be complimented by the bravest man I've ever met.
So that went into my report, along with all the technical details about what happened.
I hope the buffoons who run the military will stop slapping themselves on the back long enough to recognize this young man.
Medals don't mean much to me, but if any story from this day needs to be told, it should be about the young man with a shattered body thinking of his friends before himself, which is what being a soldier and a decent person is all about.
And now, you know, the earlier part of this email was just as horrifying or worse, and yeah, was it Sherman, the guy that burnt the south to the ground that said, War is Hell?
And I guess he was bragging, but you know, I don't know, Aaron, I've only spoken with you on the phone a few times.
We've never met in person, and yet I can't help but think that if you were blown apart and dying in my arms that I would be pretty screwed up about that for the rest of my life.
This is the kind of thing that we're putting our guys through, our neighbors, our friends, our nephews and cousins and brothers.
This is what they're going through over there.
Well, and you know what else, and this is something that I think most people don't realize is that the U.S. government, the Bush administration, does not want stories like the one you just read to be heard.
They don't want that.
They have banned U.S. soldiers from using MySpace.
They have banned them from putting their videos up on YouTube.
They have banned, I mean, not the internet entirely, as you can see, you got this email, but all kinds of communication blogging has been severely curtailed.
I mean, this is the way that people are able to tell their own personal stories about what they're going through to the wider public, and all of that has been completely made illegal by a DOD order recently.
Well, they're just trying to save bandwidth, Aaron.
Yeah, right.
I mean, Jesus, you know, I mean, you're going out there, you're risking your life in a stupid war, and then when you want to tell people about it, then they tell you, you know, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave.
You can't tell anyone.
But I mean, it's even hard for me to even just hear that, you know.
It's been hard.
I've been doing a lot of stories about veterans, the things they're going through, and of course, I was over there as a journalist, you know, over parts of three years, and it's not an easy thing to talk about sometimes.
And I think that's one reason, you know, in addition to the censorship aspect, I think it's one reason why the media has really shied away from reporting what the war is really actually like, you know, to the Iraqi people, and what the war is actually like to the American soldier.
And then when the American soldier comes back from that, you know, they're in a situation where most people are just at the mall doing their shopping and don't really care.
And that, you know, I'm imagining you come back from that, you've had somebody who you're pretty close to die in your arms, then you come back and people don't relate to the war here in a visceral way, in a way that is intimate and important.
Right, yeah, I read a guy said, a kid came up to him and said, man, what happened to your leg?
And he said, well, I lost it over there in the Iraq war.
And the kid said, oh, that's still going on?
Yeah.
That's completely removed from most of the society.
I just saw a report the other day where they were counting time spent on the major cable TV news networks covering Iraq, and how at CNN and MSNBC, the numbers have gone way, way down.
But at Fox News, they spent a total of 11 minutes and an entire afternoon talking about Iraq.
And these, the people who were, you know, nothing but war 24 seven in the run up to the war won't dare cover it now.
Well, they don't want to talk about the fact that there are now 1000s of veterans of the Iraq war who are already homeless.
You know, I couldn't believe it.
I mean, they're, I mean, first of all, it's a disgrace that we have on any given night 400,000 veterans sleeping on the streets of this country.
God, is it that many 400,000 I mean, that's according to the government, so it's probably even more.
You know, they classify 200,000 people as homeless veterans.
But then on any given night, there are 400,000 people who are veterans of this, you know, this country's armed forces sleeping on the street.
But I was shocked.
I was down in Los Angeles, where there are 91,000 homeless veterans, according to the census, and 20 91,000 homeless people and 27,000 homeless veterans, and go into some of the homeless shelters and finding, you know, at any given shelter, two or three people who are, you know, 25 years old, 27 years old, veterans of the of the Iraq war and already ending up in the homeless shelters.
And when I talked to the people who run these shelters, they said, this is unprecedented, that after the Vietnam War, you know, there are a lot of homeless veterans, but it took some time.
You know, people didn't come back from the Vietnam War and then immediately become homeless, like they are now they would come home, the family wouldn't understand, they burn some bridges, and then you know, seven, eight years down the line, it'd be on the street.
With these with these veterans of the Iraq war, it's happening in hyperspeed.
Why?
What's the difference?
Well, I think that I mean, one, one thing that people say is that, you know, generally speaking, the social safety, then this country has shrunk, generally speaking, people's relationships to their family are not as close.
But also, people say that, you know, the younger generation today, we have a more, I speak for myself, as well as somebody who's, you know, the same age as some of these guys, you know, we don't want to like, go in and fill out like a million forms of VA, you know, and then come back again and again and again during our six month wait time to get some kind of treatment.
You know, to eventually get it.
I mean, the services are there, but the bureaucracy is just incredible.
And I think that people in the younger generation, myself included, we just don't want to fight through that crap, right?
You know, and, you know, we're used to things happening in a reasonable amount of time.
And they just don't happen.
And I think another thing happens with this, with this younger generation, which I think is also important, which is, as you mentioned, the lack of a draft.
You know, so during the Vietnam era, the whole country is at war.
So when you came back from the war, you know, there wasn't an attitude like you said, oh, that's still going on.
Right.
You know, so there was, I think, a broader social support, even though the war was deeply unpopular, you know, at least people like were invested in the war itself.
Now people are just trying to move on themselves.
They didn't care.
Right.
You know, for the people who, the soldiers who come back and do try to fight through the bureaucracy in order to get their health care, they're being told to go and screw themselves and die.
Basically.
I'm sure you probably saw this article in The Nation by Joshua Kors called How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits.
And in that article, he says is, I think it was 20,000 of these guys, which out of what, 50 or 60,000 injured total, Joshua Kors reports the nation of approximately 20,000 of these guys have been told by the VA, oh, you know what your problem is?
It's not that artillery shell that went off right over your head and gave you a major concussion and, you know, punctured, destroyed both your eardrums and whatever, whatever.
No, your problem is you have a personality disorder, which, sorry, we can't define that or measure it in any real sense.
It's just basically calling names.
And so we're going to call you names.
You're a guy with a personality disorder and you know what that means?
No benefits for you.
Go die in a gutter, pal.
And they're telling this to tens of thousands of veterans?
What the hell?
Well, you know what else they do?
I mean, people come out of the military and then they get a drug problem, right?
I mean, after going through some of the stuff that we've been talking about.
Sure.
And then the military says, then the military, well, they're still in the military, right?
You come back, you're still in the military.
You haven't been discharged, but you're dealing with the crap that you went through in Iraq.
You develop a drug problem, you start smoking marijuana or doing something else.
And then the next thing you know, the military kicks you out and says, hey, you have a drug problem.
We don't want you in the military anymore.
And then of course the guy wants nothing more than to get out of the military after everything he's been through.
So he goes quietly.
But then later on, when he turns around and tries to apply for his benefits that he should get from his service, the military, or actually the VA tells him, you know what?
You're not entitled to those benefits because you got kicked out of the military for doing drugs.
Unforgivable.
I mean, it's just an absolute disgrace.
I don't know.
I don't know what to say, man.
A personality disorder, that's the one that just, it just sticks with me so much.
I mean, what does that mean?
That you're an asshole?
I mean, anyone in this audience can tell you right now, Aaron, that I have a personality disorder, dude.
Does that mean I'm not qualified for healthcare now?
You know, we have this VA that gets all their money for free.
It's not like they have to work for it.
They take it.
It's tax money.
And they can't just spend it where it belongs?
There are researchers at Harvard that have said that for the VA to maintain its services the way it's always been maintaining its services, right, for this new generation of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, so that it doesn't feel like a cut to the men and women who have come back, you know, because the money's gone up.
But like I'm talking about, like the way it actually feels to the veteran, if they didn't double the budget, then it's going to feel like a cut, because you have 2.5 million people who have either already become veterans or are currently in the military and have served over there.
You know, 1.5 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and 900,000 people currently in the service in these wars are rotating in and out.
And all those people are going to come out to the VA.
And it's not like all those World War II veterans went away or those Vietnam vets, they're still there.
The VA's still caring for them.
I mean, just to defend the VA for a second here.
And then, you know, where's Congress?
You know, so then the VA is stuck with not enough money, right?
And then you have these people waiting for six months going through this bureaucracy, which the VA has put in place, so that's their fault for putting in all this paperwork, you know, but then the VA is like, how are we going to cut corners here?
We can't possibly care for all these people with the amount of money we're getting from Congress.
I mean, the VA doesn't set the policy here, it's the elected officials that we vote for.
Yep, and just think about the cost of this, you know, into the future.
I guess it was Joseph Stiglitz, the economist said, by the time we're done, this will be $2.5 trillion.
And that's, you know, for the people who actually aren't, you know, denied care or actually get it.
And I guess really the only solution is to keep sending local cops out to murder these guys and then that way they can't collect their benefits either.
That's even more effective than telling them they have a personality disorder.
You just send the local sheriff's department to put a bullet in their head.
Well, I mean, this is something that the law enforcement is handling in different ways around the country is you have people who are, you know, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the kind of situations that we've been talking about and, you know, having a difficult time getting by day to day.
And then guess what?
Then the military shows up and tells them it's time to go back to Iraq.
And so we had a case recently in Maryland where a guy who had already served in Afghanistan who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder was being told that it was time for him to go to Iraq.
So he barricaded himself in his house, in a farmhouse in rural Maryland with a bunch of guns.
And but by himself, it was not a hostage situation.
And he was not nearby any buildings where he could shoot at passersby.
He was all alone in a farmhouse.
He just wanted to be left alone.
And the cops surrounded the house about the straight troopers, the local police, the local sheriff's deputies.
They brought two armored personnel carriers.
Here's the guy having a flashback to a war zone experience.
And then, you know, the local police department just provided the war.
And and they're all soldiers to the local cops, pretty much a lot of them are.
Yeah.
It reminds me of, you know, like the Ruby Ridge thing, right?
Oh, he's an ex green beret, an ex green beret.
It's all these cops get it in their head that they're going up against Rambo, which is just a movie, you know, and they end up killing this guy's son and his wife.
That's the same kind of thing that's happened in the Maryland case.
And then there was this other guy in Delaware, Derchay Hale in Delaware, who was murdered the same way where the cops just completely overreact and, you know, militarize, you say militarize the situation unnecessarily out of their own fear.
And this is the kind of thing.
This is just a small clue.
This is just a sample of the ripple effects that this particular war, never mind the rest of them, is going to have on our society on down the line from here.
We are already seeing like just here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, a number of like, kind of odd cases that have come up.
Like there was a guy, San Mateo County, which is the suburb south of San Francisco, where Silicon Valley is named as Nicholas Rosenoff.
He had served in the Iraq war, and he just went to his neighbor's house.
You know, he didn't know him.
And he said, I need your car.
I need your car.
You're not an Iraqi.
And he commandeered his car, and then drove it to Moffett Field, which is a closed military base.
It used to be a military base, but the DOD closed it years ago.
He drove to this military base, and he dropped off the car and turned himself in.
These are normal people who didn't act this way before they went to war.
The one thing that I will say, and I hope it's true, is there was a case, one of the first cases I ever covered as a journalist was this guy, Manny Babbitt, who was a Vietnam vet who murdered a woman in Sacramento in 1980.
He was diagnosed with severe PTSD.
He was a veteran of the Battle of Que Son, where thousands of North Vietnamese and American soldiers died.
He actually, shrapnel came through his skull and sliced it open.
They actually thought he was dead, so they put him in a helicopter hangar with a bunch of dead bodies, and that's when he woke up.
So you can imagine the kind of severe trauma that he was going through, and he just wasn't the same after he came back.
He committed a bunch of petty crimes, and anyway, in 1999, the state of California executed him for a murder he committed in 1980.
I remember his clemency hearing.
Here in California, we have a clemency hearing process, so if somebody is going to get executed, after all, his appeals are exhausted, and it's clear whether he did it or not.
The judges had the final say.
They have the hearing for clemency for mercy, and I remember busloads of Vietnam vets coming to this clemency hearing and talking about how they couldn't sleep with their wives anymore, that they had to go into another room and lock the door because they might get violent in the middle of the night during a flashback.
And then the state of California went ahead and executed him.
And it's been eight years now, and I just pray that we don't see a situation in the coming years where we're going to be executing Iraq War veterans who have been screwed up by the military, sending them off to this needless war in Iraq, and then they come home and they're not fine, upright citizens because they've had people die in their arms and they're severely injured and they're screwed up in the head, and then we do the final icing on the cake and kill them ourselves.
Well, I know Mark Bole did an article for Playboy magazine in March or April about a guy who was sentenced, I think, to 30 years for a murder of one of his fellow soldiers when he got back from Iraq, and it was exactly this kind of thing, post-traumatic stress disorder.
In fact, this guy, when he was still in Iraq, the medic on base or whatever had said, this guy, he's completely out of it, he's got PTSD bad and he needs to be sent home, and that medic was ignored by the higher-ups, overruled by the higher-ups, and this kid was sent back out there, and by the time he got home, he was such a basket case, he killed one of his best friends, stabbed him 30 times or something.
And they didn't sentence him to death, but yeah, he's still in 30 years.
And it reminds me of an article that Matt Bargaineer wrote back when he used to still write articles at antiwar.com about how many new Timothy McVeighs are we making out of this mess?
You know, how many people are going to have all these soldiers come back, probably half of them are going to be cops, and then another third of them are going to be PTSD cases.
Again, this is the kind of thing, it's just long-term consequences are going to continue to reverberate from this disaster for generations, probably.
And people ask, well what's the solution to this, and I said the number one solution, the first solution, is to stop the war.
Absolutely, and spend all that money on the guys who went and fought it and need the help.
That'd be a good place to start.
As a first step, just stop killing innocent Iraqis and allowing Americans to be killed and injured in the process.
That would be a nice start.
Yeah.
All right, well thanks very much for your time today.
Okay, my pleasure, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
Aaron Glantz.
You can find everything he writes at aaronglantz.com and at antiwar.com/glance.
This is Antiwar Radio.