Don't ask, don't tell

The latest edition of The New Yorker features an article about the US army's "don't ask, don't tell"-policy. After he died, in Iraq, Alan Rogers got some attention for his activism. His former colleagues, who held Rogers to be a respectable M.I major who devoted all his energy to the army, weren't too happy about the revelations of this part of Rogers' life:

“To a person—I really mean every person in the office was completely surprised,”Hardy told me, referring to Rogers’s private life. Hardy’s officemates knew Rogers as an easygoing college-football enthusiast and a capable volleyball player—their team captain, last June, at the annual office picnic. “ ‘The first openly gay soldier to die in Iraq,’ ” Hardy said, recalling Pilaud’s Wikipedia entry. “We’re, like, ‘Hold it. If it’s a surprise to all of us, that can’t count as the first openly gay soldier to die in Iraq.’ And we just felt there was an agenda that wasn’t Alan’s.” Hardy said that he did not know who had made the Wikipedia edits, but he mentioned a recent article in USA Today in which a soldier’s mother expressed some unease about the specificity of the instructions her son had given her in the event of his death—which friends should speak on his behalf, what songs to play at his funeral. “Nowhere—and I read the will—did Alan leave any piece of paper that said that,” Hardy told me. “He did not make any moves to be remembered as a gay soldier. Nowhere in those phone calls home did he say, ‘Let everyone know that I died a proud gay officer.’ ” Of course, being a proud gay officer is tantamount, under the current military policy, to being a retired gay officer with no pension.

Geopolitics, retropolics, oilpolitics

I know all too little about these things - international politics and economics, that is - but this was interesting. Even though the arguments are quite compressed, there were many points that were new to me or that I have only reflected on in passing.

Joshua Key: The story of an ordinary soldier

Buying a Christmas gift to my father is usually an ordeal. He prefers biographies, mostly about war and "great men". This year, I was lucky when strolling around in the local, crappy book shop - I bought The Deserter's tale: The story of an ordinary soldier who walked away from the war in Iraq by Joshua Key. My father read it and now I have read it, too. The book teels the story of a poor kid from Oklahoma who joins the army in order to solve his financial problems, is taken in by the recruiters' lies (he thinks he will not have to go abroad to fight) and is sent to Iraq. Being exposed to the cruelty against civilians shown by American soldiers in Iraq, he loses all his faith in the war being a mission to restore democracy and peace. Even though some parts of the book are seemingly the product of an attempt to create an alluring story (the story of a man from childhood onwards), it was a good book to read for someone who, like me, don't know much about the present reality in Iraq. Of course, I come across reports from Iraq in the news, but the soldier's point of view is rarely present there. In that way, Key's book is important.

He talks about the frustration of hunting down invisible terrorists. As a matter of fact, he never sees any 'terrorist'. The frustration of the soldiers is taken out on civilians, whom the soldiers are taught to perceive as 'the enemy', 'terrorists'. This part of the book, when he reports about horrible acts of cruelty, is very convincing. Towards the end of the book the tone is altered; he now draws general conclusions from his own experiences in Iraq. He reflects on the meagre excuses of 'I was only acting in accordance with orders'. Of course he is right that this is an excuse that will not convince anyone, but the way he says it, it comes out in a fairly preachy way that I consider entirely unnecessary in relation to what he has already said about the atrocities in Iraq. We have, as it were, already got the point. And his appeal to the Geneva convention left me a bit confused. On the one hand, he says that what they did was possible only when conscience was suffocated. On the other hand, he appeals to the Geneva book in the last part of the book almost if that would shed light on the graveness of the crimes committed by the soldies. (The Geneva convention has a function, who would want to dispute that, but I was unclear about the role it had in Key's book)

That said, Key's book should be taken seriously.

I am curious about the reception of the book in the US. Have any representatives of the US army commented on the book? Is Key's story explained away asan exception to the "humanistic mission" of the US army, in the same way as the Abu Ghraib scandal was said to be the result of the misbehaviour on the part of a few soldiers?

privatization of war etc.

There are many things about world politics I have a hard time understanding. Too many questions seem childish and naive, on the verge of insanity. From a certain point of view, that is. "This is how the world works, deal with it."

The existence of some phenomena indicates how certain things are taken for granted, that certain things are considered to be normal, OK. I'm thinking about the firms that supply 'soldiers' to US security forces in Iraq. Firms with the main objective of supplying mercenary troops. Firms profiting on war. Great business, I can imagine. Of course I can see the logic going on here. The lack of responsibility is practical, of course. Human resources are lacking in the security forces. But I can't help asking: what is it like to work for that kind of firm? In a news article, a guy from the infamous Blackburn tells the journalist that he is not only doing it for the money - there is something about it that makes him go back.

I don't know much about this at all. Here is one of the articles I've read:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070528/scahill