DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Bonfire of puppy-tossers, and the beer test
By Julian Delasantellis

Five years now the bright nights of shock and awe have turned into the never ending days of blinding sorrow and affliction, but there is one thing that even the fiercest critics of the war, of which I include myself, must now admit. The hoary shibboleth that states that Americans care little or nothing for the non-combatant casualties its armed forces are inflicting on the Iraqi civil population has been demonstrated decisively wrong. Recent events have proven that Americans care deeply, passionately, even to and beyond the point of breaking the laws about making direct criminal threats, about those Iraqis injured by American forces.

As long as those injured have four legs and bark.

Viral is the current adjective of choice for Internet content, be it video, music or just a rumor or joke, that gets copied and passed on in an exponential fashion; soon it can be found on most of the web servers of the world. Early this month, a video so viral emerged from the muck and mire of the Internet that Americans, looking up from their NCAA basketball pool and their mental calculations as to how many mortgage payments they'd have to miss to be able to afford just one night with one of disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer's hookers, remembered that there were still over 150,000 US soldiers in Iraq.

The 17-second video, apparently produced with a cell phone camera, was posted on YouTube. It opens with a US Marine, in current day marine battle dress, in Iraq, holding a small puppy dog, maybe a newly born St Bernard, by the scruff of the neck. The marine is making cute cooing sounds to the dog - "oh, so cute, little puppy", then without any apparent warning or provocation heaves the puppy a good distance through the air into a gully. The dog can be heard yipping and yelping as it flies through the air, and its body can be seen twisting, until it lands, when it becomes still and quiet, apparently dead.

"That's mean, that's mean", says another marine, more jokingly than serious, as if he knows he should care but doesn't.

In the two days following the video's arrival on YouTube, and even before the news of its existence made it very far into the mainstream media, it was viewed over 145,000 times. YouTube quickly pulled the video down, but, demonstrating how difficult it is now to control access to information and content in the Internet age, others who had copied the video quickly re-posted it on this, and many other Internet sites.

Merciless outrage soon burned across the web. For five years Americans had mostly sat by and clicked on their remote controls whenever there was coverage of alleged atrocities by US military personnel against helpless Iraqi civilians, but for those who transgress the laws of war against cute Iraqi canines, well, dust off those gavels at Nuremberg, what we got here is a real crime against humanity!

The young marine in the video was soon identified as being from Monroe, Washington state, a small, semi-rural community located in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains about 60 kilometers northeast of Seattle. The local major newspaper, the Everett Herald, has recently reported on what happens when, like a child using a magnifying glass focusing the sun's heat to set an insect on fire, the ability of the Internet to produce the combined, concentrated power of middle-class rage is focused on one little town.

"Threats keep building toward the family of a man many believe is the marine in the video, and from across the globe Internet vigilantes are calling the workplace of the man's mother in Monroe and threatening acts of vandalism unless the mother is fired."

But, obviously, evil abounds in poor little Monroe, and it cannot be limited to just the employer of the marine's mother. The whole town must share the stain of sin, it truly is the new Village of the Dammed.

Monroe City councilman Mitch Ruth told the Herald that the town's email address had been sent many "abusive, profane and harassing" messages accusing the city of tolerating animal cruelty. It's apparently acceptable that the town's major employer, the Washington State Reformatory, contains the Internal Management Unit, which is now housing the state's most violent criminal offenders, and the Special Offenders Unit, which holds the state's most criminally disturbed offenders, including its sexual predators. But allow the alleged puppy killer to walk the streets, and the implication becomes that Monroe makes Sodom and Gomorra look like Sherwood Anderson's idyllic, innocent early 20th century small town of Winesburg, Ohio.

My favorite manifestation of Iraq puppy rage is this question posted on the Yahoo-Answers bulletin board: "The marine puppy killer. Does anyone know what church if any his family attends? Please let me know? Just think it would be fun to visit on Sunday."

Just what would this poster, self-identified as "Scott B", expect to find at this house of worship? Nazi jackbooted thugs? Aliens from out of The X Files? Motorcycle gangs? Maybe, in the spirit of Hannah Arendt's account of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, "Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil"; Scott B might be surprised and disappointed to see at this church just average looking Western Washingtonians at a very average religious observance.

But what "fun" was Scott expecting at this church? Was he going to, in the spirit of Jesus in Matthew 21:12, drive the puppy killers from the temple? Was he going to seize the pulpit like Savonarola, thundering to the gathered faithful that they must repent? Or, in the more modern fashion of AIDS activists pelting attendees at Roman Catholic services with prophylactics in order to spur their consciences, was he going to hurl dog chewies and cans of Alpo at the ashamed congregates?

But a much better question is why Americans can care so deeply over one dead Iraqi dog, and so little over hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi humans? It is in understanding this dichotomy that the real purpose of the war to America can be understood, and the risks that those who advocate its quick conclusion are taking.
Every so often, the US media report on estimates on the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The highest numbers invariably originate out of a joint project of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, and are published in the British medical journal Lancet. They reported 655,000 civilian war dead up to June 2006; extending their counting methodology two years to the present would put the figure now near a million.

Others question the Johns Hopkins/Lancet methodology, and produce different, lower figures. The World Health Organization-Iraqi Health Ministry study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, estimated between 104,000 and 230,000 excess civilian deaths during the war's first three years. The most conservative tabulation, produced by the non-partisan Iraq Body Count Project, currently estimates Iraqi civilian dead at between 82,000 and just under 90,000.

But whatever the estimate, the American reaction is the same: ho-hum.

It's the same with the story of US military personnel accused of abusing or killing civilian Iraqis. Military prosecutors have had a devil of a time obtaining serious convictions of US military personnel accused of such offenses. The reports and photographs of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison shocked and outraged the world, but not so much in America that anybody in a senior position in the command chain faced much of any sanction for them.

US Army Lieutenant Colonel Steven L Jordan, the director of the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, was acquitted of all charges related to the detainee abuse. Most of the other personnel made famous in the abuse photographs pled guilty to reduced charges in exchange for reduced sentences; only Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lyndie England (the Romeo and Juliet of Abu Ghraib guards and poster children for a morally depraved archetypal American heartland upbringing) were convicted at full trial to receive serious sentences.

In much of the civil society debate over Iraq, the Abu Ghraib guards received not approbation but praise. Rush Limbaugh both praised and defended them, saying that the guards were just "blowing off steam" and likening the abuse that so enraged the Muslim world to a fraternity initiation. But even the toughest frat house does not require pledges to undergo initiations like what happened to citizens in Haditha, Iraq, on November 19, 2005.

Prosecutors for the US Marine Corps have alleged that on that date a squad of US Marines, enraged by the death of one of their comrades, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, stormed into a house in Haditha, Iraq, and randomly killed at least 15 Iraqi men. When officers arrived at the scene, they commenced a cover up to make the killings look as if a result of an improvised explosive device (IED).

For two of the four marines directly charged with unpremeditated murder in the incident, charges have been dropped. An investigating officer is recommending that charges for another, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, also be dropped. Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich remains to face trial; at his support web site, appeals are made for help with funding for his legal defense as a way that Americans can "support the troops". According to a recent posting on the "leatherneck.com" web site, over $200,000 has been raised from Americans for the defense of Wuterich and Tatum.

Prosecutors have had more success with the perpetrators of the outrages of Mahmudiya, in which a squad of soldiers from the US Army's 502d Infantry Regiment raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdered her and her family. Convictions and guilty pleas have already been obtained against four of the perpetrators, the alleged ringleader of the plot, former Private Stephen Green, will face trial and the death penalty in a civilian court next year.

"Mahmudiya killings" returns 22,300 hits on Google. In contrast, in less than a month, "Iraq puppy killing" returns 737,000 hits.

It is perhaps Marine Corps Sergeant Ilario Pantano that best represents the poster child for America's indifference to the civilian casualties it is causing in Iraq. Pantano, a veteran of the first Gulf War in 1991 and an investment banker and energy trader with Goldman Sachs, rejoined the marines after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

While on patrol, also in Mahmudiya, on April 15, 2004, two soldiers in Pantano's command allege that he fired two entire M-16 magazines, usually with around 30 rounds each, into the bodies of two unarmed Iraqi men, who, even acknowledging that the men had their hands in the air, Pantano says represented a threat to him.

Describing the incident, Pantano said, "I then changed magazines and continued to fire until the second magazine was empty ... I had made a decision that when I was firing I was going to send a message to these Iraqis and others that when we say, 'No better friend, No worse enemy,' we mean it. I had fired both magazines into the men, hitting them with about 80% of my rounds." Pantano left a placard with that phrase - "No better friend - no worse enemy" - the slogan of his Marine Corps battalion, on the corpses of the men he shot, and it also became the title of his autobiography.

As part of his defense, Pantano, much like President George W Bush, reached for the security blanket of September 11, 2001. In a March 2005 BBC interview he stated that "I'm a New Yorker and 9/11 was a pretty significant event for me, our duty as marines is, quite frankly, to export violence to the four corners of the globe, to make sure that this doesn't happen again."

Pantano quickly achieved near idol status in the right-wing blogosphere. Ultra-conservative talk show host Michael Savage took up his cause daily, even the New York Times invited him to pen an op-ed. Under intense pressure and threats, Pantano's two accusers altered their stories so thoroughly that the charges against Pantano were dropped. Pantano is currently a North Carolina Sheriff's deputy, and, although he denies it, rumors abound that the local Republican Party eyes him hungrily for nomination to an elective office.

It is interesting that, just about 20 kilometers west of poor, shamed Monroe, which now apparently must forever bear the cross of producing the puppy killer, another small Washington state community, Mukilteo, takes pride in being able to call itself the home of an Iraqi human killer.

In an investigation of a April 2006 incident in the Iraqi town of Hamadania, the US Navy's Criminal Investigative Service inquiry led to charges of murder, kidnapping and coverup against seven marines and a navy corpsman in relation to the killing of an Iraqi man. One of the accused, Lance Corporal Robert Pennington, of Mukilteo, pled guilty and received a 14-year sentence; he was granted clemency and released a few months later. On his return home, he received a hero's welcome, as reported in the Everett Herald, "Out of jail, marine is cheered in Mukilteo: 150 greet man convicted in Iraqi's death."

So the question still is this: if Americans sent their soldiers to Iraq to save the Iraqi people, why do they care so little when their soldiers go out and kill the Iraqi people? How can they care so passionately about the dogs of Iraq, and so little about its people?
I've written before on this site about America's confused and ever-morphing rationalizations for remaining in Iraq. Last June 6, in Yes Rambo, you get to win this time, I wrote that many Americans wanted to persevere in Iraq in order to erase the stain of Vietnam's shame. On August 7 of last year, in Dying in vain or for George W's daddy? I speculated that a core reason that America went to, and was still staying in Iraq, was that George W Bush was using the war as a psychological truncheon against his distant and cold father, the former president George H W Bush, in that winning the war where his father could not would at last prove himself superior to him, and his perceived better-loved brothers. In my October 30 piece from last year, Ideology wins - the people lose I observed that US officers in Iraq were apparently quietly acquiescing to their troops refusing to go out on patrols, for by then the real rationale in staying in Iraq had degenerated to just denying the Democratic party the political victory of being able to claim that they had stopped it.

All these various justifications are united by a common factor. None of them has much or anything to do with anything actually occurring in Iraq. Americans killing Iraqi civilians in cold, or at least chilled blood; they're OK with that. But Americans killing Iraqi dogs - "what kind of people do you think we are?"

But there's more. A recent article in the online journal Salon, by retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William J Astore, explains why, even with a virtual guarantee that military enlistment, at least in the army or marines, means service in Iraq, substantial numbers of young men still continue to show up at military recruitment offices. Part of it is patriotism and a desire for 9/11 payback, but according to Astore, an equally important factor is the cultural phenomenon called the "war against boys".

"To many of these potential recruits, American culture today appears feminized - or, at least demasculinized - a mommy-state, a risk-averse society with designer drugs and syndrome-of-the-day counselors to ease our pain," Astor writes. "In response, what we're seeing is a romantic yearning among young men for the very hardness, the brutality even, epitomized by military service and warfare."

Some conservative polemicists, most notably Christina Hoff Summers, now contend that the American public educational system, in finally seeking to address the unique educational requirements of young girls, has swung the pendulum so far as to suppress the natural, rambunctious instincts of boys. Competitive, possibly injurious pursuits such as gym class dodge ball are discouraged, and therapists are quickly dispatched to deal with the obvious psycho-cultural "issues" involved if any two boys resort to fisticuffs at recess. In contrast to these traditional training methodologies of the patriarchy, the emphasis in today's schools is said to be on cooperation, safety and contests where no one wins, but no one loses or gets hurt.

That's certainly not a way to describe the dusty, dangerous streets of the Iraq war. So, since a core reason to maintain the US presence in Iraq is to continue to "support the troops" and since the troops are getting to do the breaking and destroying of things that, although innate to their character, they couldn't do growing up in the late 1990s and beyond, thus is created another unspoken rationale for Iraq - boys will be boys.

Even with it now obvious that the entire Iraq misadventure, which claimed its 4,000th American life over the weekend, has now become nothing but an unending quagmire where the American people care more about the country's dogs than its people, I worry that the US presidential candidate that has best expressed clear and concise opposition to the war, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, now looks likely to be the Democratic nominee for president this autumn, to face unabashed war supporter Senator John McCain of Arizona.

In describing the reasons for an expedited American withdrawal from Iraq, Obama reflects the views of the vast majority of the nation's informed foreign policy elite, as well as a great many retired military voices as well, who contend that the Iraq catastrophe has done nothing to make America a nation more safe from terrorism or any other national threat.

For Obama's last remaining rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, her opposition to the war is more nuanced, more couched in generalities and limiters. In 2002 she supported the Congressional authorization for use of force in Iraq that Bush used as a causus belli for war. Most political observers believe that, in doing so, and in her continuing equivocations about ending the war or preventing Bush from spreading it to Iran, Clinton was, and is, just once again following the political strategy called triangulation. This, the effort to consciously stake out policy positions between the ideological poles of extreme right and left, her husband Bill used to maximum benefit and advantage during his presidency. Clinton apparently figures that if it worked in the 20th century, it will work in the 21st.
So Clinton stakes out a position on the war more favorable to it than Obama, but for reasons that essentially have nothing to do with Iraq or the war. That Americans can understand, can identify with, for it matches the country as a whole allowing the war to continue for reasons having nothing to do with Iraq, either.

The beer test has become an important modern qualification for the American presidency, as in that during the last election, political pollsters discovered that Americans would rather have a beer with Bush than his rival, Senator John Kerry. Clinton's success in getting votes from blue-collar, working-class Democrats means she would probably poll higher than Obama in this regard. More Americans might want to have a beer with her if only to see if a little inebriation would loosen the coldly calculating mind of Hillary Clinton, America's modern Machiavelli, and to see just where the border in her psyche is between ambition and scruples, so would I.

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.

Ellie