Midas in the Desert

The NYT has some fascinating coverage today. [One piece, not available online and due for an unrelated AntiC posting, check out this story about how Sheehan has brought snap-focus to the antiwar movement and brought everything into synthesized focus. Has the Left moved toward Sheehan because of her timing, or has Sheehan moved the Left to her because of her emotion? How do we move forward with this; how do we convince the middle-road Americans that all this opposition to the war and the Administration has not let up, and will not, and deserves to be heard? Another piece, a Maureen Dowd commentary, about how The Administration uses the image of women liberated in the Invaded countries, while limiting women in our own country, deserves great attention as well.]

But among all of their intriguing work today, there are two pieces about US soldiers in Iraq, two separate profiles of their treatment, expectations, and lifestyles among Our War.

The first shows how the struggle for the Pentagon to keep our soldiers protected in the war has not abated. In fact, they still have not been able to outfit our soldiers in proper amounts of updated body armor. 3 years later, 2 of those years in significant post "Mission Accomplished" Insurgency, and we still have not properly protected our soldiers.

But we have succeeded in providing our soldiers with one important thing: American leisure lifestyle. From the current annals of bizarrity, we learn that in fact the life of the soldier has a tight dichotomy. In one world they live amongst the hottest zone in the world, patrolling the streets in often hostile territory, always on the lookout for the next IED coming their direction, always trying to find the best way to protect themselves, their compatriots, and the innocents around them.

And then, they also have access to huge amounts of Stuff. That's right, stuff. Mini fridges, microwaves, huge-screen plasma TVs. They have more stuff than a significant amount of Americans at home have. And hugely more than 98% of the people in the land that they are trying to secure. Stuff.

Is that what this war is about? Right now, it's a package deal, enabling the propagation of a free-market, stuff-oriented consumer society. The system is simple: Soldiers buy a lot of stuff, then hustle it to new waves of soldiers when they arrive in Iraq as the old ones leave. It's a constant cycle, with the end result the goal of amassing as much American stuff as possible.

The duplicitous nature of this war is strange, surreal:

"We had no idea conditions were going to be this great!" said Lieutenant Deaton, 25, the public affairs officer of the 256th Brigade Combat Team and an ambassador of the exclamation mark. "My first thought was, oh my God! This is good!"

As much as modern warfare has changed in recent decades, so has the lifestyle of the modern warrior - at least the modern American warrior on base.

-and-

And for those soldiers whose jobs require them to leave base, there is no escape from the cruel realities of war in Iraq.

Wrapped in body armor and the ubiquitous threat of death, they choke on dust and heat and make do with Meals Ready to Eat. On long combat missions, they may go weeks without a shower and sleep wherever they can: on the ground, in empty buildings, in their cramped vehicles. Beyond that, the Pentagon's program to provide them with stronger, safer vehicles has suffered delays.

But wherever possible, the current generation of young soldiers - like its predecessors in Vietnam and other conflicts - has sought the succor of the familiar, and resourceful soldiers in this war have taken this quest to astonishing levels, accumulating all the accouterments of home: personal electronics, bed linens, furniture, household appliances and beauty products.

Gadgetry, in particular, proliferates among the 138,000 troops stationed in Iraq: laptop computers, MP3 and DVD players, digital cameras, televisions and video game consoles. On bases in greater Baghdad, many soldiers have cellphones and some have satellite dishes that pull in scores of stations. Personal DVD collections numbering several hundred are not uncommon; the legendary ones top 1,000.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much stuff been acquired by so many soldiers in so little time.

-and-

One Louisiana National Guardsman stationed on Camp Liberty converted his trailer into a recording studio, and a New York National Guardsman living nearby has spent some of his free time during the last year producing a record by a singer in New York using an electric keyboard, sequencer, laptop computer, sampler, drum machine and mixer in his room; he and the singer use sound files sent via the Internet to exchange musical ideas and recorded tracks.

"I don't know how they managed to acquire so much audio-visual machinery," said an amused Lt. Col. Geoffrey J. Slack, 48, commander of the First Battalion, 69th Infantry, of the New York National Guard, which is garrisoned on Camp Liberty with the Louisianans. "Some of these kids, they'll go out and fight all day, and they'll come back and play these goofy space-age electronic war games all night. The furthest thing from my mind is to play war games. You'll walk by and hear them hootin' and hollerin'."

Indeed, it has entered the filmic world of multi-facted self-mythologizing, surreal, self-contradictory, auto-critical yet un-examined farce. In one way we can't outfit our soldiers with proper armor, we can't protect them from the continued heat of a very dangerous war that we've been misled to believe is totally on track; and yet we also have seen fit to provide them with absurd access to consumer society, unlike ever available in warfare history.

It is an easy point to suggest that many of these soldiers come from an American world where their economic status would not afford them the disposable income to have such leisure luxurie. From this article we know nothing of Lt. Deaton who comments that she was surprised that things were so good, but it is easily possible that for many of the soldiers fighting this war, the wealth in the compounds of Iraq is something far better than their lives at home.

And for many others, the ability to have access to wide varieties of consumer goods is simply a life they've become used to. Many of the national guardsmen who have been removed from our society, their skills atrophied from the vital worlds of America, and been removed from their families, skills, and careers, have also been used to this system of life. Their comforts have been removed.

But is this the kind of replacement for their lives that we should provide them? Shouldn't we instead be able to tell our servicemen that we can provide for their safety, that they can trust our society to give opportunity and expression and protection to all Americans, but that we would do so by NOT sending them to elective and foolish wars without reason?

Or is this what we've been fighting for all along? Not for the democratization of the Middle East, not for the liberation against tyrants and enemies; not for the prolonged peace and stability of the world.

Rather, for the ability for Americans to live like Americans everywhere we go. In fact, have we been fighting for our stalwart consumerist society of junk, not to export it, but rather to simply be able to continue giving it to ourselves, in every part of the world, no matter how ridiculously dangerous or impoverished? Is this a war not even designed to provide opportunity to lift even our poorest soldiers out of poverty, but rather to provide them with a further dream of a plasma TV that must always be replaced, perhaps exploded in an Insurgent IED or mortor attack, and therefore that must be replaced? Another war victim for Sharp, another Panasonic warantee fulfilled, another feel-good moment for Halliburton, McDonald's, Subway, Compaq, and Vorizon?

Are we at war not at all to protect ourselves, but to rather protect all of our shit...?