7 The Neocon and the Soldier
It was a lovely and a strange Christmas Eve. Lovely for the feast Petroushka cooked. Strange for the conversation. A friend who served in the U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq only to get out and very publicly criticize the Bush administration came in from Beirut, where he’s been learning Arabic and French in preparation for a diplomatic career. A journalist for a neocon, Zionist paper dropped by because he was having a rough day. It was the first time I’d really met him. Surprisingly, I like Neocon very well. He’s a clever guy and has a fantastic deadpan sense of humor. And it’s probably good for me to talk to smart people I disagree with as often as possible.
One conversation, inspired by Spielberg’s upcoming movie “Munich,” stands out in my memory. Soldier made a point about the importance of bearing in mind at what point the response to terrorism becomes immoral and the dangers of believing that because you’re fighting against bad people, you’re good… or worse, that because you must be good, they’re bad. Neocon said he thought ultimately the U.S. troops were fighting for the good cause: peace and democracy in the Middle East, whereas the guys blowing up cars outside job lines were fighting for the return of a brutal dictator or the continued destabilization of the country.
Soldier told a story about a mission he went on in Baghdad in which his platoon was told to take out a top-secret installation based on two-week-old intelligence. On the way to the target, they saw two guys with machine guns duck into a building. The platoon followed. An intense, indoor gunfight ensued. The neighborhood got involved (“Decided it was ‘Kill an American Day,'” as Soldier put it). It was the among the hottest gun battles Soldier had seen in his military career. There was a generator in the building, it was loud, there were two guys with machine guns shooting at them from behind a steel door. At the end of the fight, the two guys with machine guns were dead. Soldier didn’t feel badly about this because they had been trying to kill him and his platoon. But he discovered afterwards that the generator in that building had been supplying the neighborhood with power and that these guys had been guarding it against what they saw as a pernicious, vindictive attack.
And you know what? Revealingly, Neocon stuck to his guns. So to speak.
[tags]Neocon, Iraq, Terrorism, Christmas[/tags]
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