Iraqi Draftees: We Should Care
About Their Boys Too
by
Glenn Sacks
© 2002
Hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US have demonstrated
against the coming war against Iraq, decrying the inevitable civilian
casualties and expressing fear for the safety of "our boys" in the
armed forces. Proponents of the war have expressed similar concerns,
though from a different angle. This is as it should be, but there is
one major element missing from the discussion--the young Iraqi
soldiers who will die in this war.
The Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that in the last Gulf War
100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and another 300,000 were wounded,
compared to less than 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed or wounded. The
Iraqi government puts its military losses at 75,000 to 100,000 and its
civilian losses at 35,000 to 45,000.
The carnage was particularly gruesome on the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait,
to Basra, Iraq, dubbed the "Highway of Death," upon which tens of
thousands of young Iraqi soldiers were killed as they tried to leave
Kuwait. Some of the charred and dismembered bodies littering the
highway were those of child soldiers, whom Iraq used in both the war
against Iran and the Gulf War.
Today the young Iraqi male is the damned of the earth. Drafted by
force at 18 or younger into the service of a regime he may despise to
fight an enemy with whom he has no quarrel, this generation of young
Iraqi men can see nothing but pain and death both in front of it and
behind it.
In 1994 Saddam Hussein decreed desertion punishable by the amputation
of hands, ears or feet, and the tattooing of deserters' foreheads.
According to Reuters, thousands of these mutilations have taken place
since then, often performed without anesthesia and without treatment
for post-amputation bleeding and infection. Such punishments were
reportedly later abolished, in part because Iraqi veterans who had
lost arms or feet in battle did not want to be confused with
deserters. Generally the punishment for desertion has been the firing
squad.
In addition, Iraqi boys who refuse to fight often bring government
repression down upon their families, who sometimes plead with their
sons to do their duty in the army for the sake of their brothers and
sisters. Even without these punishments, usually few young men are
willing to face the social stigma that most societies attach to males
who do not want to fight. Such refusals can render them social
pariahs, whom few women would want to marry and few parents would want
to claim as sons.
By decrying the death of "innocent" civilians, those on both sides of
the war debate backhandedly ascribe guilt to these young draftees. Yet
if they are not innocent victims of this war, who is?
Placed in an impossible situation, most young Iraqis will pray to
their God, hope that it will be someone else who takes the bullet, and
do the best they can to stay alive. In Dr. Zhivago, Russian
novelist Boris Pasternak described the cruel fate of the young World
War I Russian draftee, writing that the soldiers often went to war
knowing that "those who made it home at the price of an arm or a leg"
would be the lucky ones. In A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway
depicted the way desperate young Italian soldiers threw their rifles
off bridges in the vain hope that if they didn't have their weapons
their officers couldn't make them fight. While the Iraqi boys' faces
and tragedies will be invisible to us, can there be any doubt that
thousands of similar dramas will be played out in this coming war?
Proponents of the war argue that despite the suffering it will bring,
in the end this generation of young Iraqis will benefit because it
will topple the dictatorship and pave the way for a brighter future
for them and their children. They may be correct. But in the debate
over the war let us not forget the one group of inevitable casualties
in whom neither the war's opponents nor proponents have taken
sufficient interest--Iraq's young men. We should care about their
lives, too.
This article originally
appeared on the Glenn J. Sacks
Website
and appears here with the permission of the author.
Copyright 2001 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
