Iraqi Draftees:
We Should Care About Their Boys, Too
March 11, 2003
Millions
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.
