Wars’ toll: Ruined bodies, injured brains, damaged economy

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Last weekend brought sobering news about the staggering, long-term human and economic cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Almost half (45 percent) of the troops that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking government disability benefits for physical injuries or psychological trauma caused by their service in the two war theaters, according to a story first reported by the Associated Press’s (AP) chief medical writer, Marilynne Marchione.

The percentage of Iraq/Afghanistan veterans seeking compensation for service-related injuries is unprecedented in the history of America’s myriad wars. For instance, in the aftermath of the Gulf war, the most recent major conflict before George W. Bush’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, an estimated 21 percent of military personnel filed disability claims, less than half the current record rate.

Moreover, most recent veterans seeking disabled status are reporting many more injuries than veterans of previous conflicts. According to AP:

“…these new veterans are claiming eight to nine ailments on average, and the most recent ones over the last year are claiming 11 to 14. By comparison, Vietnam veterans are currently receiving compensation for fewer than four, on average, and those from World War II and Korea, just two.”

There are many reasons for the quantum leap in the rate of disability claims filed and in the skyrocketing average number of injuries per claimant. Chief among them is the great strides that have been achieved in U.S. battlefield and military medicine in recent years. These have sharply increased the percentage of soldiers with grievous or multiple injuries that are able to survive. In earlier wars, for instance, soldiers with traumatic brain injury rarely made it home alive. In contrast, in the current wars, many more of the brain-injured have survived, albeit typically with disabilities that will require a lifetime of extremely costly government-provided care.

Second in importance is the recognition by medical science and the military of the reality, pervasiveness, and seriousness of the psychological wounds of combat, especially post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). The prevalence of psychic trauma is also affected by the nature of these wars. Unlike World War II but similar to Vietnam, the soldiers who have participated in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan often did not understand why they were fighting, much less the vastly different cultures into which they were suddenly thrust.

These are wars of constant terror, with no front lines and hardly any way to tell an ally from an enemy. It is not uncommon for an Afghan or Iraqi soldier to turn his weapon and kill American or NATO troops who thought they were dealing with a comrade-in-arms –or for a suicide bomber posing as a CIA informer to blow himself and several CIA officers up with him.

This situation evokes the concept of anomie coined by Emile Durkheim, a pioneer sociologist, to describe a context in which the rules are unclear or non-existent. A lack of clear norms increases anxiety. This also partly explains the murderous or callous ways in which too many American troops regard and treat “the natives,” including massacres like Haditha and many other killings of civilians (almost all of which have gone unpunished). Then, too, the U.S. armed forces being a volunteer army, it attracts a percentage of people who harbor racist feelings and even a few who, in civilian life, might have become psychopathic killers. While these uniformed perpetrators of atrocities may escape the law, even they are not immune to psychic trauma.      

The bottom line – literally and figuratively – is that a combination of arrogance, deliberate deceit, denial, ideological zeal, and messianic delusion led George W. Bush and the neoconservatives and other hawks that prodded and supported him, to perpetrate a horrible tragedy against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States. While the human costs have been especially large for the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan, these wars have also extracted a huge toll on the United States. The facts contained in the AP report that show that almost half of the 1.6 million service members who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan suffer from multiple disabilities attests to that.
  
The Bush administration sold its wars to the American people as actions that would be short, relatively bloodless (for American troops) and cheap. It didn’t turn out quite that way. Bush officials estimated the cost of going to war in Iraq as $50 to $60 billion dollars. When Lawrence Lindsey, President Bush’s chief economic adviser, demurred, suggesting that a price tag of $100 to $200 billion would be more realistic, Bush fired him. Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Lindsey’s numbers “baloney” and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said oil revenues might be enough to cover Iraq’s postwar reconstruction.

By 2008, Lindsey’s for him fateful estimate proved to be wildly wrong – but in the opposite direction in relation to official projections. That year, Nobel Prize winner for economics Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes added up the total overt and hidden long-term costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and came up with a figure of $3 trillion. As the wars have continued during the last four years and new data, such as the astonishing rate of disability claims have surfaced, the figure has climbed to $4 trillion.

That’s a sum that would pay for a lot of nation-building – in this country, where right now that is sorely needed. Yet the same characters that beat the drums for the Iraq war and the escalation of the Afghan conflict learned nothing from those debacles. The same old neoconservatives and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, along with many others on the right, are threatening an attack against Iran.

Even President Obama, unwilling to give the GOP an electoral advantage on the sacred issue of “national security” or to cede a portion of the “Israel right or wrong” Jewish vote to the Republicans, has made some bellicose noises toward Teheran.

An attack on Iran would be an even more tragic mistake than the ones we have witnessed during the last decade the costs of which we are now just beginning to pay. Iran is bigger (in population), more determined, and tougher than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Saddam was a buffoon, albeit a murderous one. The rulers of Iran may be fanatics, but unlike Saddam they are not buffoons or deluded to the point of risking annihilation as Saddam did time and again. And a third straight U.S. attack against a Muslim country is bound to have ominous repercussions.

The American people, who initially backed both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, have seen the light and now stand in opposition. Let’s not be deceived once again by the politics of demonization and fear into supporting another preemptive war the costs of which would be greater than that of the last two combined.