It’s becoming clearer by the day that the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are destroying these countries. Less obvious is the way that the occupations are corrupting the occupying soldiers and thereby threatening the societies that sent them off to war. To grasp just how serious this corruption is, examine the evil the occupations are inflicting upon the occupied populations.

According to Oxfam’s July 30 2007 report, Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq, over two million people have been displaced inside Iraq and another two million have left the country as refugees. Forty-three percent of Iraqis are living on less than a dollar a day, and 15 percent can’t buy enough to eat. Twenty-eight percent of Iraq’s children are malnourished, and 92 percent are suffering from learning problems. A 2006 study by the Iraqi Ministry of Health found that 70 percent of primary school children in a Baghdad neighbourhood suffered from symptoms of trauma-related stress such as bed-wetting and stuttering.

The conflict has probably killed more people than the 1994 Rwandan massacres. The Lancet medical journal sponsored the world’s only on-the-ground scientific report on Iraqi casualties. Using well-respected scientific methods, the study estimated a median figure of 655,000 excess deaths between the 2003 invasion and June 2006. If this death rate has remained constant over the subsequent year, then the invasion and occupation are responsible for over a million Iraqi deaths. If what happened in Rwanda was a genocide, then so is the carnage occurring in Iraq.

There have been no comparable studies of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but on June 2 2007 the UN reported that the number of civilian deaths “attributed to pro-government forces marginally exceeds that caused by anti-government forces.” In other words, the coalition is raking up a higher civilian body count than the Taliban. Life expectancy figures also suggest that the occupation is having a negative effect on Afghanistan’s people. According to the CIA World Fact Book, life expectancy in Afghanistan has gone down from 45.88 years in 2000 to 43.77 years in 2007.

As Michael Neumann points out in his June 5 2007 Counterpunch article, When Myopia Becomes a Crime: Canada in Afghanistan, coalition forces will be unable to stabilize or improve the situation. Neumann refers to a 2003 Rand Corporation study stating that a successful occupation of Afghanistan would require 20 soldiers for every 1,000 inhabitants, or an occupation force of half a million. Coalition forces stand at between 30,000 and 50,000, or less than 10% of the manpower required for the task. Given the disparity between what is needed and what is available, the coalition can’t subdue the insurgents or rebuild the country. Unable to help Afghanistan, the longer the coalition stays the more harm it will inevitably do.

It’s impossible to participate in this kind of violence without being soiled by it. Political leaders may be the ones who make the decision to go to war, but soldiers are the ones who have to dirty their hands and souls, to expose themselves to situations that are inherently corrupting.

A May 2007 study conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Command revealed the moral degeneration of the American forces in Iraq. The report states that “Only 47 percent of soldiers and only 38 percent of Marines agreed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect.” It goes on to say that, “Well over a third of soldiers and Marines reported torture should be allowed, whether to save the life of a fellow soldier or Marine . . . or to obtain important information about insurgents.” Nine percent of soldiers and 12 percent of Marines reported damaging or destroying Iraqi property “when it was not necessary,” and four percent of soldiers and seven percent of Marines reported physically abusing a non-combatant “when it was not necessary.” Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of Marines would report a unit member who injured or killed a non-combatant.

If these figures quantify the spiritual rot afflicting the occupying forces, then a scandal involving talk-show relationship counselor Dr Laura Schlessinger’s son reveals its qualitative flavor.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported in May 2007 that Deryk Schlessinger, a soldier stationed in Kandahar, was under investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan. It seems that he was operating a MySpace page that contained cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture, and child molestation. In one cartoon a man laughed as he raped a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family, while in another a knife-wielding man forced a boy to suck his penis while the boy’s mother begged for his life. The webpage also contained a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib.” One of the weblog entries read, "Yes . . . FUCKING Yes!!! . . . I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don't."

The contours of this ethical disintegration have been traced by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University. His background in theology has given him a depth of perspective that is very rare among journalists who cover armed conflict.

In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2003), he writes that “The task of carrying out violence, of killing, leads to perversion. The seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque—the Bible calls it ‘the lust of the eye’—the god-like empowerment over other human lives and the drug of war combine, like the ecstasy of erotic love, to let our senses command our bodies. Killing unleashes within us dark undercurrents that see us desecrate and whip ourselves into greater orgies of destruction.”

He continues to describe this desecration in Losing Moses on the Freeway (Free Press, 2005), where he writes that, “When love, compassion and human kindness are replaced by the vast, grotesque panorama of violence and destruction of war, God is banished. Human beings, who have the freedom to choose good and evil, can not find within them the power of the divine when they embrace a world of sin. At that moment they shut out the divine. And war is a state of almost unadulterated sin.”

Hedges reinforces his point about sin with a quotation from William Mahedy’s book, Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets (Ballantine Books, 1967): “In theological terms, war is a sin. This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”

The soldiers who descend into this moral hell are dangerous to their victims in foreign countries, but also to themselves and to their own people. Once hatred begins to burn, it’s hard to put it out. The violence and rage ignited on foreign shores can immolate families and scorch civil societies back home.

To find redemption, soldiers everywhere are faced with a spiritual challenge. Besides striving to heal their physical and psychological traumas, they must also take responsibility for the evils they’ve committed and find some way to confront the political, economic, and cultural forces that threw them into the darkness. Many soldiers and veterans, such as those involved with the American organizations Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, take this challenge very seriously. They bear witness to the lies that lead nations to war. They crack open war’s mythological armour, its fantasies of heroism and glory, to expose its necrophilic core.

Their efforts can have powerful effects, as shown in the documentary Sir! No Sir! (2005). This movie charts the resistance to the Vietnam War that arose from within the military’s own ranks. A massive anti-war movement spread throughout the military, recruiting soldiers who were imprisoned by the hundreds for their outspoken opposition to their government’s policies. In conjunction with their allies in the civilian anti-war movement, the many soldiers and veterans who condemned the aggression in Vietnam turned public opinion against the war and helped bring the bloody fiasco to an end.

Like the Vietnam-era soldiers, Canadian and American soldiers are today fighting in two wars. They’re fighting in an American-led war of aggression on Middle Eastern and Central Asian fronts, but, whether they know it or not, they’re also fighting a war for their own souls. To truly support our troops, we need to help them redeem the most precious part of who they are. For the sake of all that’s good within them, and for the sake of the people they’re hurting overseas today and those they’ll hurt at home tomorrow, we need to help them lose the first war and win the second.