The Forever War Post 3

A large aspect of Part Two is the violence that Filkins sees while he is in Iraq. Filkins only writes about his own personal hope for the country's future in one chapter, The View from the Air. In this chapter, as he looks down at the country of Iraq from a plane, he can encompass the country in one look. He can imagine the Iraq people uniting together through a time of struggle in order to emerge victorious. However, when Filkins lands he confronts the brutal reality of the war. The Iraqi people are not uniting. Rather, they live in a state of perpetual fear and mistrust due to the nature of the insurgents.

The Iraqi insurgency began shortly after Americans entered Iraq in 2003. The insurgency encompasses all militia groups, foreign fighters, or rebels that are fighting to get Americans out of the country. The insurgents fight against not only American soldiers, but their own people as well. The insurgents punish any Iraq people they believe to be remotely associated with America or the American soldiers. It almost seems to be an elaborate cycle. The insurgents inflict violence on Americans and their own people, while the American soldiers attempt to counteract the insurgents’ murders but kill many innocent civilians in the process. It is this daily violence that characterizes the landscape of Iraq as Filkins explains it.

However, the brutality underlying this violence astonished me. The brutality came from both the American soldiers and the Iraq insurgents. The American soldiers, in increasing attempts to end violence with violence, ordered more violent punishments for captured insurgents. In one such instance, two captured insurgents were pushed into the freezing cold Tigris River when they would not reveal information. One of the men did not survive. Since the Army has rules against this type of punishment, the men who carried out the orders were punished. Those higher up who had ordered for it to happen were not. This misplacement of the blame is a whole different problem. However, the punishment in and of itself is a big issue. It is clear that this type of punishment is inhumane and should not occur, however I understand why the American soldiers felt compelled to undertake such punishments. They became consumed by the Iraqi mentality, “an eye for an eye.” The actions of the insurgents were becoming increasingly violent and the American soldiers were powerless to stop it. Those two insurgents they captured represented a small part of a much bigger machine that could not be stopped.

The actions of the insurgents were often hard to read about. Filkins details their acts of a brutality in a calm, reporter style so it almost did not seem real. One of the main branches of the insurgents’ attempted attack on the Americans and their supporters was the suicide branch. As 9/11 was occurring in the United States, hundreds of suicide bombers were wreaking havoc every day in Iraq. The suicide bombers drove trucks filled with gasoline into walls, strapped bombs to their bodies, tossed bombs into crowded marketplaces. Every day there were numerous suicide bombers detonating across the country. The information that struck me the most was where these suicide bombers were detonating bombs. They targeted schools and hospitals. They bombed the lines into the marketplace, the lines into the polling centers for voting. Every single place in which hope for the future rested, the suicide bombers destroyed. Filkins describes a tortured Iraq in which Iraqi extremists were killing their own people. It was terrible to read about the individuals who lost their lives, the Iraqi people and the soldiers, in the bombings.