The Forever War

I was mesmerized by this book. I was horrified by this book. Dexter Filkins ground level accounts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq bring a visceral immediacy to what is going on over there. The book does not task the reasons we are there. It examines the impact this chaos and slaughter has on the lives of the people who still live there and the U.S. soldiers prosecuting this fiasco.The Shia and the Sunni factions of Islam have fallen on each other like rabid dogs. They don’t just seek to murder each other. That would be far too prosaic. They prefer new forms of torture -the electric drill being one of their favorites. As the author says in one of his quotes, “It’s in their DNA.” And into this hell are injected American forces to help promote “democracy” – a democracy that will transform this region into a fourth century caliph.The neocons that got us into this war are not stupid. There is veniality in their thinking and an absence of reality. It is great theory. I have read most of their works. It is hard to imagine that thinkers like Francis Fukuyama did not grasp how horrific the enterprise he was promoting would become. As a country we became victims of our own arrogance. We got caught in the riptide of history at a time when our political leadership was both villainous and vain. And into that mix there was this ideology, this doctrine that did not want to deal with facts but which had the clarity of a prophecy. It folded in so nicely with the rapture and the end of times. It worked as the final struggle between good and evil. In so many ways those who produced this hell are no different than their counterparts in Taliban.A new culture has been imposed on us. We have broken our sword because the only blow we could strike was against the ancient rock of hatred. Our soldiers are randomly mutilated by suicide bombers and road side bombs. This book brings to mind something Tim Welsh told me about his experience in Viet Nam. “When you have to build a 360 degree perimeter you have lost the war”.The following is part of a review from the New Times Book ReivewNow, in the tradition of “Dispatches,” with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book, “The Forever War,” it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.It is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the “culture” of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well. You might call the work of enlightening and guiding a deliberately misguided public during its time of need a cultural necessity. The work Filkins accomplishes in “The Forever War” is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration’s fascinating contemporary public relations tactic. The political leadership’s method has been the dissemination of facts reversed 180 degrees toward the quadrant of lies, hitherto a magic bullet in their never-ending crusade to accomplish everything from stealing elections to starting ideological wars. Filkins uses the truth as observed firsthand to detail an arid, hopeless policy in an unpromising part of the world. His writing is one of the scant good things to come out of the war.The old adage holds that every army fights the previous war, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, as someone said of the restored Bourbon dynasty in France. The United States military did learn one strategy for preventing the public relations disasters of Vietnam, and this was the embedding of correspondents with military units engaged. Michael Herr in Vietnam could not have been more alienated from the United States government’s P.R. handouts, but his sharing the fortunes of American troops made his compassion, sometimes his plain love, for them available to thoughtful Americans. It’s hard to imagine that Donald Rumsfeld’s politically intimidated brass had “Dispatches” in mind when they decided to embed correspondents with American units, but it started out as an effective policy. One of the memorable bites of the early days of the Iraq invasion was the exultant embedded correspondent citing Churchill on camera: “There’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed!” A far cry indeed from being shot at and hit.All that worked for a while. Filkins opens “The Forever War” with a prologue describing the attack on the Sunni fortress of Falluja by the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. Embedded (and how) with Bravo Company, Filkins shares the deadly risks of street fighting in a hostile city in which the company, commanded by an outstanding officer, takes its objective and also a harrowing number of casu¬alties. The description makes us understand quite vividly how we didn’t want to be there and also makes ever so comprehensible the decision by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to give our last excursion into Asia a pass. (“Bring ’em on!” said the president famously about this one.)Filkins had been covering the Muslim world for years before the invasion of Iraq, and his book proper opens with a scene beyond the grimmest fiction, a display of Shariah religious justice staged in a soccer stadium in Kabul during the late ’90s. Miscreants are variously mutilated and killed before a traumatized audience that includes a hysterical crowd of starveling war orphans whose brutalized, maimed futures in an endlessly war-ravaged country can be imagined.For the reviewer — perhaps for the selfish reason that it takes place closer to home — the most dreadfully memorable witness that Filkins bears takes place not half a world away but in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. Filkins is making his way past Battery Park.“My eyes went to a gray-green thing spread across the puddles and rocks. Elongated, unrolled, sitting there, unnoticed. An intestine. It kind of jumped out at me, presented itself. It’s amazing how the eyes do that, go right to the human flesh, spot it amid the heaviest camouflage of rubble and dirt and glass.”In Tel Aviv, Filkins recalls, he watched Orthodox Jewish volunteers seeking out the same sort of item in the aftermath of a suicide bomb.Filkins takes shelter from the cool night in the Brooks Brothers store in One Liberty Plaza.“Later that night,” he writes, “I was awoken many times, usually by the police. Once when I came to, a group of police officers were trying on cashmere topcoats and turning as they looked in the mirror. There was lots of laughter. ‘Nice,’ one of them said, looking at his reflection, big smile on his face. ‘Look at that.’ ”Dexter Filkins, one of The New York Times’s most talented reporters, employs a fine journalistic restraint, by which I mean he does not force irony or paradox but leaves that process to the reader. Nor does he speculate on what he does not see. These are worthy attributes, and whether their roots are in journalistic discipline or not they serve this unforgettable narrative superbly.Someone, Chesterton it may have been, identified the sense of paradox with spirituality. Though Filkins does not rejoice in paradoxes, he never seems to miss one either, and the result is a haunting spiritual witness that will make this volume a part of this awful war’s history. He entitles his section on Manhattan “Third World,” and he leaves us feeling that the history he has set down here will not necessarily feature in our distant cultural recollections but may rather be history — the thing itself — come for us at last.

With the recent mess in Syria I decided it was finally time for me to become more informed about the Middle East. It is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I have felt embarrassed for a long time about my lack of understanding of the region, the cultures, the history, and the meaning of current events. I have sort of a compulsive brain so whenever I decide to study anything I generally try to adopt a systematic plan: begin with broad introductions that are “balanced” then dive into interesting details and explore more partisan viewpoints. But I decided with the Middle East to just go with my gut and start with whatever book seemed most appealing to me at the moment so I decided to begin with Dexter Filkins’s book on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.After the first couple of chapters I was worried that I had made a mistake. I could tell that Dexter Filkins was a good writer, and the narrative was going to be interesting, but it became quickly apparent that the book was going to be made up of a series of vignettes, and I was afraid that I would not get enough of the context to understand what the vignettes meant. As I went along, however, I eventually decided this was an excellent place to start precisely because Filkins does such an excellent job portraying the complexities of what actually happened on the ground.I will just give one example. One of the stories he tells is about a doctor in a hospital in Iraq after the invasion. At the time of his visit the hospital was without power due to the war and a lot of babies were not surviving because of it. Filkins was talking to the doctor about it and the doctor was explaining how these power outtages did not happen under Saddam. Filkins wondered how many babies were dying and the doctor explained that they did not have good records anymore because without the discipline instilled by Saddam’s regime the hospital staff was not bothering to do their job. But then Filkins asked the doctor if he thought it would have been better to leave Saddam in power and the doctor said no, things were bad under Saddam, and they would eventually get better now that he was gone.What was interesting to me about this story was that it did not fall neatly into any of the standard ideological positions on the war in the United States. It does not fall easily into the pro-war narrative of the US as liberators spreading democracy but it also does not fall easily into the anti-war narrative of the US as a colonial power that should have left well enough alone. It would be very hard for either side to use this story in their propaganda. I am convinced that the world is too complex and multi-dimensional to fit into the two-dimensional narratives we try to foist upon it and I think Filkins’s book does an excellent job of portraying the complexity without filtering it through a simplistic ideological lens.For that reason - and also because it was just a really absorbing narrative, Filkins knows how to spin a good yarn, and there are many genuinely moving and heart-breaking stories in this book - I wound up feeling like this was actually an ideal place to begin my studies of a very complex region. I might even return to it, and read it again, once I do have more of the context just because it was such a good read.