The Greatest Evil Is War

by Chris Hedges

There are no good wars. None.

The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured.

When I entered southern Iraq in the first Gulf War, it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies of the dead, including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been bombed. Schools and hospitals had been bombed. Bridges had been bombed. The United States military always wages war by “overkill,” which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south, where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, three million rockets tipped with white phosphorus—which will burn its way entirely through a body—and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm.12

If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else. And this blindness leads to catastrophe.

That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and nearly all the water-pumping and sanitation systems

We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.

The failure of nearly all our religious institutions—whose texts are unequivocal about murder—to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime, because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, or Vietnam, are placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, a simple act such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy is elusive, shadowy, and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, or when a helicopter or troop transport plane is shot down and everyone inside is killed, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians, who are fused with the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing to murder. Soldiers and Marines swiftly become socialized to murder.

War empowers soldiers to destroy not only things but human beings, to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction—and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word—sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir the power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects—objects to either gratify or destroy or both.

Objectification from war