In today’s Friday interview, Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai discusses how accurate a picture we are getting of the war in Iraq with Ilario Pantano, a former Marine lieutenant who fought a high-publicity campaign against murder charges after he shot and killed two Iraqis in 2004. He is the author of Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Kokai: Should we be surprised by the headlines we see emerging from the Iraq?
Pantano: They don’t surprise me because, sadly, I’m jaded enough to know that there has not been accuracy from the beginning. You know, a very interesting phenomenon happened with headlines coming out of Iraq. Those reporters were embedded. We saw nothing but salutation and praise of our troops as they were in the fight and reporters and soldiers were side by side. It took about two weeks for a new cycle to ultimately demand new and greater stories. And the soldiers went from being the heroes and liberators, ultimately to being oppressive occupiers and renegades, and then ultimately victims of the insurgency. And so I think that the report has just been skewed from the beginning. But I think the American people know that, and that’s one of the things that the military has to fight through.
Kokai: A major North Carolina newspaper recently published an editorial with the headline, “War on the Cheap,” taking the Bush administration to task for not providing enough resources to troops. In your book you also mention similar concerns about the fight in Fallujah. Do you think our troops are getting the resources they need?
Pantano: I think, unfortunately, they get politicized in a way that undermines the effort. I think it’s absolutely true that my battalion didn’t stay and operate as part of the second Fallujah fight because we didn’t have the radios or the heavy weaponry. We had to turn those over to a unit relieving us — in essence a hot swap. I think the aspect of this that I think is sad is when that aspect you mentioned is politicized. I think that you’re never prepared enough for a fight, for any kind of fight, whether it’s in a high school locker room or on the battlefield with all the millions of dollars and the bureaucracies involved. You can never be sufficiently prepared. Sometimes you have to do what’s required with what you have. Now I also recognize that there could have been more planning, and that certainly we would have benefited from more resources. And I think I say that pretty strenuously in the book. But I don’t like it when it’s politicized as an effort to undermine the effort.
Kokai: How about troop levels? There’s been quite a bit of debate about the proper size of the American fighting force in Iraq.
Pantano: The person managing the fight needs to make a solid decision about — if we want to be a very effective liberator — then we need to go in with the force sufficient to really maintain security. A lot less emphasis on the building of a school or the effort to try and restore electricity, because every time you put that power line up, it will be blown down if you don’t have the forces on the ground to make security. So the first step, as a matter of hierarchy, is security. Then you can worry about the fundamentals, the things that people will like us for. So on one aspect I would say that we were massively under-strength. There’s another tack that could have been taken, which would have been a more traditional counter-insurgency model where we just went in with advisors on a much, much smaller footprint. Sadly, we went in with just the right amount to get in trouble, and not the right amount to do the job.
Kokai: Now in Warlord you praise your fellow Marines. What message do you want people to get about the U.S. Marine Corps?
Pantano: My wife and I bicker about this because she’s very concerned about what our children do or don’t do. But I would be nothing but honored if my children decided to take up arms for their country as Marines. And one of the things that was a tragedy for me during my case, was the letters and emails where people asked, “What’s happening to you is such a terrible oversight. Should I let my child join? What do you think about that?” And my response uniformly was, “Serving your country is the greatest privilege.” You know, all my life — and I’ve had the benefit of working in a number of different professions — I worked on Wall Street, I worked in media with the entertainment types. And I came back to the Marine Corps for a reason. And it wasn’t just 9/11 and the need to be in the fight. It was also about a community of people that are dedicated to their country and they’re dedicated to service. And that’s something that, to this day, I look for as I try to figure how to spend my time and with whom to spend my time.
Kokai: At one point in the book you talk about the disconnect between the every day danger in Iraq and the peaceful conditions in the U.S. Do you think that disconnect hurts the war effort at all?
Pantano: That disconnect is the double-edged sword of our success and our victory. Because our war fighters — our soldiers, our legionnaires, if you will — are doing good at keeping us safe and protected. The mother of two isn’t afraid of the glass at the Chick-fil-A blowing in and wounding her children. We live in peace and prosperity here in the United States. We have a rule of law. And certainly we’ve paid for that by blood over 230 years. And we’ve been successful at doing that and preserving that, so much so that we’ve actually, I would argue very strenuously, have become soft as a society and are no longer prepared or equipped mentally or even physically to some degree, to do what’s required to keep our society alive. And sadly it’s the cycle of every empire. You reach a point of — almost like a spoiled child — the parents, the generations before, you know, are hard workers. Then you achieve success, then you forget what success is all about or why it’s important. And you lose it. I’m afraid, and one of the things I hope is a message of this book, that I see our loss as something that could be in the future. And I’m hopeful that America can find the strength to rally and push.
Kokai: Your book also details a level of frustration about media coverage of the conflict, enemy combatants, for example, using the media to discredit American troops. How do we fight this?
Pantano: This is one of the new problems that vexes us as we try and wage war in the 21st century. And for everyone who has kind of lost sight about the complexities of the Iraq war over three years, and the three years to come, Israel provides a very neat set of 30-day “Cliff Notes.” All of the impetus, all of the legitimacy, all of the requirement to fight, and after 30 days — and I wouldn’t argue that it was even a concerted media campaign. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there’s skewing of the story. I would just argue that the volume of exposure is such that it makes it very difficult for rational people to actually see the consequences of war. And because there’s such exposure, you can see it at night, you can see it in the day, you can hear about it in your car, you’re exposed to the warfare all the time. And the level of detail, the instant reporting — “Wow! Fifteen kids were killed today!” And you know their ages and you know what village they came from. There’s an intimacy. It’s not them, it’s not the enemy. And we’re in their living room, we’re looking at the pictures of their living rooms destroyed. That’s a very hard thing for a civilized society to stomach. Sadly, if we can’t stomach it, we’re going to lose.
Kokai: So most of us in society will not be heading to Iraq. What should we know about the war that we don’t know now?
Pantano: One of the things that I experienced firsthand on the ground is something that I’ve heard spoken to hypothetically, but is very, very real, and that is the Iraqis are sitting on the fence. And obviously an American timeline with a 24-hour news cycle, we want them off the fence already. It’s not convenient. We’ve got a two-year electoral cycle. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! The world doesn’t work that way. This region doesn’t work that way. So not only are the Iraqi people on the fence, which is something that I observed in my day-to-day interaction with them as a platoon commander, but the region is on the fence: the Saudis, the Iranians. And in many ways, what we do in Iraq has an opportunity to influence positively or negatively. Now The Economist had a great piece that said, “We started this war in Iraq to scare the pants off the world and we ended up scaring the pants off of ourselves.” I don’t want that to be the legacy of this fight. To the extent that we have people on the fence, we need to win them over on our side. Now that’s the final point. Winning the hearts and minds, we think, and we always focus on the carrot dimension of that. But there’s a stick component as well. And sometimes that kind of coercion is what’s required. So I would argue that if we were successful in Iraq, and sometimes that success requires more force up front, then we would have less need for violence or bloodshed in Syria or Iran or these other places. And I think in the long term we can save a lot of lives. And that is the more humane approach.