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You don't just hope your leaders are right if that means that you will have to invade and kill others. When other people's lives lie in the balance, you better be sure you are doing the right thing.
Wishful thinking and self-delusion are not worthy of respect ever; but they're even less so when their consequences include the destruction of a country.
You bring up a good point. Thanks for writing.
I don't think he supports US policy in order to retroactively justify his choices or out of straw-grasping idealism that the US might be virtuous after all, and if my writing made it seem that way, I should correct that.
That formulation -- hoping the US was right about Iraq, or else it was a pointless loss of lives -- was one of many ideas he expressed.
However, it did seem to me he thinks US policy is about democracy, freedom, and other positive ideals.
In any case, in answering every "why" with a "because" for rhetorical flourish as I composed the post, I neglected to show the very clear transition this soldier made from believing in the war and the US agenda in Iraq and Afghanistan, to wanting to get the troops out of Iraq in no uncertain terms and transition to Iraqi self-government. From absolute faith in the system, to rejecting this war but still believing America is worth fighting for.
Hence his vote for regime change (in the US).
That made me view him as someone with an independent mind, someone who questions authority as well as his own prior actions and beliefs. Hence, someone I can respect as an individual -- even if he has participated in a war I do not support or views America's foreign policy as more benevolent than I do.
Roxy
I would like to add something--and this is not a criticism of anything you have said.
I suppose if somebody engages in mass-murder or destroys a country, as the American troops have done in Iraq, we would normally label them as evil, and that would be the end of that: we would show them no sympathy.
However, experience shows what has been called the "ordinariness of evil." By that I mean that the same people who would normally be kind and courteous to you would not, under the right circumstances, hesitate to condemn you to death. That is how mass murder comes about, whether it be in Rwanda, Germany, Iraq, or Hiroshima.
So, I'm perfectly willing to think of this soldier as an intelligent, compassionate, thoughtful person who wants to do the right thing. But I would say exactly the same thing about the tens of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda who turned against their Tutsi compatriots with machetes, or about the pilots in Saddam's army who doused Kurdish villages with nerve gas.
Objectively, their actions appear cruel and barbaric. But they proceed on the basis of narratives that justify their actions, and therefore they don't see themselves as culpable. In other words, evil is always done in the name of good.
The problem, though, is that the narratives are wrong and flimsy. Establishing democracy was never one of the goals of the attack on Iraq. Records show that the neoconservatives' intention was to turn Iraq into another Egypt--an autocracy with sham elections, headed by Chalabi or somebody like him that would depend on the US for staying in power and therefore acquiesce to US plans for the region. And while Ayatullah Sistani was calling for free elections, the US was opposing it. The neoconservatives were not shy about expressing any of this. Of course, things didn't work out as originally planned.
The US could have made a huge contribution to democracy without firing a single shot. A good starting point would have been to stop propping up dictatorships in the Middle East and Pakistan (say, stop giving 2 billion dollars every year to Mubarak of Egypt), and to stop undermining elections (in Gaza, Lebanon, etc.) that brought people to power whom the US didn't like.
Finally, the soldier needs to ask himself whether disagreeing with a country's political system is enough justification for destroying that country.
* * *
Now, the soldier could have tried to educate himself about some basic facts about the region and the history of American policy. It appears though, that he found it psychologically easier to accept the ideological indoctrination of his superiors. Well, that is exactly how we end up with mass murder. Nobody does evil in the name of evil.
In any case, thanks for reading and writing!