HOW HE SEES IT Why we've won war but not peace

By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Why did the United States have such an easy time winning the Iraq war -- and is having such a hard time winning the Iraq peace? One answer comes from a new book, which makes a simple point: A killer elite can change a regime, but it can't change a country.
The book, bluntly but aptly titled "Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War," is by Evan Wright, a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine who was embedded with the U.S. Marines on the road north to Baghdad last year. Wright's publication is known for its left-of-center sympathies, but his style owes more to Hunter S. Thompson than to any sort of political correctness.
And that explains why the book is frankly admiring of the Marines -- and so revealing as to what they are really like.
Wright's Marines are not the stoic demigods, resplendent in their dress blues, that we see unsheathing their gleaming-steel swords on prime-time TV commercials. Nor are they the citizen-friendly figures heading up the annual Christmastime "Toys for Tots" campaign.
As one Marine recalls, "We must say 'Kill!' 3,000 times in boot camp. That's why it's easy." An officer briefs his men: "The bad news is, we won't get much sleep tonight. The good news is, we get to kill people." And bring death they do. One Marine observes, "You're supposed to feel up after killing people. I don't."
Yet these men are not monsters. They give their food to women and children; they prevent a mentally disturbed officer -- disparagingly dubbed "Captain America" and "a retard" by his men -- from abusing POWs. They stage a minimutiny to get a wounded boy -- accidentally shot by a Marine at night -- flown to a military field hospital.
But still, these men are killing machines. And if that fact doesn't fit the sanitized made-for-TV image of American "liberators" -- well, these Marines don't care. One reacts indignantly to a letter from an American child who wants the Marines to know that she is praying for peace: "I'm a death-dealing killer. In my free time ... I sharpen my knife."
Surprises
Indeed, much of the book might come as a surprise. Wright observes "a widespread, though usually unvoiced public perception that the military is a refuge for the socioeconomic dregs of society, people driven in by lack of jobs or paucity of social skills." But, in fact, he argues, a significant percentage of the officers and enlisted men are the children of professionals, even graduates of Ivy League schools.
But all these Marines, no matter what their background, are united by one thing: their alienation from mainstream American society. "The life they have chosen is a complete rejection of the hyped, consumerist American dream as it is dished out in reality TV shows and pop song lyrics. ... Their highest aspiration is self-sacrifice over self-preservation."
So what's the problem here -- we won the war, right?
The answer to that question, of course, looks a bit more complicated than it did May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations.
For one thing, the Marines are, as they proclaim, "the few." Those few won the war by racing straight to Baghdad, killing anybody who got in their way. But in doing so, they bypassed many who were still armed and dangerous. This lightning-speed war was in keeping with stateside theories of 21st-century military "transformation," but it didn't square with the old-fashioned need to physically occupy the conquered country.
Today, Iraq is still full of weapons of nonmass destruction, notably rocket-propelled grenades. Whether those weapons were in Iraq all along -- or have been imported since -- the brutal fact is that anti-American guerrillas have a substantial stockpile of deadly armaments. This failure to disarm the Iraqi population must be reckoned as a major failure of the military mission.
That's not the fault of Wright's "devil dogs." As one of them says in the middle of the fighting, "You know, I don't miss anything from home." For these Marines, home was where the heart of darkness was.
XJames P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.