Duty Bound to Civic Education

With a NY Times op-ed titled “The War as We Saw It,” a group of infantrymen and non-commissioned officers from the 82nd Airborne Division answered a different call to duty last week. As Washington gears up for a series of progress reports on Iraq, this group of servicemen offer their own voice of experience…

Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

Any of us who made it through Hobbes’s first book can’t miss the mechanism of beginning with definitions. We recognize the tone of skepticism and the vehicle of making your case to the public too. This particular expression of skepticism makes way for a much more comprehensive discussion of the politics and people of Iraq and provides a vehicle for us to consider who we are or want to be as well.

There’s power in this act of civic duty that we shouldn’t let the debate over Iraq overshadow.

Much of our civic education curriculum emphasizes a responsibility to speak out and points to colorful protests in important places. It can be difficult for students to imagine themselves in such a situation. They often respond to this suggested responsibility with an argument that speaking out hardly matters when no one is listening. I know many adults who have accepted that conclusion as fact too…maybe even a few of us.

These servicemen, however, chose to make their case to the American public through the newspaper. They must have believed someone would hear them and somewhere it would make a difference. In doing so, they utilize arguments on themes you’ll recognize from our discussions at the National Academy…

What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes.

We know any sense of society is fragile with so many people “outside the box.” I don’t know how you’d describe the presumed relationship between American forces and the Iraqi people but consider applying what we know about contract-making to statements like these found throughout the article…

Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families…

…Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda…

…What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

…The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis.

This is all a part of the debate on Iraq which is far from resolved but there’s a couple of opportunities in this op-ed for us to consider as civic educators. First, there’s the opportunity to re-consider the ideas we read as a learning community in L.A. But then, this analysis from the ranks of our armed forces signals a triumph for civic education that’s larger than the sum of us and the work we did for three weeks.

We’ve all seen the studies showing how little students remember or understand from their high school government classes. Letterman asks people on the street to name the first three presidents and we all get a good laugh when none of us can. A young guy on the radio who can rattle of the name of the NASCAR driver to go with any car number dismisses the next question to name three Supreme Court Justices as meaningless trivia.

This op-ed provides an example of civic duty when the big ideas behind the gory facts matter the most and where these soldiers earned their highest marks. Whatever their test scores, they “get it.”

–Shellee