Should We Really Be Risking More Lives to Look for the Missing in Iraq?
The search for three American soldiers recently abducted in Iraq is following a familiar and tragic pattern. In the thirty-five years since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has engaged in an extensive and costly search for service personnel killed in the conflict but whose remains were not recovered at the time of death. On April 7, 2001 a helicopter carrying a search team crashed in Vietnam, taking the lives of seven Americans and nine Vietnamese. Since the May 12, 2007 abduction of the three American soldiers south of Baghdad, two soldiers have been killed trying to find them.
The desire to free prisoners of war and to recover the remains of those killed is understandable. Families of the missing seek closure and the desire to know the fate of those missing is not unnatural in itself. But expending further lives in the process is symptomatic of an American tendency to value the dead and missing more than those of the living. This tendency becomes even more pronounced when the United States is involved in a losing effort on the battlefield, as was the case in Vietnam and is now true in Iraq. Dead and missing soldiers are effortlessly transformed into heroes, individuals for whom continued fighting is far more easily justified than official platitudes and never-realized political and military objectives. Consequently, some semblance of victory can be achieved when remains are recovered or when prisoners are freed. The highly choreographed and ultimately farcical “liberation” of Jessica Lynch in 2003 is a perverse case in point.
The statements of those charged with recovering the dead and missing reveal the logic at work here. Repeatedly since the end of the Vietnam War we have been told that the United States will do everything possible to ensure the return of America’s dead and missing. And so it goes in the current instance. According to Major General William Caldwell, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, “We will never stop looking for our soldiers until their status is definitively determined, and we continue to pray for their safe return.” No goal, it seems, is more important than the recovery of an American service member once he or she goes missing. Winning the war, stabilizing the country, or ending the intervention that produces missing soldiers in the first place all take a back seat to tracking down the unaccounted for. What this means, in both Southeast Asia and Iraq, is that additional Vietnamese, American, and Iraqi deaths will be acceptable so long as they generate either a positive remains identification or the return of a prisoner of war.
Taken this far, the desire to recover the missing virtually ensures the continuation of the problem it’s supposed to solve. This is because the uncertainty generated by missing and/or unidentified service personnel is portrayed as somehow worse than the death, bloodshed, and suffering occasioned by searching for them. As a recent story in the New York Times put it, “in a war without front lines and goals that are hard to achieve, the search offer[s] the comfort of certainty, of a clear and noble goal. ‘If we find them, we accomplish something specific,’ Sergeant Byers said. ‘It’s not like trying to bring peace to the area then finding out later that you didn’t.’” Sadly, the “something specific” in this case is two more dead American soldiers.
As has been the case for over three decades in Southeast Asia, searching for the missing has become a surrogate for winning in Iraq. Yet we owe it to our servicemen and women to rethink this strange relationship. Why not, for example, try to negotiate the release of the missing rather than risk further lives trying to find them? Some will say this indicates weakness on our part. Yet perhaps the real weakness lies in our inability to ask, much less answer, “How far is too far? How many dead soldiers is too many for the recovery of three who are missing?”