Iraqi Children: Paper, Politics and Psychology
Often, and increasingly, there are stories about Iraq veterans and their mental problems, marital problems, divorce rates and alcoholism. I was just reading a recent article in the Guardian about Iraq veterans suffering stress and alcoholism. These problems have been getting worse, the studies suggest, as tours of duty get longer. The longer a soldier stays in Iraq, the more likely they are to “sustain psychological wounds”. Another reason for the overstretched military to switch from surge to drawback.
I wouldn’t want to pour scorn on post-traumatic stress disorder, but the ‘longer tours’ part occasionally galls me. Only because I find myself thinking: how many headline-making studies have considered the levels of post-traumatic stress disorder when the ‘tour’ has no end?
Search for psychological cost of war and all you get is pages and pages on the trauma soldiers suffer while engaging in war. It’s not that I have a problem with that. Just that, occasionally I wonder about the trauma of living a war. And as Highlander points out, if adults have a great difficulty coping with trauma, how much worse is it for children?
Searching for psychological cost of war Iraqi children I ended up reading an article entitled “Iraq Comes Home: Soldiers Share the Devastating Tales of War” on Information Liberation – The news you’re not supposed to know. I quite like Information Liberation, but that subtitle at that moment made me feel queasy.
I did of course find something on what I was searching for. Searching Unicef, came up with this, from 2003. And this on CNN. I’m sure there has to be more sites or articles about this, somewhere. It’s just that I had a hard time finding them.
There was much much more on medical aid, cluster bombs, and art. Iraqi children’s art. Although actually I came across the Iraqi Children’s Art site while searching for a half-remembered quote from Berger’s book, Ways of Seeing, not the psychological cost of the war on Iraqi children. I don’t think the site has the word “psychological” in it. But it did have the Berger quote I wanted:
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
The Berger passage is quoted on the Exhibits page of the site, followed by the words: “The exhibit is about people; it is not about politics”. Although on another page it says the idea is of “child-to-child diplomacy”. I can’t claim to understand what that means.
There’s also a link on the site to Project Farasha, which has a gallery of some of the pictures in the exchange program. This quote is in the photos section:
We see frightening scenes of these children play-acting out the violence that they have witnessed. When they receive a drawing from an American child, there is a human connection and they are suddenly and imminently aware that somebody cares about them – Claudia Lefko
I’m reminded of the report on Al Jazeera English on Iraqi children’s games, which include blowing up toy cars. A drawing will make all the difference of course.
I like the idea. It’s very Pollyanna. But slight sarcasm is involuntary.
The psychological cost of war is, we are told, invisible. As far as Iraqi children are concerned, it seems to be non-existent. It certainly isn’t something that appears regularly in the papers. Except perhaps the papers they draw on.
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The psychological costs of war are nothing new: westerners have been acutely aware of them ever since World War I.
If there is a preponderance of literature in western media on the psychological costs of war, it is more due to the fact that the Left in western society is increasingly frustrated by the continuing success of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, – and the failure of the Left to have any sway in the matter – to the point that they need to scrounge around for old anti-war arguments dredged from the past.
This is not to say that the psychological costs aren’t real. However, they aren’t any worse than those of wars in the past, and if previous generations were able to deal with them, there is no reason to suppose societies today cannot.
No generation could deal with war and after war problems, veterans and their families, victim civilians families and civilians victim of confronting missles and city bombing!
The psychological problem always will be there and it sucks more victims in the form of alcoholisim, divorce, killers, aggresive behaviours and so on! this list goes beyond our imagination and nobody can cure it!
And the people think it would be fine and they can help, just they are pretending it’s gonna be OK!
No generation could deal with war and after war problems, veterans and their families, victim civilians families and civilians victim of confronting missles and city bombing!
I totally disagree, as we have nothing but examples of productivity and success from all the participants in both World Wars.
The greater error is to think that war has hidden costs that cannot be dealt with, and that this would be a reason for not going to war against those who are intent on destroying you.
War is a necessity, so long as we cling to multicultural relativism.
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Examples?! how many? in what rate?
Most people after war are dealing with phycological problems. it’s not a theory!
If you wnat to courage people to attend to war (I don’t know why war, which war, what for) for whatever reason you have! if even you want to lie to them about heavenly features after was that could happen to them! Just don’t deviate us from facts and science.
Thanks in advance.
I don’t know what kind of reasoning is this! I guess Hitler satisfied all their army with the same method!