The war on terror in the early twenty-first century

In this chapter, we analyze contemporary patterns of culture pertaining to the current war on terror through the lenses of the classic sociological perspective of Emile Durkheim, and his influence on two controversial classics, Samuel Stouffer’s The American Soldier and S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire. Our empirical data come from participant-observation research in courts-martial pertaining to three infamous sites of abuse in the current war: the abuse at Abu Ghraib that occurred in 2003 (Mestrovic 2007); the Operation Iron Triangle massacres of 9 May 2006 (Mestrovic 2009); and the Baghdad Canal Massacre of March 2007 (Zamost 2009).¹ We conjoin these seemingly different sites of abuse because they all involve common, systemic issues that have been validated by other studies and by journalists. Suicide rates are currently at a 30-year high in the US Army. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) rates among soldiers are the highest that they have been since the Vietnam War. Soldiers are forced to follow unlawful rules of engagement (ROE) (Iraqi Veterans Against the War 2008). The basic needs of soldiers pertaining to sleep, food, hygiene, and safety are not being met. The background of Iraqi-on-Iraqi ethnic cleansing and tribal warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan has not yet been addressed, but contributes to the chaos and combat stress that US soldiers endure. These are some of the systemic, sociological issues that are at the center of all these events, but are treated as peripheral and without social theoretical scaffolding by media and scholars alike. Thus, these three sites of abuse are used here as a vehicle for a wider theoretical and empirical discussion of systemic issues pertaining to the war on terror.