Friends,

I wanted to share this recent series of Guardian interviews with Dr. Emma Sky questioning the impact of the Long War on both the troops and the effected populace. Emma, along with Dr. Nancy Roberts, Dr. Anna Simons,and Dr. Jill Hazelton served as waypoints to me as I navigated the storms of the last ten years, and I am grateful for their time and mentoring.

Looking past strategy, these women are trying to understand what happens when a sole superpower violates the Clausewitzian trinity.

In the first, she succinctly describes how the professional military deliberately ignores emotional intelligence through indoctrination and training in order to allow the soldier to survive combat.


“There was so much violence that it was almost too big to comprehend. The military has a language that is not accidental; it is used to quarantine emotion.”

This quarantine, or so-called compartmentalization, over extended deployments, will lead professional soldiers towards a breaking point of PTSD if they cannot find alternative means (family, friends, and socio-economic structures) to process the deliberate bifurcation of emotions (hearts) and actions/thoughts (minds). Coupled with repeated concussions or traumatic brain injury (TBI) from repeated or spectacular blast, this brain damage can become debilitating, a nascent insurgency brewing within one's own mind. The body is a closed, organic system which is not equipped to split the heart from the mind. Rather, it brings to mind wasted valor.


In the second, Emma describes the prolonged effects of extended intervention,

“We've been fighting the war on terror for 10 years" said Sky. "At times it seems we have been fighting demons. We behaved as if there were a finite number of people in the world who had to be killed or captured. And we were slow to realise that our actions were creating more enemies.

"It has been seen by many Muslims as a war on Islam. Now, we are saying, 'We've pulled out of Iraq, we are pulling out of Afghanistan, and it's all over now.' It may be over for the politicians. But it is not over for the Muslim world. Well over 100,000 Muslims have been killed since 9/11 following our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly by other Muslims.

"We have to ask ourselves, what do we think this has done to their world? And how will they avenge these deaths in years to come? It is not over for the soldiers who have physical injuries and mental scars, nor the families who have lost loved ones."

She added: "The world is better off without Saddam. But nobody has been held accountable for what happened in Iraq, and there is a danger that we won't learn the right lessons, particularly related to the limitations of our power.”
Emma shows shades of The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. What she warns seems warrant to immerse into fiction if not boiled and embroiled by the facts of the day. Emma espouses my own worst fears, and I am left wondering how to unmuddle a way out of this wicked web of problems.

Best

Mike