Performance Interrogation

So I was listening to NPR yesterday as they interviewed a very intriguing performance artist. She is a self-described feminist who is working on a project to explore feminism from the perspective of woman as aggressor, not as victim. To do that, she plays the role of a Gitmo interrogator alone on the stage, alternately interrogating imaginary detainees and teaching other interrogators techniques. It's supposed to be realistic, yet funny and scary - she actually attended the sessions where the Army trains their interrogators.

Anyway, to the main point - one line she said to the NPR interviewer really stuck with me. During their discussion of how the artist gets into character, she said (paraphrasing) "the soldiers really need to believe in what they're doing - they need to believe that their techniques, although harsh, are directly saving the lives of their friends and comrades, otherwise it's impossible for them to perform their job."

To me, that really represents why war doesn't make sense - especially war for profit. If average soldiers need to be brainwashed in order to perform pretty routine (which in itself is scary) military tasks, it follows that those tasks are counterintuitive and not in the soldier's natural best interests. It's obvious to any educated observer that interrogation doesn't directly save the lives of comrades in most situations, at the very least, so soldiers have to believe something that isn't true in order to do something that isn't good for them.

So who does benefit from this transaction? The cynic in me says "Nobody". But a more holistic view of the situation arrives at a more sinister truth. While it sounds like Weekly World News-style conspiracy theory, a realistic analysis leads to the conclusion that the people that benefit are the people that aren't fighting. This isn't to say that the overall "surplus value" (in economic terms) of the Iraq situation isn't negative, meaning that it was a huge mistake to go in there any way you slice it, but some parties are definitely making out like bandits.

Oil companies profit from access to fields that they didn't have before. Halliburton/Bechtel/Blackwater and their ilk benefit from enormous, unaccountable, no-bid contracts. Arguably hardline GOP hawks benefit from being able to scare people into voting for them (a strategy that is running dry).

But to summarize, people that aren't fighting, and are generally already wealthy, are brainwashing people who aren't generally wealthy to do things that are bad for them in order to make the rich richer. There is something profoundly fucked-up about this situation.

Maybe I'm giving too much credit to the stillborn independent thought processes of the troops - maybe they really do buy into this nationalistic fervor even before their indoctrination. In that case, America as a country is royally screwed, which may be the case anyway. But if the troops actually do think like this artist, and are somewhat skeptical of their assignments until they are falsely led to think that their duties directly save the lives of their buddies, it is a sad state indeed.

What do you think - am I going down the right path? I'm not sure myself...