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War and Crime: Does American Military Intervention Produce Crime at Home?

By Jonathan Simor

The case for the Iraq war has often come down to this: If we don't fight them there, they will come here and kill us. President Bush has said that often, as has Rudy Giuliani. Its not clear that American forces in Iraq truly reduce the numbers of terrorists motivated to come and kill Americans. Indeed some believe that the specter of the American army occupying a Muslim country has helped recruit new soldiers for the Jihad.Now recent research by New York Times reporters Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez and published last week in the NYTimes raises the question of whether the formula is really backwards. If we send soldiers to fight in contemporary asymmetrical wars like Iraq today (and Vietnam a generation ago), with lots of opportunity for emotional trauma and little of the social solidarity of conventional wars of necessity, will they come home and kill us? Sontag and Alvarez, using only journalistic methods, found 121 cases of Iraq veterans who have been accused of involvement in killings here at home...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).