January 10, 2006
One of the true scandals of media coverage of the war in Iraq has been
the simple fact that you -- relatively small numbers of you anyway --
had to visit Tomdispatch.com, or Juan Cole's invaluable Informed Comment blog, or Antiwar.com,
or other Internet sites to find out anything about the fierce (if
limited) ongoing air war in that country. The American media's record
on coverage of the air campaign against the Iraqi insurgency since
Baghdad was taken in early April 2003 has been dismal in the extreme.
Our military has regularly loosed its planes in "targeted" attacks on
guerrillas in Iraq's heavily populated urban areas (where much of the
fighting has taken place), sometimes, as in largely Shiite Najaf and
largely Sunni Falluja in 2004, destroying whole sections of major
cities, in part from the air. Despite this, American reporters in Iraq
have essentially refused to look up, or even to acknowledge the planes,
predator drones, and low-flying helicopters passing daily overhead.
In these years, only one journalist, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, seems to have visited an American air base in Iraq and written a piece about it -- an anodyne piece
from an otherwise good reporter. As far as I can tell, no American
reporters have been assigned to, or written about, the part of the
American air campaign that has been mounted from outside Iraq -- from
air bases in places like the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, or
from aircraft carriers; and hardly more has been written from the
United States where our fleet of unmanned but deadly Predator drones
are (remotely) controlled. Because the military has continued to release
limited amounts of information on its air campaign, the odd line or
even paragraph (clearly taken from military press releases or news
conferences) about bombing or missile runs on Iraq's urban areas made
it into boilerplate wire-service news stories; otherwise the air
campaign has simply been missing in action.
There was no excuse for this. To take just this site: If, in August 2004, you had read What Do We Call the Enemy?,
you would have known that the air war, to my mind, was already the
number-one missing story in Iraq coverage (followed closely, as is
still true, by the issue of administration plans
for maintaining permanent bases in Iraq). As I wrote then, "Air power
has been at the heart of the American-style of war since World War II."
For war reporters with even the slightest historical memory, that alone
should have made it an obvious topic of interest. Several months later,
in December 2004, I devoted a dispatch to the subject, Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq, writing:
"The complete absence of coverage [of the American air
campaign]… is a little harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent
military base facilities the U.S. has been building in Iraq to the tune
of billions of dollars… the loosing of air power on Iraq's cities is
the great missing story of the postwar war. Is there no reporter out
there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and
missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial
or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event, after the last
century of destruction and threatened destruction, that no one thinks
it worth the bother to attend to? Is the Bush administration really to
be given another remarkable free ride?"
This all seemed so obvious, even to someone thousands of miles from
Iraq. Still, no reporter took the subject up. Soon after -- in February
2005 -- I asked Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist covering the war
from Baghdad, to write a piece on the subject. His report, Living Under the Bombs, ended with this vision of air power in Iraq:
"Helicopters buzz the tops of buildings and hover over
neighborhoods in the capital all the time, while fighter jets often
scorch the skies. Below them, traumatized civilians await the next
onslaught, never knowing when it may occur."
In December, 2005, back in the U.S., he returned to the subject ("An Increasingly Aerial Occupation"),
doing what any reporter in or out of Iraq should have been quite
capable of doing -- mining the news releases the military was regularly
producing on its air campaign.
But it took another reporter in the U.S. to put American air power in
Iraq on the media map. Comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq are constantly
being disputed and discredited and yet, given the Bush administration's
actions, all sorts of strange parallels can't help but continually pop
to mind. Take Seymour Hersh, now a reporter for the New Yorker
magazine, who has never set foot in war-torn Iraq, and compare him, for
instance, to... Seymour Hersh, the young former Associated Press
reporter writing for a little known news outlet called Dispatch News
Service, who had never set foot in war-torn Vietnam. On November 13,
1969, Dispatch released a piece by Hersh, picked up by more than thirty
newspapers nationwide, which began: "Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr.,
twenty-six, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran
with the nickname 'Rusty.' The Army says he deliberately murdered at
least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in
March, 1968, in a Viet Cong stronghold known as 'Pinkville'..." This is
how the My Lai massacre first reached our world -- not from one of the
scads of reporters in Vietnam but from a loner in Washington. Unlike
Bob Woodward, who transformed himself in the post-Watergate era into an imperial stenographer, Hersh has remained implacably on the job all these years. (His old book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, should be required reading for every political observer in this country who wants to put the growing NSA flap over spying on citizens, possibly reporters, and who knows whom else, in perspective.) Now, he has done a similar service from afar. By writing Up in the Air for the December 5 New Yorker
on the Bush administration's decision to intensify its air war as part
of an Iraq "withdrawal" plan, he made American reporters in that
country look up at the skies (and more power to him for that). In the
wake of his report, though little has really changed, pieces on the air war
are suddenly part of the mainstream news mix. Reporters are mining
information released by the military, calling Iraqis in bombed-out
urban areas -- doing, in short, what reporters are supposed to do.
What makes this more of a scandal is the fact that the changeover from
two-plus years of no air-war articles to a spate of them has come
without the slightest acknowledgement anywhere that anything is being
done differently. It's seamlessly as if it had always been so.
Nonetheless, the American press has a long way to go to report on the
air war in the fashion it actually deserves, and someone far away -- in
this case sociologist and Tomdispatch regular Michael Schwartz -- can
still make sense of it in a way impossible to find off the Internet.
Yet. Tom
A Formula for Slaughter
The American Rules of Engagement from the Air
By Michael Schwartz
A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians
had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with
about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence
by the U.S. and its allies. The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected
British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically
validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating
that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000. Though the Congo
study had won the praise
of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for
UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was
quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of
the war.
This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the antiwar movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.
One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that
the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill
so many people so quickly -- about 1,000 each week in the first 14
months of the war. This may reflect our sense that carnage at such
elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter
and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis
killed. With the exception of the battle of Falluja, these sorts of
high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.
Mayhem in Baiji
But the Iraq war is a twenty-first century war and so the miracle of
modern weaponry allows the U.S. military to kill scores of Iraqis (and
wound many more) during a routine day's work, made up of small
skirmishes triggered by roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and American
foot patrols. In early January 2006, the New York Times and the Washington Post
both reported a relatively small incident (not even worthy of front
page coverage) that illustrated perfectly the capacity of the American
military to kill uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.
Here is the Times account of what happened in the small
town of Baiji, 150 miles north of Baghdad, on January 3, based on
interviews with various unidentified "American officials":
"A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft detected three men
planting a roadside bomb about 9 p.m. The men 'dug a hole following the
common pattern of roadside bomb emplacement,' the military said in a
statement. 'The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi
civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was
relayed to close air support pilots.'
"The men were tracked from the road site to a building nearby, which
was then bombed with 'precision guided munitions,' the military said.
The statement did not say whether a roadside bomb was later found at
the site. An additional military statement said Navy F-14's had
'strafed the target with 100 cannon rounds' and dropped one bomb."
Crucial to this report is the phrase "precision guided munitions," an
affirmation that U.S. forces used technology less likely than older
munitions to accidentally hit the wrong target. It is this precision
that allows us to glimpse the callous brutality of American military
strategy in Iraq.
The target was a "building nearby," identified by a drone aircraft as
an enemy hiding place. According to eyewitness reports given to the Washington Post,
the attack effectively demolished the building, and damaged six
surrounding buildings. While in a perfect world, the surrounding
buildings would have been unharmed, the reported amount of human damage
in them (two people injured) suggests that, in this case at least, the
claims of "precision" were at least fairly accurate.
The problem arises with what happened inside the targeted building, a
house inhabited by a large Iraqi family. Piecing together the testimony
of local residents, the Times reporter concluded that fourteen members of the family were in the house at the time of the attack and nine were killed. The Washington Post, which reported twelve killed, offered a chilling description of the scene:
"The dead included women and children whose bodies were
recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently
been sleeping. A Washington Post special correspondent watched
as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger
than 10 were removed Tuesday from the house."
Because in this case -- unlike in so many others in which American air
power utilizes "precisely guided munitions" -- there was on-the-spot
reporting for an American newspaper, the U.S. military command was
required to explain these casualties. Without conceding that the deaths
actually occurred, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson,
director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad,
commented: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using
civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."
Notice that Lt. Col. Johnson (while not admitting that civilians had
actually died) did assert U.S. policy: If suspected guerrillas use any
building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is
justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to "shield
themselves." These are, in other words, essential U.S. rules of
engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that
planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid
demolishing surrounding structures. Put another way, it is more
important to stop the insurgents than protect the innocent.
And notice that the military, single-mindedly determined to kill or
capture the insurgents, cannot stop to allow for the evacuation of
civilians either. Any delay might let the insurgents escape, either
disguised as civilians or through windows, backdoors, cellars, or any
of the other obvious escape routes urban guerrillas might take. Any
attack must be quickly organized and -- if possible -- unexpected.
The Real Rules of Engagement in Iraq
We can gain some perspective on this military strategy by imagining
similar rules of engagement for an American police force in some large
city. Imagine, for example, a team of criminals in that city fleeing
into a nearby apartment building after gunning down a policeman. It
would be unthinkable for the police to simply call in airships to
demolish the structure, killing any people -- helpless hostages,
neighbors, or even friends of the perpetrators -- who were with or near
them. In fact, the rules of engagement for the police, even in such a
situation of extreme provocation, call for them to "hold their fire" --
if necessary allowing the perpetrators to escape -- if there is a risk
of injuring civilians. And this is a reasonable rule... because we
value the lives of innocent American citizens over our determination to
capture a criminal, even a cop killer.
But in Iraqi cities, our values and priorities are quite differently
arranged. The contrast derives from three important principles under
which the Iraq war is being fought: that the war should be conducted to
absolutely minimize the risk to American troops; that guerrilla fighters should not be allowed to escape if there is any way to capture or kill them; and that Iraqi civilians should not be allowed to harbor or encourage the resistance fighters.
We are familiar with the first principle, the determination to
safeguard American soldiers. It is expressed in the elaborate training
and equipment they are given, as well as the ongoing effort
to make the equipment even more effective in protecting them from
attack. (This was most recently expressed in the release of a Pentagon
study showing that improved body armor could have saved as many as 300
American lives since the start of the war.) It is also expressed in
rules of engagement that call for air strikes like the one in Baiji.
The alternative to such an air attack (aside from allowing the
guerrillas to escape) would, of course, be to use a unit of troops to
root out the guerrillas. Needless to say, without an effective Iraqi
military in place, such an operation would be likely to expose American
soldiers to considerable risk. The Bush Administration has long shied
away from the high casualty counts that would be an almost guaranteed
result of such concentrated, close-quarters urban warfare, casualty
counts that would surely have a strong negative effect on support in
the United States for its war. (The irony, of course, is that, with air
attacks, the U.S. is trading lower American casualties and stronger
support domestically for ever lessening Iraqi support and the ever
greater hostility such attacks bring in their wake.)
The second principle also was applied in Baiji. Rather than allow the
perpetrators to take refuge in a nearby home and then quietly slip
away, the U.S. command decided to take out the house, even though they
had no guarantee that it was uninhabited (and every reason to believe
the opposite). The paramount goal was to kill or capture the suspected
guerrilla fighters, and if this involved the death or injury of
multiple Iraqi civilians, the trade-off was clearly considered worth
it. That is, annihilating a family of 12 or 14 Iraqis could be
justified, if there was a reasonable probability of killing or
capturing three individuals who might have been setting a roadside
bomb. This is the subtext of Lt. Colonel Johnson's comment.
The third principle behind these attacks is only occasionally expressed
by U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, but is nevertheless a
foundation of American strategy as applied in Baiji and elsewhere.
Though Bush administration officials and top U.S. military officers
often, for propaganda purposes, refer to local residents as innocent
victims of insurgent intimidation and terrorism, their disregard for
the lives of civilians trapped inside such buildings is symptomatic of
a very different belief: that most Sunni Iraqis willingly harbor the
guerrillas and support their attacks -- that they are not unwilling
shields for the guerrillas, but are actively shielding them. Moreover,
this protection of the guerrillas is seen as a critical obstacle to our
military success, requiring drastic punitive action.
As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which U.S. military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating." A Marine calling-in to a radio talk show
recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people
get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their
house."
This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism --
attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the
enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever American
troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of
terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.
Escalating the War Against Iraqi Civilians
Baiji, a loosely settled village, is not typical of the locations where
American air power is regularly loosed. In Iraq's densely packed
cities, where much fighting takes place, buildings usually house
several families with other multiple-occupancy dwellings adjacent.
Moreover, city battles often involve larger units of guerrillas, who
ambush U.S. patrols and then disperse into several nearby dwellings, or
snipers shooting from several locations. As a consequence, when U.S.
F-14s, helicopter gunships, or other types of aircraft arrive, their
targets are larger and more dispersed. Liquidating guerrillas can then
require the "precise" leveling several buildings (with "collateral
damage"), or even a whole city block. Instead of 100 cannon rounds and
one five hundred pound bomb, such an attack can (and often does)
involve several thousand cannon rounds and a combination of 500 and
2000 pound bombs.
Needless to say, the casualties in such attacks are likely to be
magnitudes greater, though we hardly read about them in the American
press, since reporters working for American newspapers are rarely
present before, during, or after the attack. This has started to change
since "Up in the Air," a New Yorker piece
by Seymour Hersh garnered much attention for outlining a Bush
administration draw-down strategy in which air attacks are to be
increasingly relied upon. One particularly vivid recent account by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer
discussed the impact of air power during the American offensive in
Western Anbar province last November. Using testimony from medical
personnel and local civilians, Knickmeyer reported that 97 civilians
were killed in one attack in Husaybah, 40 in another in Qaimone, 18
children (and an unknown number of adults) in Ramadi, and uncounted
others in numerous other cities and towns. (The U.S. military typically
denied knowledge of these casualties.) All of these resulted from the
same logic and the same rules of engagement as the Baiji attack and in
most cases the attacks seem to have been chosen in place of mounting
ground assaults. In each case, "precision guided munitions" were used,
and -- for the most part, as far as we can tell -- American forces
destroyed mainly the targets they intended to hit. In other words, this
mayhem was not a matter of dumb munitions, human error, carelessness,
or gratuitous brutality. It was policy.
These same principles apply to all engagements undertaken by the U.S. military. There are about 100 violent encounters
with guerrillas each day, or about 3,000 engagements each month, most
of them triggered by IEDs, sniper fire, or low-level hit-and-run
attacks. (Only a relative handful of these -- never more than 100 in a
month and recently far fewer -- involve suicide bombers). The rules of
engagement call for the application of overwhelming force in all these
situations. The hiding places of the attackers -- houses, commercial
shops, even mosques and schools -- essentially become automatic targets
for attack. For the most part, rifles, tanks, and artillery are
sufficient to eradicate the enemy, and air power is only called in as a
last resort (though with a recent surge in air missions reported, that
"last resort" is evidently becoming an ever more ordinary option).
Instead of body counts ranging as high as 100 per incident, only a
small minority of these daily engagements produce double-digit
mortality rates. Nevertheless, the 3,000 small monthly engagements
often involve attacking structures with civilians in them, and the
lethality of these battles, combined with the havoc and destruction
wrought by the air attacks, does add up to possibly thousands and thousands of civilian deaths each year.
Seymour Hersh's article made the new Bush administration policy of
relying on air power public. It involves, in the near future,
substituting Iraqi for U.S. foot patrols as often as possible (which
means an instant drop in the quality of the soldiering involved); and,
since the Iraqi military do not have tanks, artillery, or other heavy
weaponry, the U.S. plans to compensate both for weaker fighting outfits
and lack of on-the-ground firepower by increasing its use of air
strikes. In other words, in the coming months those 3,000 encounters a
month are likely to produce even more victims than the already
staggering civilian casualty rates in Iraq. Each incident that
previously might have killed a few civilians will now be likely to kill
many more.
The Washington Post,
along with other major American media outlets, has confirmed that a new
military strategy is being put in place and implemented. Quoting
military sources, the Post reported that the number of U.S. air
strikes increased from an average of 25 per month during the Summer of
2005, to 62 in September, 122 in October, and 120 in November. The Sunday Times of London
reports that, in the near future, these are expected to increase to at
least 150 per month and that the numbers will continue to climb past
that threshold.
Consider then this gruesome arithmetic: If the U.S. fulfills its
expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average
air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air
power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add
the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all
sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the
Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.
The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has
written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American
business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the
internet at numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times
,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the
Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social
Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with
Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.
Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz
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