Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
civilian casualties, urban bombardment, etc.
I’m in one of those moods today.
I think I’m going to go home and just get completely tanked — falling-down, sloppy drunk.
Then I’m gonna borrow my friends Hummer and drive down to the Farmer’s Market in Santa Lucia, honking my horn the whole way and screaming obscenities out the window.
I think I’ll ignore some stop signs, and of course the speed limit is only for people who care.
It sounds dangerous, I know, but I promise to do this in a way that minimizes civilian casualties…
Of the war in Iraq, Colin Powell tells us that “the United States and our coalition partners will do our utmost to do it quickly and do it in a way that minimizes the loss of civilian life and destruction of property.”
Can someone give this man a sense of shame?
If you want to minimize casualties to civilians, you can start by not throwing explosives into the countries they live in.
Have you been keeping track of how many of our “precision” weapons have missed the country of Iraq?
So far, I’ve read reports of these sophisticated devices hitting Turkey, the Persian Gulf, and Iran (not to mention the ones that took out a British bomber and a
bus full of fleeing Syrians).
If you can’t even hit the country you’re aiming at, you sure as hell can’t be confident you’re going to hit the barracks instead of the elementary school.
And of course, even when they hit exactly what they intended to hit, what they intended to hit sometimes turns out to be a civilian bomb shelter or the Chinese embassy.
Here’s another good piece of doubletalk from Powell in today’s news:
“[A]fter we have defeated this regime… I think at that point, the Arab public will realize that we came in peace, we came as liberators, not conquerors.”
You heard it here first: the United States military, backed by a “shock and awe” bombing campaign, intending to defeat the Iraqi military, overthrow its government and install another in its place, “came in peace.”
(I sent this to a mailing list I’m on.
Someone posted links to the video of U.S. casualties that’s been doing the rounds, and there followed a debate over whether this was appropriate, and whether this sort of footage was good or bad to view or to encourage people to view.)
I’ll lay it on the table:
I don’t think that George Bush and his crew value human life to an extent that I consider safe.
I think they have grand plans on a large scale for how they want to remake the world, its nations, the stories writ large on history, and so forth.
This is, from one point of view, entirely appropriate for people in their position.
But it also means that when they’re deciding whether or not to take an action that might result in, say, civilian casualties in Iraq, their calculations are done at this grand scale, their considerations are along the lines of:
will this change the way other civilians react towards our soldiers?
will this change the way Arab media report on our actions?
will this put additional pressure on regional governments to strengthen their opposition to us?
will this do significant damage to a strategically important target?
will this strengthen the resolve of Iraqi troops?
will this encourage terrorism against U.S. targets elsewhere?
And other good, solid, strategic considerations.
For the civilian casualties themselves, and those who love them, and those who witness their dismemberment without having to click on a link to do so, there’s another element to the calculation.
To people who believe that the suffering an Iraqi brother feels for the death of an Iraqi brother is of the same sort as the suffering I would feel for the death of my brother, this is an element in our calculation as well.
I don’t think this makes it into the calculation of people who think like George Bush and his crew.
I honestly do not think that they value the lives of the people that they are killing as human lives, but only regret their deaths occasionally out of rhetorical necessity or strategic calculation.
I think people whose ambition carry them to the sorts of offices George Bush and his crew occupy, who dash out position papers full of empire and realpolitik, who dream up “shock and awe” and so forth, have for the most part given up this ability.
I think they’ve convinced themselves that they’ve done this for good reasons, reasons that are, when seen from the perspective of The Big Picture, actually better ways of addressing the very concerns I’m accusing them of ignoring.
They think that people who include the pain of an anguished Iraqi brother in their calculations are dangerously naïve and sentimental.
A nation full of television generals, op-ed writers, and policy-makers are pleased to agree.
I think they’re completely, tragically wrong.
Any justification for loosing the dogs of war that is true and right and good shouldn’t have to leave out the suffering of its victims.
You shouldn’t say that D-Day was justified because of Hitler’s evil and so it doesn’t matter about the people who suffered and died there.
You should try to be able to say that D-Day was justified because of Hitler’s evil even considering the suffering and the people who died there.
It does no honor to the people who die in war to hide from how they died or what happened to their corpses afterwards.
Better we should learn which one died the worst death and study the details so that we can tell ourselves honestly “this was the cost” and can decide whether we can really say “and it was worth it.”
And of course this criticism can be extended to critics of the war, who had better form a vivid picture of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers before spouting any jawclap about respecting the sovereignty of his government.
I saw a picture of an Iraqi child covered in burns from one of the bombings.
I think that the people who insisted that this child had to suffer in order to liberate Iraq would have gone through a different, more honest mental calculation if instead of deciding this a planet’s-width away from a child they’d never see, they decided it with the flamethrower in their hands and the child in front of them.
Maybe they’d decide the same way, but they’d decide knowing the real cost of their decisions.
I think if George Bush had to personally burn, dismember, and crush the victims of his war, he would lose the heart for it.
He would beg for excuses to try some other way with even more desperation than he in fact searched for reasons to go to war.
The gruesome technology that allows him and people like him to rain death on people from a distance shields them from seeing the consequences of their actions except as results that can fit into a framework preselected to exclude non-abstract considerations of human suffering.
And I think this disease is widespread.
And I think one potential cure is the sort of shocking footage we’ve been arguing about.
It may or may not end up being effective, but most of the arguments I’ve heard against it sound like symptoms of the disease rather than arguments against the efficacy of the treatment.
One of the persistent myths about the recent Iraq war was that it was conducted by the US-led coalition in a manner that was unusually sensitive to minimizing civilian casualties.
Sometimes this is stated to be a consequence of a particularly American respect for life and human dignity.
Other times, it is explained as a consequence of more precise weapons and an increasingly disciplined US military.
As a testable hypothesis about reality the myth runs into problems.
First, because it’s not easily testable, since you can’t compare one war against another one to determine the rates of civilian casualties as if everything else about the wars were equal.
Second, because the Pentagon prefers not to find out how many civilians it kills, and so it has a hard time measuring reality against its predictions.
But most troublesome is that the available data seem to show the opposite:
the US seems to be getting more and more reckless about civilian casualties over time.
I brought this up , when the founder of the software company I used to work for was quoted in the paper making excuses for the military’s interest in our software:
“The fact that the battles of today are about information more than about bigger bombs will make war less destructive to most people,” he said.
“It certainly makes it possible and likely that there’s less harm to innocent bystanders.
As much as everyone hates war, I think the world is better because our technology exists.”
In his e-mail, J— added:
“My father’s generation fought a huge war with massive casualties and disruption.
My generation fought a war with carpet bombing, napalm, land mines and booby traps.
Today, we’re able to fight a war with drone aircraft, communications, sensors and other protective equipment, and precise munitions that damage as small an area as possible.”
I pointed out that , the Christian Science Monitor had reported that contrary to this expectation, as war becomes more high-tech, civilian casualties seem to increase:
…In the [] Gulf War, just 3 percent of bombs were precision-guided.
That figure jumped to 30 percent in the bombing of Yugoslavia, and to nearly 70 percent during the Afghan air campaign .
Yet in each case, the ratio of civilian casualties to bombs dropped has grown.…
Well, now the numbers are in on the latest war in Iraq.
The numbers are the best estimates that the Project on Defense Alternatives was able to come up with for Iraqi casualties during the invasion (they restricted their analysis to the time when Iraqi regular forces were still resisting the invasion, — their methodology is described in detail at http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html).
They believe that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed during this period, and that between 3,200 and 4,300 of them were civilian noncombatants.
Almost 30% of the people killed by coalition forces were not Iraqi troops, Ba’ath party targets, or members of armed militias, but were unarmed civilians.
And although more Iraqis died in the Desert Storm war, more civilians died in the recent war, both in number and in percentage.
These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other dense urban areas; they murder whole families.
If the word terrorism has any modern application, it is this industrial state terrorism.…
Only by recognizing the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however horrific, are tiny by comparison.
Moreover, their source is inevitably the official terrorism for which there is no media language.
Thus, the state of Israel has been able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of terrorism when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause of the infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide bombers.
For all of Israel’s perverse rage against the BBC — a successful form of intimidation — BBC reporters never report Israelis as terrorists: that term belongs exclusively to Palestinians imprisoned in their own land.
It is not surprising, as a recent Glasgow University study concluded, that many television viewers in Britain believe that the Palestinians are the invaders and occupiers.
On , Palestinian suicide bombers killed 16 Israelis in the town of Beersheba.
Every television news report allowed the Israeli government spokesman to use this tragedy to justify the building of an apartheid wall — when the wall is pivotal to the causes of Palestinian violence.
Almost every news report marked the end of of “relative peace and calm” and “a lull in the violence.”
During of relative peace and calm, almost 400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them in assassinations.
During the lull in the violence, more than 73 Palestinian children were killed.
A 13-year-old was murdered with a bullet through the heart, a five-year-old was shot in her face as she walked arm in arm with her two-year old-sister.
The body of Mazen Majid, aged 14, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets as he and his family fled their bulldozed home.
None of this was reported in Britain as terrorism.
Most of it was not reported at all.
After all, this was a period of peace and calm, a lull in the violence.
In How We Became Barbarians, Michael Neumann discusses the popularity of terrorism and how practices as barbaric as “ripping the flesh off children” for political or military aims have become so widely accepted in the civilized world.
Someone who can scarf popcorn all through both Kill Bills will go hoarse about the killing of innocents in Israel or Iraq or anywhere suitably distant.
Someone who’d cheer a B-52 strike on Baghdad will murmur feelingly about the perfect little hands of a second trimester fetus.
And everyone hates terrorism with a passion because it victimizes innocent people: that’s so outrageous!
Really the claptrap about terrorism has gone far enough.
Brutes should at least recognize their own brutality.
None of us, left, right, or center, are all that bothered about the deliberate killing of innocents.
Virtually none of us think it’s that big a deal to tear the flesh off a child.
I’m not being cynical.
There are some things that most people genuinely, sincerely abhor, important things like genocide and torture.
There has been real progress on these fronts.
That’s just why we should notice that, on the matter of ripping the flesh off children, we have regressed.
We weren’t always so vicious; at least we tried not to be.
Perhaps we will try again — but not until we realize how low we have sunk.
Neumann goes on to describe how reformers like Hugo Grotius started to develop standards that would protect the innocent during war.
“From Grotius’ time until sometime after the First World War, there was a gradual, unsteady progress away from killing innocent civilians.
Armies fought on battlefields; battlefields were more or less unpopulated.
Navies fought on the ocean.
Soldiers foraging for food and fuel might kill civilians, but this wasn’t considered acceptable.”
These standards were never universally accepted, but they did have some force, and became yardsticks by which a nation’s behavior (or the behavior of its rivals) was judged.
And we inherit some of this today.
The members of Saddam Hussein’s regime will be going on trial charged with violation of these standards.
But in fact, Neumann says, these codes of behavior more-or-less disintegrated with the evolution of aerial warfare.
“The world was shocked when, in , Nazi aircraft dropped 100,000 pounds of bombs on the Spanish town of Guernica, killing 1,500 people, about a third of the population.
This tender-heartedness did not survive the Second World War.”
Britain and the US decided that maybe bombing civilian populations into despondency wasn’t such a bad idea.
They bombed with enthusiasm.
Whether or not the casualty counts in Hamburg and Dresden have been exaggerated, no one denies that innocent civilians were in fact targeted.
This objective is implicit in the World War Ⅱ distinction between “strategic bombings,” which aimed to destroy defense industries and other military-related objectives, and “saturation bombings,” intended to level whole cities.
This was a decisive and fateful step away from Grotius’ not wholly unsuccessful attempts to humanize war.
The brutalization of attitudes towards attacks on civilians was and is quite universal.
We may deplore some such attacks, but not all of them.
We disagree, not about whether they are ever legitimate, but rather about whether they should be blatant.
Some think it’s ok to kill civilians as long as they’re not really your target.
Others think that they can be all or part of your target.
It’s the difference between dropping bombs you know will kill civilians and dropping bombs to kill civilians.
It’s not a very important disagreement and it’s not very important to those involved.
The victims’ suffering is just as great in either case, and the perpetrators seem able to live with their deeds.
Even those who moralize about saturation bombings don’t seem too upset.
Left-wing and liberal political writers sometimes speak of the stench of burning flesh in Dresden; they themselves give off more than a whiff of bad faith.
The bombing of Dresden has been in the public eye at least since Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was published in .
This was twenty-four years after , a time-span not considered too long for punishing child molesters.
If [that] attack was so criminal, where were the loud calls for the prosecution of those responsible?
Why didn’t we hear demands for a truth commission or day of atonement to commemorate the event?
Why has this crime evolved into nothing more than a shocker for occasional use in polemics about something else?
Only Nazi sympathizers have crusaded to bring the perpetrators to justice; others have kept their scruples to a murmur or a snide remark.
The plain truth is that there is, in our culture, no serious opposition to deliberate, direct mass killings of civilians.
The enemy, of course, must not attack innocents.
Our side must not do so if the attacks are ineffective or superfluous.
But no one says: even if these attacks saved thousands of our soldiers’ lives, we must renounce them.
And silence speaks volumes here: what we ignore, we permit.
I bring this up not as a war reformer, not as someone who thinks we need to adopt some code of conduct for engaging in war humanely.
I bring this up because so many Americans seem to feel that there is a code of conduct that prohibits the killing of civilians (which is what makes terrorism so evil in comparison) and that we do follow it.
They hear about civilian casualties and think they’re tangential mistakes, when in fact they’re an essential part of the package deal you get when you buy a war.
I wish there were a way to convince people of this truth: that when they say they’re in favor of the U.S. going to war over something that they’re saying they’re in favor of ripping the flesh off of children over it.
Today: a grab-bag of readings from around the web —
“We Don’t Need Them” by Joe Carpenter — “I’ve never understood the idea of speaking truth to power.
The truth, surely, is that in almost all countries of the world, political and economic systems are designed to benefit only the rich and powerful, at the expense of those with less money and power.
This is how the world works, and I see no reason to think that the powerful don’t already understand that.
After all, they designed it, they maintain it.… ¶ They are very few and we, here in the U.S. alone, are roughly three hundred million.
We don’t need to rush out to tell the few that they are abusing the many.
They already know that.
We need to stand upright and walk out to tell the many that they are being slowly devoured by the few, for — incredibly, they do not know.
We need to look to our next-door neighbors, and to their next door neighbors and to the folks all along the block.
We need to tell the truth to each other — for we are the answer.
Ben Tripp at Counterpunch tries to visualize the monetary cost of the war: “Every month, the United States spends enough money killing Arabs of various kinds so that, if we instead decided to paperclip all those dollars together, we could not only reach the moon, we could come all the way back again with another chain of dollars, and still have enough dollars left over to go all the way around the equator ($262,954,560) 3.8 times… And that is every month.
¶ …Where are all these dollars coming from?
You can’t slip that kind of loot out of mom’s purse.
These dollars are coming from foreign governments and financial institutions.
The USA has borrowed all this money from people that don’t even use dollars at home!
How many Chinese yuan does it take to reach the moon?
We’re about to find out.
Since G. W. Bush took office (and he did take it), his government has borrowed $1.05 trillion.
That is to say, over one thousand billion.
Remember how many a billion is?
$1.05 trillion is more than the total borrowed by every administration ($1.01 trillion).
The mind implodes.
Half of this nation’s debt in 224 years, the other half since Junior Bush got the top job.
Remember how far away the sun is?
We have spent enough dollars to get us all the way to the sun with plenty to spare for sunscreen.”
The news has lately been full of reports of U.S.-launched precision explosives being used in targeted strikes that destroyed homes and the families who lived in them.
First, a strike in Iraq that was designed to kill three people thought to have been planting roadside-bombs, but that for some reason didn’t hit until they had ducked into a home nearby the one that was actually destroyed by the missile strike.
And, more recently, a missile strike on a home in Pakistan that the U.S. hoped would take out Ayman al-Zawahiri, but instead seems to have yet again killed mostly women and children.
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve discussed the U.S. policy of launching airstrikes against civilian-occupied buildings in the hopes of assassinating “high-value targets” (and what a poor batting average they have when doing so):
and : “Human Rights Watch report that U.S. air strikes designed to assassinate top Iraqi leaders were utter failures — zero for fifty — and because they involved techniques like dropping ‘bunker busters’ on residential neighborhoods they caused many civilian casualties.”
: “It’s interesting to play with some thought experiments.
Imagine Saddam Hussein in a desk chair suspended by a rope above a volcano.
He’s up there, directing his regime via fax and email, safe in the knowledge that this is the last place the invaders will look for him.
But you’ve found him.
And you’ve got a pair of scissors.
And you see where the rope is tied off.
You go to drop the bastard, but you notice he’s got somebody else tied up and dangling from the bottom of the desk chair.
You don’t recognize this other person.
Maybe s/he’s a complete innocent — or maybe a P.O.W. Maybe there are five people dangling there — or fifty.
Maybe you do recognize this person and it’s someone you know.
Maybe it’s 1,000 uniformed draftees in Saddam’s army.
Maybe it’s your mom.
Maybe she’s holding a kitten.”
: “I continue to be struck by how people morally evaluate the killing of innocent people.
There’s an implicit heuristic at work that includes the race or nationality of the perpetrator and victim, whether or not that person was part of a uniformed and organized military force, how expensive and high-tech was the equipment used, and whether the perpetrator and victim might have been able to look each other in the eye.
I sometimes wish that this heuristic could be made explicit, because I think people would disavow much of it then.”
: “I saw a picture of an Iraqi child covered in burns from one of the bombings.
I think that the people who insisted that this child had to suffer in order to liberate Iraq would have gone through a different, more honest mental calculation if instead of deciding this a planet’s-width away from a child they’d never see, they decided it with the flamethrower in their hands and the child in front of them.
Maybe they’d decide the same way, but they’d decide knowing the real cost of their decisions.
I think if George Bush had to personally burn, dismember, and crush the victims of his war, he would lose the heart for it.
He would beg for excuses to try some other way with even more desperation than he in fact searched for reasons to go to war.
The gruesome technology that allows him and people like him to rain death on people from a distance shields them from seeing the consequences of their actions except as results that can fit into a framework preselected to exclude non-abstract considerations of human suffering.”
: “If you want to minimize casualties to civilians, you can start by not throwing explosives into the countries they live in.
Have you been keeping track of how many of our ‘precision’ weapons have missed the country of Iraq?
So far, I’ve read reports of these sophisticated devices hitting Turkey, the Persian Gulf, and Iran (not to mention the ones that took out a British bomber and a bus full of fleeing Syrians).
If you can’t even hit the country you’re aiming at, you sure as hell can’t be confident you’re going to hit the barracks instead of the elementary school.
And of course, even when they hit exactly what they intended to hit, what they intended to hit sometimes turns out to be a civilian bomb shelter or the Chinese embassy.”
: “One of the persistent myths about the recent Iraq war was that it was conducted by the U.S.-led coalition in a manner that was unusually sensitive to minimizing civilian casualties.… [T]he available data seem to show the opposite: the U.S. seems to be getting more and more reckless about civilian casualties over time.… ‘In this war in particular we see that improved capabilities in precision attacks have been used to pursue more ambitious objectives rather than achieve lower numbers of civilian dead.’ ”
: “The United States military said it dropped a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house outside the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, killing five people.
The man who owned the house said the bomb killed 14 people, and an Associated Press photographer said seven of them were children.… ‘The house was not the intended target for the airstrike.
The intended target was another location nearby,’ the military said in a statement.… ‘Multi-National Force Iraq deeply regrets the loss of possibly innocent lives,’ the statement said.”
Just in case you thought the U.S. had decided to sit back and let Iraqis do all of the Iraqi-killing:
A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year.
Knight Ridder’s statistical findings were reviewed and confirmed by American Air Force officials in the region.
The numbers also show that U.S. forces dropped bombs on more cities during than they did during the same period a year ago.
Airstrikes hit at least 11 cities , but were mostly concentrated in and around the western city of Fallujah.
, U.S. warplanes struck at least 22 cities during .
Not great news, but it is nice to see some actual journalism on the wires…
A few miscellaneous things that caught my eye recently:
How astonishing are the budgetary numbers?
Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades.
, defense spending actually fell significantly.
In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon’s budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in , to a low of $265 billion in .
(That compares to wartime highs of $437 billion in , during the Korean War, and $388 billion in , at the peak of the War in Vietnam.)
After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, decline wasn’t exactly the hoped-for “peace dividend,” but it wasn’t peanuts either.
However, , defense spending has simply exploded.
For , the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in .
Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing “Global War on Terrorism” — which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — for , the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion.
In other words, even without the President’s two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since .
How are all these children being killed by militaries that insist they’re doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties?
That’s right — it’s the enemy’s fault: they’re using children as “human shields”
One miguelbar on MetaFilter pointed to this quote from the Wall Street Journal to show how human shields work:
A little over a week later, 34 children were killed by car bombs while U.S. soldiers handed out candy at the reopening of a sewage treatment plant in Baghdad.
In , Jesse Beaudin wrote me to dispute the accuracy of this report and the implications I drew from it.
The following year, Nick Ayers also wrote me with his story.
Please see The Picket Line for and for for follow-up articles.
Back in I wrote a short piece for The Picket Line that compared some then-recent press coverage of civilian casualties and “human shields.”
I’ve since exchanged some emails with an Army Captain whom I quoted, who tells me I’ve got the wrong idea.
In combat, one tactic used to prevent the enemy from successfully attacking what you don’t want them to attack is to increase the risk that such an attack will include collateral damage that is unacceptable to the enemy.
For instance, you could set up your prisoner of war camp adjacent to your command bunker so that if the enemy tried to bomb the latter, they’d risk killing some of their own soldiers who are imprisoned in the former.
Or you could set up your anti-aircraft batteries next to some national monument that is held sacred or valuable by both parties to the conflict so that the enemy would be reluctant to bomb it.
That sort of thing.
One approach sometimes taken is to surround targets with noncombatants so that an attack risks killing many civilians — either to reduce the likelihood of an attack or to increase the propaganda value of one.
This sort of thing is illegal under the laws of war, to the extent that anyone takes that sort of thing seriously.
For instance, Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention says:
The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.
And a commentary on this provision states:
During the last World War public opinion was shocked by certain instances (fortunately rare) of belligerents compelling civilians to remain in places of strategic importance (such as railway stations, viaducts, dams, power stations or factories), or to accompany military convoys, or again, to serve as a protective screen for the fighting troops.
Such practices, the object of which is to divert enemy fire, have rightly been condemned as cruel and barbaric…
In order to determine the exact scope of the provision, it is necessary to define the term “military operations”.
Those words refer here to any acts of warfare committed by the enemy’s land, air or sea forces, whether it is a matter of bombing or bombardments of any kind or of attacks by units near at hand.
It also covers acts of War by groups, such as volunteer corps and resistance movements, which are placed in the same category as the regular armed forces….
The prohibition is expressed in an absolute form and applies to the belligerents’ own territory as well as to occupied territory, to small sites as well as to wide areas.
The prohibition expressed in this Article also occurs in Article 83… which lays down that places of internment for civilians are not to be set up in areas particularly exposed to the dangers of War.
The United States has frequently accused its enemies of using “human shields” in violation of the laws of war and of honorable behavior.
Frequently this accusation comes after the United States kills a lot of civilians in an attack.
A spokesperson then insists that the United States military was properly engaging the enemy, but that the enemy had contrived to hide among civilians or herd civilians into the line of fire in order to discourage an attack or make the consequences of an attack useful for propaganda purposes.
In some circumstances, this may be accurate, but it usually strikes me as disingenuous.
Bombing attacks in urban areas are frequently going to result in civilian casualties, and it’s no use to complain that the guerrillas you were trying to bomb wouldn’t assemble in some open area away from people so that you could bomb them more easily.
And the United States itself is no great respecter of the Fourth Convention.
For instance, as Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch point out in a fascinating article about Abu Ghraib in the latest New Yorker, that as a “place of internment for civilians” (including children being held to flush out or intimidate their parents — another violation of those alleged laws of war) that camp was “set up in [an area] particularly exposed to the dangers of War” including frequent mortar attacks that killed internees.
In that Picket Line piece I wrote in , I also noted that there seemed to be evidence that the U.S. military was deliberately using human shields to deter attacks.
I quoted from a Wall Street Journal article by reporter Greg Jaffe in which he reported on how junior officers in the U.S. Army in Iraq are innovating new tactics in response to the challenges of urban guerrilla warfare, focusing on the example of Captain Nicholas Ayers.
The paragraph I quoted from the article read:
Capt. Ayers took lessons from his fellow captains.
In , Capt. Jesse Beaudin convinced a friend from the U.S. to send backpacks, notebooks and pencils for schoolchildren.
Kids mobbed troops for the goods whenever they went out on patrol.
“The kids provided security.
No one attacked us when we were surrounded by children,” Capt. Beaudin says.
After hearing about this tactic at the dining hall, Capt. Ayers’s men also wrote home requesting school supplies.
I added:
A little over a week later, 34 children were killed by car bombs while U.S. soldiers handed out candy at the reopening of a sewage treatment plant in Baghdad.
(Several months after that there was another case in which 24 children were killed when a suicide car bomber hit U.S. soldiers who had come to an Iraqi neighborhood to warn residents of possible car bomb attacks in the area and who then began to hand out candies to children.)
While I was away on vacation last month, I got an email from Jesse Beaudin, and we have exchanged several emails since.
He tells me I have drawn an incorrect conclusion from what was quoted in Greg Jaffe’s article.
He was unwilling to let me quote directly from his emails to me, but the gist of what he has to say is as follows:
If Iraqis did not attack Beaudin’s platoon it was because the platoon was doing important and beneficial work in the community and the Iraqis were grateful for this.
His troops handed out school supplies in schools, not when they were conducting combat patrols.
The schools were indoors and were surrounded by security, so there were no mobs of children surrounding troops in the open.
At other times and in other contexts the platoon handed out things like food, soccer balls, medical supplies, toothbrushes, and propaganda.
It was not unusual for Beaudin’s troops to be swarmed by children or other curious civilians while out on patrol, but they did not encourage this, and sometimes actively discouraged it.
They would sometimes patrol through crowded areas like marketplaces, but the crowds were incidental to the mission and were not being used as cover.
Beaudin and his men frequently met with Iraqis in a number of contexts, but at no time did they intend in these encounters to be using the Iraqis they met as human shields.
Greg Jaffe is the only Wall Street Journal reporter Beaudin has spoken with (and this was for a different article), and Beaudin says that Jaffe told him that Jaffe did not write the part of the article that I quoted that quotes Beaudin.
Furthermore, Beaudin did not deliver the quote attributed to him directly to any reporter, but it has been reported second-hand.
Beaudin shared with me a email to him from Jaffe in which Jaffe agreed that the implication that Beaudin was using children as human shields was incorrect.
(I’ve contacted Jaffe to ask him to comment directly on this, but he has not yet responded.)
Beaudin was in a different unit from Nicholas Ayers and never spoke with him about operations, and never spoke to any of the men in Ayers’s unit.
But in any case, Beaudin thinks it unlikely that Ayers would use children as human shields.
In , Nick Ayers wrote me to tell his side of the story.
I also eventually got some limited feedback from Greg Jaffe.
Please see The Picket Line for for a follow-up article.
Ann Wright, at truthout, notes that U.S. soldiers who have refused to serve in Iraq have received more severe punishment than those who participated in the murder of Iraqis (in those few cases when such killings result in punishment of any kind).
Capt. Ayers took lessons from his fellow captains.
In , Capt. Jesse Beaudin convinced a friend from the U.S. to send backpacks, notebooks and pencils for schoolchildren.
Kids mobbed troops for the goods whenever they went out on patrol.
“The kids provided security.
No one attacked us when we were surrounded by children,” Capt. Beaudin says.
After hearing about this tactic at the dining hall, Capt. Ayers’s men also wrote home requesting school supplies.
I compared this tactic to the accusations by U.S. military spokespersons that civilian casualties caused by U.S. attacks were the consequence of its enemies unscrupulously using the civilian population as “human shields.”
I noted that a little over a week after this article appeared, 34 children were killed in a car bomb attack on U.S. soldiers who were handing out candy to children in Baghdad.
, Jesse Beaudin wrote to me to give his side of the story.
As I wrote in a follow-up article here, Beaudin told me that Jaffe’s article gives the wrong impression, and that his troops did not use Iraqi civilians as human shields.
He also said that he had never spoken to Ayers or to the men in Ayers’s unit about operations, and that he had only spoken to Jaffe on one occasion and that Jaffe later told him that he had not written the part of the article in question that appeared under his by-line in which Beaudin’s quote that I reproduced above appeared.
I’ve tried to get Jaffe to tell me whether he stands by the article as-is or whether that part of the article was inserted by someone else or was edited in a misleading fashion.
After multiple attempts to reach him, he sent me an email telling me curtly that he was upset that I had used a quote from his article in a way that he felt was out-of-context in order to advance an agenda.
He did not address any of my specific questions, and did not respond to further emails.
Beaudin did, however, send me a copy of an email he had received from Jaffe.
That email seems to contradict the suggestion that Jaffe did not write the paragraph in question.
Also in the same email Jaffe recharacterizes the tone of the paragraph from his article, asserting that it merely noted that Beaudin handed out gifts to children in order to promote goodwill and that Beaudin noticed that this seemed to result in fewer attacks in areas in which his troops did this.
I think this is a dishonest whitewashing of what the paragraph actually says.
I also think that the charge that I quoted from his article in a misleading out-of-context manner is dishonest.
You can read Jaffe’s article on-line if you’d like the context, but I think you’ll find that none of that context makes a difference to the characterization of the tactic Jaffe describes as being like the use of “human shields.”
Whether that tactic was accurately described in Jaffe’s report is another matter.
Beaudin vigorously denied to me that it was, and a couple of days ago I was also contacted by Nicholas Ayers, who gave me his side of the story.
He gave me permission to quote this section from his emails to me:
With regards to a posting concerning an article by Greg Jaffe (WSJ, ), I wanted to reinforce comments by Jesse Beaudin, especially since Greg’s article may have gave readers a false impression that units were actively using Iraqi children as shields.
Jesse and I were in different sectors and although I knew Jesse, we didn’t discuss these sorts of practices.
We did provide some supplies to children, but this was not connected in any way to trying to use them as shields.
We took great care in trying to protect the local citizens and being an officer and a father of 3, I would never have done anything that would put children in danger.
I think the comment during the interview with Greg was something like, “We’ve noticed that when the kids start going inside or can’t be found, there is probably an attack going to occur,” … and then at another point in the conversation telling him that we have provided school supplies to children.
I don’t think Greg was trying to insinuate the use of “shields,” but I can see why, from the article, someone would have gotten that impression.
Anyway, Jesse is 100% correct in what he said and I know Jesse and he would never have put any children in danger.
I know the area that he was assigned to and it was a very difficult and challenging situation.
Jesse did a great job there and really did great deal to try to build a healthy and cooperative relationship between his unit and the local populace.
I hope this helps to clarify it.
I’ve been misquoted enough times by the media that this all sounds plausible enough to me.
Reporters have a way of cobbling together quotes and anecdotes Frankenstein’s-monster-style in such a way that their stories stitch together well but don’t always much resemble reality.
Both of the officers in Jaffe’s account have denied the implication of the quote attributed to Beaudin, and so that part of the story doesn’t have much left to stand on except for Jaffe’s original telling, which he seems reluctant to forthrightly defend.
On the other hand, there did seem to be a number of tragic episodes in which members of the U.S. military ventured into hostile territory, surrounded themselves with children by handing out gifts, and then were attacked.
In one case, they were in a neighborhood warning people about the likelihood of car bomb attacks when they attracted a crowd of children in this way and then were hit by a car bomb — 24 of the children were killed.
It still seems possible to me that innovative junior officers like the ones Jaffe describes were creatively trying a variety of tactics to try to keep their troops safe and their missions effective, that they stumbled on the tactic of discouraging attacks by encouraging children to flock around them, and that only some time later — perhaps after news of this tactic hit the press — did it occur to them that they had inadvertently reinvented a war crime.
So they then disavowed it and discontinued it.
This is a plausible, if not particularly generous, interpretation of the available facts.
Luckily in this particular case we’re privileged to have some feedback directly from the officers in the field that helps us see a little further beyond what makes the papers.
In any case, it’s heartening — especially in a day in which when White House officials were accused of ordering torture, some people were less concerned with denying the charges than with defending torture — that members of the armed forces have gone out of their way to defend themselves on an obscure blog from a newspaper account that they may have participated in a Geneva Conventions violation.
Whether Jaffe’s Wall Street Journal account was accurate, exaggerated, or totally off-the-mark, both of the people mentioned in the account considered it an insult to their honor in need of correction, and that’s good news.
Had Nidal Malik Hasan been launched from a remotely-piloted Predator drone into a Pakistani funeral procession, it would have been a bold victory in the War on Terror; had the major been dropped onto a village in Waziristan or fired into an Afghan wedding party, it would have represented an efficient and effective display of tactical military superiority; had he exploded in a shower of cluster bomblets over a Gaza refugee camp or been dispersed in a cloud of corrosive gas through an Iraqi city, we could all celebrate this triumph of American technical ingenuity over the forces of barbarism.
Instead, Major Hasan will be tragically remembered as a piece of prematurely detonated ordnance, accidentally claiming the lives of people rather than those of numbers.
You may remember , when a NATO helicopter crew in Afghanistan attacked ten children, ages 9 to 15, who were out collecting firewood, and successfully killed all but one of them.
Or you may not have heard of it. It made the Times, but from my friends and relations I heard nothing about it but plenty of allusions to something or other that Charlie Sheen said.
The gunners mistook the children for Taliban belligerents, which was easy for them to do while following the modern superpower modus operandi of killing people from as far away as possible — continents away if need be — so that you don’t have to take any unnecessary risks yourself, but you instead can pass the unnecessary risks on to children collecting firewood and other such unimportant people.
This is the sort of courageous warrior virtue we have in mind when we “support the troops.”
Not all NATO troops are bad.
One of them, Bradley Manning, reformed and took a serious turn for the good.
He thought that maybe it was because the American public was unaware of the repulsive acts of its government’s military that they permit it to continue.
So he leaked the Collateral Murder video, which was taken from an Apache helicopter while its crew were killing children and journalists, and, if reports are true, also leaked many diplomatic cables detailing shenanigans of the U.S. government and various foreign officials it has rented.
Manning may have been too optimistic about the possibility that sunlight would prove a potent disinfectant of the American soul, but his heart was in the right place, and he showed admirable courage and initiative — no drone pilot he.
The powers that be are furious, and they have decided to hit him with the full force of American justice, which, if you have been paying attention these last several years, you will know means taking someone captive and tormenting them heartlessly and ruthlessly in the hopes of utterly breaking them, while saving anything like a “trial” in the formal sense for some far off future when the damage has already been done.
Certainly some of this is just from a sadistic desire to hurt Manning, and to break him and turn him against those who helped him get the word out.
But much of it is also a tactic designed to discourage other whistleblowers and dissenters:
Screw with us and we’ll make your life a living hell and no law or lawyer or code of honor or sense of decency will stand between you and our wrath.
Some adorably civic-minded dolts in the United States actually voluntarily
donate money to the government in order to reduce the federal government’s
debt — amounting to a couple of million dollars a year (in the
neighborhood of one one-millionth of the total officially-acknowledged
debt, or one percent of one day’s worth of interest on that
debt). You can find instructions on how to do this in your 1040
instruction booklet, under the title “Gift To Reduce Debt Held by the
Public,” and you’d do this by sending a check to “Bureau of the Public
Debt.” You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
contributions to that fund do not, however, go to pay off the debt,
but are just lumped in with all other contributions to the general fund
to swell the purse that Congress overspends from.
CIA
agents went undercover in Pakistan on a fake vaccination campaign in order
to collect intelligence during their campaign to target Osama Bin Laden.
Tom Scocca explains how this recklessly puts real health workers at risk.
“[T]he single act is a metonym for the total moral collapse of the people
and the system responsible for it… The anonymous official [who justified
the program] was not merely describing the thought processes behind one
immoral, ineffective, and destructive stunt. The same people, thinking the
same way, have been making decisions about life and death — mostly death — all over the world.”
Squabbling in Congress has meant that they have failed to renew
many excise taxes on air travel.
So, temporarily anyway, you can fly in the
U.S. without
paying these taxes (certain other federal taxes still apply).
Fred Reed contemplates disengagement, or “domestic expatriation — the recognition that living in a country makes you a resident, not a subscriber.”
A group of anti-war veterans has launched a campaign to try to convince drone operators, who are raining death on people around the world from the comfort of their cubicles at places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, and Beale Air Force Base in California, to abandon their posts.
The stress apparently comes in part from what was supposed to be one of the benefits of the job: being stationed far from the battlefield and close to home.
Drone operators report difficulty going from killing people in their day job to trying to act like civil people in ordinary life.
It’s like the stress of reentering civilian life from combat that is such a staple of past wars, but on a daily basis instead of all at once.
A Defense Department study in 2013, the first of its kind, found that drone pilots had experienced mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
