A lesson in 'disappearing the
dead' By David Isenberg
When
planning war, military officials have various targets:
enemy combatants, their support forces, the surrounding
civilian population, and their national infrastructure.
But there are other targets as well, although these are
not always discussed publicly. Among the most important
of these is public opinion, both the world at large, and
the highest priority - that of their own public. This
holds true especially in a democracy, when one is
fighting a war of choice - as in invading another
country - instead of fighting a war of national
survival.
In such wars, issues like human rights
and civilian casualties loom larger. Since such
casualties are inevitable, special pains must be taken
to explain them away. But how to do so?
In a
word, spin. Such is the conclusion of a just-released
monograph, "Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan and
the Idea of a New Warfare" by Carl Conetta of the
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Project on Defense
Alternatives (PDA).
Of course, the idea of
shaping public opinion is hardly new. For example, a
1975 study by the Congressional Research Service, a
division of the Library of Congress, in analyzing
possible United States takeovers of Persian Gulf oil
fields, wrote: "The administration, Congress, or both -
assisted by the mass media - could take steps to sway
public opinion one way or another if they believed it
advisable."
But the PDA documents how the Bush
administration has taken spin to a new level. It notes
that increased international and domestic attention to
the collateral effects of military operations has been a
persistent concern of the US defense community since the
Vietnam War. And thus has it taken significant steps to
minimize that concern. The "US Defense Department, State
Department and White House conducted large-scale
perception management" or "strategic influence"
campaigns in support of Operations Enduring Freedom and
Iraqi Freedom, as well as in support of the broader "war
on terrorism" according to the PDA study.
One of
the Iraqi war incidents analyzed by the PDA was two
market bombings in Baghdad that together claimed more
than 70 lives early in the war. US and British
authorities quickly suggested that these might have been
the result of Iraqi air defense missiles falling back to
the ground.
But this was an unlikely scenario,
according to the PDA study, for two reasons: the
relative numbers of suitable weapons used by the two
sides in Baghdad, and the attack vectors and performance
characteristics of these weapons. In regard to the first
point, coalition air-to-surface weapons outnumbered
Iraqi surface-to-air missiles by a ratio as large as
six-to-one. Second, minor errors and inaccuracies - even
standard ones - in the delivery of air-to-surface
missiles could have produced the market attacks. The PDA
study states: "Shooting downward into thickly populated
areas is simply a very dangerous and demanding endeavor.
By contrast, for an air defense system to have been at
fault would have required a string of errors and
failures - some catastrophic - in the employment,
performance, and functioning of both the system and its
failsafe mechanisms."
Nevertheless, US and
British officials kept making this claim even after a
British reporter found and confirmed that debris from
the second marketplace bombing came from a US HARM
anti-radar missile.
Of course, such implausible
claims could not have flourished without a complicit
partner, the media. The PDA study states: "Spin is a
form of misdirection on emphasizing the minor aspects of
an event or promoting a tendentious or idiosyncratic
interpretation of it - one that favors one's own
interest. However, for spin to work, there must be a
media willing to 'take the pitch' (so to speak), rather
than letting it fall flat. With regard to the
marketplace bombings; the news media's willingness to
adopt the uncertainty frame and give the coalition 'the
benefit of the doubt' divided along predictable lines.
While the marketplace bombings reverberated loudly in
the Muslim and Arab worlds, the story has no 'legs' in
the United States and only short ones in Britain."
Another tactic used by the Pentagon was what the
study calls "lawfare"; the manipulation of both public
perceptions and international law that aims to create or
reinforce the impression that one's opponent is
violating either the letter or spirit of the law. The
goal is to undermine international and domestic support
for the opponent's actions or causes.
A case in
point was the US-British framing of the Baghdad "shock
and awe" air campaign. At the same time that coalition
forces were bombing the city, they also complained about
the legality of Iraq's placement of air defense systems
in and around residential and industrial areas of the
city. In this "the coalition's case [regarding] air
defense was overstated", according to the PDA study. "It
implied strictures that would have precluded any
adequate air defense of the city - an outcome not
consonant with the intent of international law. In fact
it is not uniformly illegal to operate in or near
civilian areas if such operations are militarily
necessary. For better or worse, international law gives
wide berth to military necessity."
Particularly
questionable were coalition complaints about Iraq
placing air defense systems within 300 feet of
residences. In fact there is no international law or
rule of warfare that prevents that. Reached by phone,
the study author, Carl Conetta said "their rhetoric
implies that unless you place your systems at a distance
from a target we chose to hit, that won't hit anyone,
it's illegal. It's a typically Orwellian
approach."
But these issues represented ad hoc
attempts at perception management in the view of the PDA
study. The Pentagon also put forward broader ideas to
help frame the view of its conduct of warfare. Most
important was the concept, which had arisen before the
Bush administration took office, was the idea of a "new
warfare". This has four distinct subsets:
US precision attack capabilities have revolutionized
warfare making it possible to wage war with greatly
reduced casualties and reduced damage.
US armed forces go to extraordinary lengths to limit
collateral damage and civilian casualties and are doing
more than anyone has done before.
The number of war casualties cannot be known with
certainty.
The number of casualties is not especially
meaningful in assessing the success or progress of a war
effort.
But these claims are both deceptive and
meaningless. The standards on which expectations about
the "new warfare" are based - weapons precision and care
in targeting - do not reflect actual casualty and damage
outcomes on the battlefield. The basis for making such
claims is the technical performance of the weapons, such
as their circular error probable (CEP), which is the
radius of a circle centered on an aim point within which
some percentage, usually 50 percent, of weapons fired at
the aim point will fall. But this only measures the
relationship between the aim points and impact points as
determined in controlled tests, not the battlefield
reality.
The study notes that the ease with
which public discourse has adopted the language and
frame of "precision warfare" is surprising. As noted
above, just a few years ago military professionals would
not have described most of the guided weapons used in
the Iraq war as "precision" instruments, reserving this
adjective instead for systems with a CEP of three meters
or less. Common, civilian usage of the term "precision"
is even more restrictive. Not many practices in civilian
life that routinely miss their mark by 20 to 40 feet
would be considered "precise" - and especially not those
involving the use of hundreds or thousands of pounds of
high-explosives: That the expenditure of six kilotons of
explosives in aerial attacks (and more than this in
ground attacks), some involving guided weapons and some
not, should gain the moniker of "precision warfare"
reflects a singular triumph in branding.
It is
little appreciated that "precision" weapons are not
error-free. Many of them have inherent errors in the
sense that they reflect limitations in the systems
employed that cannot be removed without improving or
changing the systems. Beyond that other factors
contribute to errors, such as bad intelligence,
including intentional deception by allies; mechanical or
electrical malfunctions in guidance, navigation, flight
control or bomb release systems; human error on the part
of pilots or ground controllers; and unexpected or
severe weather conditions.
Furthermore, even if
weapons work perfectly they are still likely to cause
damage simply due to their destructive power. This is
because they carry hundreds of pounds of enhanced
high-explosives wrapped in hundreds of pounds of steel.
Most everything will be severely killed, damaged or
destroyed within 20 meters of a 500-pound bomb blast and
35 meters of a 2,000 lb blast.
Weapons
performance and procedures for limiting collateral
damage are only two variables in a complex equation.
Other more important factors are operational plans and
methods, which determine the types of missions that will
be attempted; political-strategic factors, which include
the goals for which a war is fought; and issues of
national strategy, which determine the role of force in
a nation's foreign policy.
These facts, despite
precision attack capabilities and specific targeting
procedures, help explain why US military operations have
claimed the lives of 50,000 people worldwide (combatants
and non-combatants) during the age of precision warfare
(beginning with Desert Storm in 1991, while during the
preceding 14 years overt US operations claimed the lives
of approximately 2,000 people).
In fact the goal
of limiting civilian casualties has not been met. The
PDA study notes that the non-combatant fatalities during
the one month of major combat operations in Iraq last
year actually outnumbers those suffered during the three
years of the ongoing intifada by the Palestinians
against the Israelis.
Insofar as the claim by
the US that civilian casualties cannot be known, the
study calls it "casualty agnosticism". It found that the
US administration distorted the casualty issue by
depreciating the value of information flow from recent
battlefields, categorically dismissing hundreds of
detailed casualty reports and positing an unnecessarily
high standard for what constitutes a useful degree of
precision in aggregate casualty estimates.
In
regards to that standard, the study noted: "The
proposition that it is impossible to calculate a
casualty figure that is both absolutely certain and
exact is true. True but facile. This truth holds not
only for the Afghan and Iraq conflicts but for all wars
and genocides. No one has individually counted and
verified all the victims of the Cambodian and Rwandan
genocides, for instance, much less the victims of the
World Wars or the Indochina conflicts. Nonetheless, we
accept some of the casualty estimates associated with
these events as sufficiently accurate and precise to
usefully inform policy."
In fact, the flow of
open sources of information from the battlefield has
never been richer than in the Afghan and Iraq conflicts.
These were the most intensively reported wars in
history.
The study concludes that the
administration's perception management efforts can only
impede a full appreciation of the war's blood cost and
its repercussions, thus making a dispassionate
assessment of the war option more difficult. Bottom
line, "The efforts were antithetical both to
well-informed public debate and to sensible
policy-making."
David Isenberg, a
senior analyst with the Washington-based British
American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a
wide background in arms control and national security
issues. The views expressed are his own.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
