A little more than a year ago, a group of
Johns Hopkins University 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 US 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
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 US government and supporters of the war.
This dismissal was hardly surprising, but
after a brief flurry of protest, even the anti-war
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 Fallujah,
these sorts of high-profile events have simply not
occurred in Iraq.
Mayhem in Baiji But the Iraq war is a 21st-century war
and so the miracle of modern weaponry allows
the US 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 US foot patrols.
Early this month, the New York Times and
the Washington Post reported a relatively small
incident (not even worthy of front-page coverage)
that illustrated perfectly the capacity of the US
military to kill uncounted thousands of Iraqi
civilians each year.
Here is
the Times account of what happened on January 3 in
the small town of Baiji, 240 kilometers north of Baghdad, based
on interviews with various unidentified "American
officials":
A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft
detected three men planting a roadside bomb
about 9pm. 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-14s 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 US 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 US military strategy in Iraq.
The target was a "building
nearby", identified by a drone aircraft as an enemy
hiding place. According to witness reports given
to the Washington Post, the attack in
effect demolished the building, and damaged six
surrounding buildings. While in a perfect world,
the surrounding buildings would have been
undamaged, the reported human casualties 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 14 members of the
family were in the house at the time of the attack
and nine were killed. The Washington Post, which
reported 12 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 US air power uses "precisely guided
munitions" - there was on-the-spot reporting for a
US newspaper, the military command was
required to explain these casualties. Without
conceding that the deaths actually occurred,
Lieutenant-Colonel 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 Johnson (while not admitting that
civilians had actually died) did assert US 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 US 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, back doors, 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 a police force in some large
US city. Imagine, for example, a team of criminals
in that city fleeing into a nearby apartment
building after gunning down a police officer.
It would be unthinkable for the police simply to
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 US citizens over our determination
to capture a criminal, even a cop-killer.
But in Iraqi cities, US 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 US 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 continuing 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 such as 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 administration of President George W
Bush 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 US 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 US 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 Johnson's comment.
The third principle behind these
attacks is only occasionally expressed by US military
and diplomatic personnel, but is nevertheless
a foundation of US strategy as applied in
Baiji and elsewhere. Though Bush administration
officials and top US 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 US 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 US 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
US air power is regularly used. 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 US patrols and then
disperse into several nearby dwellings, or snipers
shooting from several locations.
As a
consequence, when US 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 of several
buildings (with "collateral damage"), or even a
whole city block. Instead of 100 cannon rounds and
one 500-pound (227-kilogram) bomb, such an
attack can (and often does) involve several
thousand cannon rounds and a combination of 500-
and 2,000-pound (907kg) bombs.
Needless to say, the casualties
in such attacks are likely to be
magnitudes greater, though we hardly read about them in
the US press, since reporters working for US
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
US 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 US
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 - US 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 US military. There are about 100
violent encounters with guerrillas each day, or
about 3,000 engagements each month, most of them
triggered by IEDs (improvised explosive devices or
booby traps), 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 -
in essence 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.
Hersh's article
made public the new Bush administration policy of
relying on air power. It involves, in the near
future, substituting Iraqi for US foot patrols as
often as possible (which means an instant drop in
the quality of the soldiering involved); and,
since the Iraqi military does not have tanks,
artillery or other heavy weaponry, the US 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 US 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 US air strikes
increased from an average of 25 per month during
the summer, 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 US 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 US 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 US
business and government dynamics. His books
include
Radical Politics and Social Structure and
Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda
(edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail address
isMs42@optonline.net
.
