[News] Formula for Slaughter

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=48180

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Iraq as a Killing Ground

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 of 
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 Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the 
Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is 
Ms42 at optonline.net.

Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz

Thanks to Frank C
http://www.humboldt.net/~fcieciorka


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