A Formula for Slaughter
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The second principle also was applied in Baiji. Rather than allow the perpetrators to take refuge in a nearby home and then quietly slip away, the U.S. command decided to take out the house, even though they had no guarantee that it was uninhabited (and every reason to believe the opposite). The paramount goal was to kill or capture the suspected guerrilla fighters, and if this involved the death or injury of multiple Iraqi civilians, the trade-off was clearly considered worth it. That is, annihilating a family of 12 or 14 Iraqis could be justified, if there was a reasonable probability of killing or capturing three individuals who might have been setting a roadside bomb. This is the subtext of Lt. Colonel Johnson's comment.
The third principle behind these attacks is only occasionally expressed by U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, but is nevertheless a foundation of American strategy as applied in Baiji and elsewhere. Though Bush administration officials and top U.S. military officers often, for propaganda purposes, refer to local residents as innocent victims of insurgent intimidation and terrorism, their disregard for the lives of civilians trapped inside such buildings is symptomatic of a very different belief: that most Sunni Iraqis willingly harbor the guerrillas and support their attacks -- that they are not unwilling shields for the guerrillas, but are actively shielding them. Moreover, this protection of the guerrillas is seen as a critical obstacle to our military success, requiring drastic punitive action.
As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which U.S. military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating." A Marine calling-in to a radio talk show recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their house."
This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism -- attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever American troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.
Escalating the War Against Iraqi Civilians
Baiji, a loosely settled village, is not typical of the locations where American air power is regularly loosed. In Iraq's densely packed cities, where much fighting takes place, buildings usually house several families with other multiple-occupancy dwellings adjacent. Moreover, city battles often involve larger units of guerrillas, who ambush U.S. patrols and then disperse into several nearby dwellings, or snipers shooting from several locations. As a consequence, when U.S. F-14s, helicopter gunships, or other types of aircraft arrive, their targets are larger and more dispersed. Liquidating guerrillas can then require the "precise" leveling several buildings (with "collateral damage"), or even a whole city block. Instead of 100 cannon rounds and one five hundred pound bomb, such an attack can (and often does) involve several thousand cannon rounds and a combination of 500 and 2000 pound bombs.
Needless to say, the casualties in such attacks are likely to be magnitudes greater, though we hardly read about them in the American press, since reporters working for American newspapers are rarely present before, during, or after the attack. This has started to change since "Up in the Air," a New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh garnered much attention for outlining a Bush administration draw-down strategy in which air attacks are to be increasingly relied upon. One particularly vivid recent account by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer discussed the impact of air power during the American offensive in Western Anbar province last November. Using testimony from medical personnel and local civilians, Knickmeyer reported that 97 civilians were killed in one attack in Husaybah, 40 in another in Qaimone, 18 children (and an unknown number of adults) in Ramadi, and uncounted others in numerous other cities and towns. (The U.S. military typically denied knowledge of these casualties.) All of these resulted from the same logic and the same rules of engagement as the Baiji attack and in most cases the attacks seem to have been chosen in place of mounting ground assaults. In each case, "precision guided munitions" were used, and -- for the most part, as far as we can tell -- American forces destroyed mainly the targets they intended to hit. In other words, this mayhem was not a matter of dumb munitions, human error, carelessness, or gratuitous brutality. It was policy.
These same principles apply to all engagements undertaken by the U.S. military. There are about 100 violent encounters with guerrillas each day, or about 3,000 engagements each month, most of them triggered by IEDs, sniper fire, or low-level hit-and-run attacks. (Only a relative handful of these -- never more than 100 in a month and recently far fewer -- involve suicide bombers). The rules of engagement call for the application of overwhelming force in all these situations. The hiding places of the attackers -- houses, commercial shops, even mosques and schools -- essentially become automatic targets for attack. For the most part, rifles, tanks, and artillery are sufficient to eradicate the enemy, and air power is only called in as a last resort (though with a recent surge in air missions reported, that "last resort" is evidently becoming an ever more ordinary option). Instead of body counts ranging as high as 100 per incident, only a small minority of these daily engagements produce double-digit mortality rates. Nevertheless, the 3,000 small monthly engagements often involve attacking structures with civilians in them, and the lethality of these battles, combined with the havoc and destruction wrought by the air attacks, does add up to possibly thousands and thousands of civilian deaths each year.
Seymour Hersh's article made the new Bush administration policy of relying on air power public. It involves, in the near future, substituting Iraqi for U.S. foot patrols as often as possible (which means an instant drop in the quality of the soldiering involved); and, since the Iraqi military do not have tanks, artillery, or other heavy weaponry, the U.S. plans to compensate both for weaker fighting outfits and lack of on-the-ground firepower by increasing its use of air strikes. In other words, in the coming months those 3,000 encounters a month are likely to produce even more victims than the already staggering civilian casualty rates in Iraq. Each incident that previously might have killed a few civilians will now be likely to kill many more.
The Washington Post, along with other major American media outlets, has confirmed that a new military strategy is being put in place and implemented. Quoting military sources, the Post reported that the number of U.S. air strikes increased from an average of 25 per month during the Summer of 2005, to 62 in September, 122 in October, and 120 in November. The Sunday Times of London reports that, in the near future, these are expected to increase to at least 150 per month and that the numbers will continue to climb past that threshold.
Consider then this gruesome arithmetic: If the U.S. fulfills its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.
The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.
Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.com, with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.
