Dec 11 CSM column now on web

My latest Christian Science Monitor column is now up on the CSM website. You can read it here.
It’s titled ‘Made in Israel’ crackdowns in Iraq won’t work, and it starts:

    In recent weeks, many US military units in Iraq have turned from trying to win Iraqi “hearts and minds” to a “get tough” policy that explicitly copies many moves from the playbook used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the West Bank and Gaza. These moves include demolition of homes of suspects, imposition of stifling movement controls and other collective punishments on civilians, and the frequent use of excessive force.
    Tactics like these are unethical under any moral code, and illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In addition, their adoption is shortsighted. In Israel itself, many leading strategic thinkers now openly admit that the IDF’s three-year-long pursuit of these tactics has still not “convinced” the Palestinians to end their defiance of Israel’s will.
    (It is also tragic that US commanders moved to these antihumanitarian and antidemocratic measures at the same time President Bush issued his call for the spread of democracy throughout the Arab world.)

Actually, I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. I make a bunch of other important points in there, too.

22 thoughts on “Dec 11 CSM column now on web”

  2. Hi, Alex–
    That was an interesting post there on Zeyad’s blog. Let’s see where it all leads, huh?
    I would assume that of course we’re ALL against terrorism. Let me tell you personally that having covered numerous terrorist incidents in Lebanon as a journalist up very close and personal–identifying body parts of people blown apart by car bombs, dealing with the stench of blood, etc etc–I am one of the first to denounce any operations that deliberately target civilians in this way.
    Of course, indigenous groups taking actions against a foreign occupying army are, under international law, a completely different thing. (Ask any of the maquis groups that fought against foreign military occupation in Europe in the 1940s.) Though it is no less tragic for the families of those who become casualties, I know.
    … Anyway I read down a bit in Zeyad’s blog to Dec 8 and found that these anti-terror demonstrations in Baghdad were not quite the totally grassroots phenom that we might have been LED to believe: “I just got word today that the anti-terror rallies are confirmed on Dec 10th. The Anti-terror Popular Committee is organizing them together with the ministry of interior and political parties from the GC. They are to be held all over Iraq… Let’s bombard the ‘media’ with emails and letters pressuring them to give the demos some real ‘coverage’ this time.”
    Do I feel ‘bombarded’? Rallies organized by a Ministry of Interior? Why do I feel just a tad uncomfortable with this? What does it remind me of?

  3. Here’s what Juan Cole says about these demonstrations:
    “… The numbers reported on such occasions are usually inflated. What is remarkable to me is that the parties who called for the demonstrations were only able to get out a small number of supporters. All these factions together could not produce a crowd the size of the ones Muqtada al-Sadr seems able to assemble at will.”
    Read his whole post, which indicates the range of motivations of those taking part, here:
    http://www.juancole.com/2003_12_01_juancole_archive.html#107112676547325571

  4. That was a great column in the Christian Science Monitor, Helena.
    I don’t know if you have seen this. In an interview with Democracy Now, Sy Hersh suggested that some neocon policymakers and military planners may have actually expected that the invasion of Iraq would cause widespread chaos and fighting in the Middle East:
    ” . . . You can have a dark — the dark scenario would be that we do expand our aggressiveness into regime change into Syria and perhaps a new Iran and we end up sort of back-to-back with the Israelis fighting a middle east insurgency. That’s where some of the people, if you read what they say very carefully, what they said in the last ten years, that

  5. For a government sponsored event it seems to have been roundly ignored by the Western press- – yet I’ve seen the video and there are unquestionably many, many people at this protest. Thanks for the Juan Cole link, btw.
    Obviously, I can’t vouch for Zeyad’s authenticity (nor Riverbend’s for that matter…)but he seems to be unaffiliated with any government agency; as you may note his commentary isn’t simply monolithic coalition cheerleading.
    Video feed is here for the curious:
    http://reuters.feedroom.com/
    Click “Reuters Television,” then “more,” and then click “Iraqi protests.”

  6. Helene, how are “indigenous groups taking actions against a foreign occupying army are, under international law, a completely different thing?” First, I think SOME proportion of the Iraqi guerrilla movement is not indigenous to the geographical boundaries of Iraq, but imported talent. Some proportion of the Islamic world identifies a stateless fight waged by the US against all Muslims; “indigenous” as in Iraqi means little to them. Secondly, the actions taken by these freedom fighters seems to be directed mostly at NGOs and other “soft targets.” And most importnatly, at what stage of popular mistrust does an “indigenous group” of guerrillas become a a destructive and positively undemocratic force? Tim McVeigh types are certainly indigenous to the US — in their warped ideology they identify the US Federal government as illegitimate — in what way does this brand of sub-national guerrilla activism differ materially from the brand practiced by suicide bombers?? At what point can a guerrilla war ever be deemed terroristic if ever?

  7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32234-2003Apr4?language=printer
    This is an interesting WaPo piece from April touching on the lawful/unlawful characteristics of guerrilla war. The conclusions of the authors and many other experts in international law is that ununiformed combat of the sort carried out by the maquis is an explicit violation of Geneva convention rules governing armed combat, and therefore NOT legal as you seem to suggest. The Geneva convention is quite explicit on this score: Per Article 44, paragraph 3, of Protocol I; IV Geneva Convention:
    “In order to promote the protection of the civilian population from the effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves from the civilian population while they are engaged in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack.”

  8. Right, that’s what Protocol I says. But that still does not make actions of such a maquis into “terrorism”, so long as they are targeting military targets and exercizing due diligence not to harm civilians. It is the deliberate infliction of harm upon civilians in acts of violence, with political motives, that constitutes terrorism.
    A person who has joined a military body has taken a special oath that places her/him in a special status: he is allowed to kill (other military people) without suffering the normal sanctions that would occur if he carried out such an act of killing in civilian life. And by the same token, he has accepted the risk that he might be killed in combat. (And if the latter happens, no-one bears criminal liability under international law– unless the killing occurs with an expressly ‘forbidden’ class of weapon including dum-dum bullets, BCW, etc.)
    Of course, since we are now in the age of the “War on terror” (into which the US action against Iraq was somehow supposed to fit?), the very sloppily used discourse of “terror/antiterror” is getting mangled all over the place until definitions become twisted into the simply political. “Anyone we agree with is a freedom fighter; anyone we disagree with is a terrorist.”
    Remember when Nelson Mandela and his ANC comrades were all routinely described as “terrorists”?
    I think it’s better, though, to try to keep definitions as crisp, useful, and universally agreeable as possible. In that light, there is no “terrorism” without the deliberate targeting of civilians. Every side in Iraq is probably doing some of this (including the US forces with many of their collective punishments). But it is not the case under any reasonable definition of terrorism that attacks on US forces are terrorism. To claim that they are is to make a mockery of any attempt to build the kind of worldwide coalition that is needed to fight the real terrorists who are out there (OBL and Co.)

  9. Umkhonto we Sizwe routinely bombed civilian targets and committed political murder; by just about any definition including your own they were indeed terrorists. I’ll concede that military attacks by ununiformed guerrillas waging war from amid civilian populations occupies a somewhat different legal space than OBL-style terrorism and perhaps deserves a different label; still, such actions remain explicitly illegal according to the fourth Geneva convention cited above for a similar end; to guard civilian populations against ‘collateral damage’ invited by guerrillas ‘swimming among them.’ Urban guerrilla warfare shares with terrorism the deliberate intent to imperil non-combatants for political advantage. Car bombs, bombs concealed in donkey carts and other ‘concealed weaponry’ would appear to meet the criteria for illegal warfare. The UN and Red Cross attacks, on the other hand, seem to meet all the criteria for terrorism. Were those attacks were somehow less vile for having been executed in the name of national liberation??
    Ultimately, are urban guerrillas answerable to no coherent democratic authority immune from the enforcement of law? How may a legitimate sovereign control or subdue an armed violent minority unconcerned with the niceties of the Geneva convention fighting from within a sea of innocents?
    Moreover, I have yet to see evidence that the Iraqi populace endorses the campaign of suicide bombings and hit-and-runs taking place in their country. The recent demonstrations would seem to indicate the contrary. “No to terrorism” doesn’t sound like they’re talking about coalition forces, because (let’s face it) they’re not.

  10. You know this whole question of defining terrorism is completely irrelevant. The people doing these actions will continue doing them regardless and the victims will continue to die or be severely wounded. They are a loosely organized force with definite objectives and they will ultimately win unless they lose all support from the population. They don’t need majority support – this is a war, not an election. If their opposition uses Israeli tactics, they will decompose even further into isolated units, but the attacks and the wounding and dying will continue nonetheless.
    Calling them terrorists is only useful in a few countries. Most of the world does not think the world changed on 9/11. In fact, a lot of us think we should be mourning the real 9/11, i.e., 9/11/73, the date of the coup d’

  12. AC,
    It is somewhat irrelevant to the problem of when or how the US should address the situation it faces currently in Iraq. Personally, I am less concerned with trivial nomenclature than effective forward-directed policy; if organized armies are subject to Geneva, but guerrillas are for some reason exempt, there are practical ramifications that merit discussion.
    Re: Saudi Arabia: Wolfowitz makes the not uninteresting point in his Vanity Fair interview (and elsewhere) that Saddam’s removal facilitated the substitution an open-ended troop presence in Arabia (foremost among Al Qaeda’s grievances) with a finite Iraqi engagement.
    “Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina.”
    According to the same interview his 1992 “Defense Policy Guidance” memorandum advocated downsizing the military budget by 40 percent.
    Apologies to you Helena for inadvertently hijacking this thread.

  13. My ultimate question to you both is: how does a military force answerable to Geneva and an electorate deal with a sub-national armed guerrilla force answerable to no authority, political, legal or moral?

  16. I liked your article, Helena.
    I’m concerned about where we go to from here. The rougher the tactics the US army uses, the less the USA will be liked in Iraq. It might get to a point that Iraqi opinion is very hostile to the USA. Then the USA will have to choose whether to leave or stay. If the USA leaves, any Iraqi government is likely to be hostile to the USA. I don’t believe that’s what Bush was tryinmg to do when he invaded!
    If the USA stays, it will only increase hostility more and more.
    It is possible to cow a population by brutality, however to do it, the occupier would have to use Nazi-like levels of brutality, which the US public would not accept for long. The only solution that leads to a good end (from the US government’s point of view) is a hearts-and-minds one. This doesn’t mean being soft on the terrorists/insurgents/whatever you want to call them: good intelligence and police work can weed them out.

  17. Good discussion here, friends–
    Alex, thanks for your gracious apology re hijacking. Far as I’m concerned, you have raised some worthwhile points here that it’s important to continue discussing even when–or especially when– we disagree over them.
    Calc– Your plan for effecting the handback to Iraqi self-government looks generally good to me except that you don’t actually solve the tricky question of how to rebuild legitimate, credible Iraqi security forces etc under direct US-UK military occupation. I honestly, for a number of reasons, don’t think it can be done by the US-Ukers themselves. That’s why I think you have to have a UN role in the transition.
    Phil, you make excellent points. Plus, see my preceding comments here.
    (Greetings to you all from South Korea!)

  18. Oops I did it again! – Brittney Spears TGP thumbnail gallery we live together welivetogether little trouble maker joey jenna big naturals in the vip latina hardcore movies solo video girl

Comments are closed.