No US de-escalation yet

Okay, it seems that the evaluation I wrote last Monday of the situation in
Fallujah and other parts of Iraq was overly optimistic– based on an overly
generous estimation of the strategic intelligence of the people running the
US occupation in Iraq.

Nothing wrong with a bit of optimism and a bit of generosity of spirit, I
reckon. Except that in this case both were misplaced and I ended up
being wrong.

How can the people making the big decisions regarding the running of the
occupation fail to see that it is totally in their interests to climb down
the ladder of escalation that they’d hoisted themselves up onto in both Fallujah
and Najaf? It is only a very short-sighted, immature strategic “thinker”
who could maintain that there would be anything to be gained over the long
haul from winning the military “victory” in Fallujah that everyone knows
in advance is–because of the US side’s access to weapons of truly massive
destructive power–quite within their power there.

So the purely military outcome of any such outcome would not be in doubt.
But if the US forces were to “win” in such a battle– a battle that
quite predictably would involve causing the deaths of tens of thousands of
Iraqis, most of them noncombatants– then what?

What would cocky little Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the head of the
1st Marines Expeditionary Force that is currently besieging Fallujah, do
the day after his forces achieved such a victory?

What would Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and the rest of the American soldiers (and
civilians), who are spread dangerously thinly throughout nearly the whole
of Iraq, do the day after such a “victory”?

The latest pronunciamento I saw coming from Conway (WaPo, Friday’s
edition) had him expressing complete dissastisfaction with the–admittedly
quite derisory– collection of “heavy weapons” that the city’s fathers had
turned over to his people as part of their obligation under the deal under
which Conway’s people were also supposed to be looseing and then lifting
the siege. A WaPo story by Karl Vick and Rajiv Chandrasekaran had Conway
huffing and puffing that, “The people of Fallujah have not responded well
to the agreement that was made.” He added that he was prepared to wait,
“days, not weeks” for satisfactory compliance.

And if he doesn’t get it? According to Chandra,

Conway suggested that he would try to move noncombatants out of the city
so his Marines could pursue the insurgents with greater force.

“You’ve got tens of thousands of innocent people caught in the middle,” he
said. “If there was some simple way to remove them from the equation,
it wouldn’t take long..”

This is, of course, straight out of the playbook that served the Israelis (and the Lebanese)
so poorly in Lebanon for so many years. When Sharon’s forces were besieging
the heavily-populated western portion of the city of Beirut in the summer
of 1982, he had his psy-ops people drop leaflets and mount sustained campaigns
to get the noncombatants to exit the city so he wouldn’t be responsible for
any casualties among them. Many noncombatants did flee
the siege over the course of the eight punishing weeks that the siege lasted. Others
did not. Why the heck should they be forced to comply with the bullying
threats of an outside military power? Where should they go? How
could they be assured of the integrity of the properties and the safety of
the loved family members they left behind them? Several thousand civilians
lost their lives in Beirut when Sharon used weapons like an oxygen-sucking gravity
bomb, other very heavy munitions and sometimes indiscriminate artillery shelling
against the city.

But then, Lebanon proved unpalatably “sticky” for the Israelis, as we know. Throughout
the 1980s and the 1990s the IDF again and again engaged in battles there.
It had all the technical capabilities to “win” every one of those battles, which
in a sense it did. But it could not “win” the overall war which was
fought, it turned out, not on a military battlefield at all but in the “battlefield”
of Lebanese political opinion. Simply put, the Israelis were unable
to break the increasing support that Hizbollah won and kept from many segments
of the Lebanese public. When Israeli troops finally left Lebanon in
spring 2000, their government had won not one of the political-strategic
prizes it had sought from Lebanon when Sharon had launched his invasion
18 years earlier.

(Yes, it had “won” the dispersal of the PLO’s military forces from Lebanon,
back in August 1982. But Sharon had sought much more than that. He
also actively sought–and for a brief moment in 1983 perhapshe thought
he had won– a formal agreement with the Lebanese government whereby Beirut
would enter into a close political and security relationship with Israel.
When Israel finally withdrew, it was without any such agreement. From
one point of view, Sharon’s winning the dispersal of the PLO forces can be
considered like the Bush people’s winning the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s
regime: a stated goal achieved. But the further goal of winning a
longlasting political-security alliance with the country occupied while
achieving that goal: h’mmm, in both cases, a far harder goal to achieve.)

So anyway, back to that Israeli playbook. The way the engagements between
the IDF and Hizbollah came to be played out in the 1990s involved one side
or the other– or very frequently, both–seeking an escalation for whatever
reason. Israeli forces perched in their occupation zone inside the south
of the country would shell some alleged Hizbollah positions further to the
north. Hizbollah would launch a few low-tech rockets right over the
occupation zone and into northern Israel (where as often as not they would
fall into fields and cause little harm, though yes, there certainly were
some civilian casualties.) Both sides would ramp up the rhetoric. Increasingly,
over the years, as part of this rhetorical escalation, the Israelis would
“tell” all the civilian residents of south Lebanon to head northward for
their own safety. (But what about disabled people, older people, people
who couldn’t afford or were unable to leave? Did the fact that they
stayed there– in their own homes–mean that they should be held responsible
for the extreme harm that the IDF’s actions might subsequently impose on
them?) And then, the IDF would throw huge amounts of all the (US-donated)
heavy weapons at their disposal into the fight…

In 1996, there was yet another of these huge and gratuitous escalations–
this time, launched by the pathetic Labor PM Shimon Peres in an
attempt to reverse his plummeting standing in the the Israeli polls. He
had an election coming up within weeks…. (Does this sound depressingly
familiar?) So anyway, he did the “warn the local populace to leave
their homes” thing big-time. One group of a couple hundred villagers,
most of them old people, didn’t have the ability to quit the whole of the
region and make it to Beirut. They took shelter in and around a local
UN camp, located near the south Lebanese village of Kafr Qana, thinking that
would be safe. Oh no! IDF bombs tore into the large sheds where
they’s sought shelter there, killing more than 120 of them…. That
catastrophe just further helped to turn Lebanese opinion against Israel and
its wanton aggressivity.

I interviewed Peres in Tel Aviv in March 1998. I asked him about the
Kafr Qana incident, and whether he didn’t think there had been either faulty
Rules of Engagement given to the IDF on that occasion, or a breakdown in
command relations for which he might feel some responsibility. “Oh
no,” he assured me, quite at ease with his conscience. “He who warns the
local population is absolved of responsibility.”

… Anyway, some of you may recall the speculation I got into just over a week
ago over who exactly in the Bush administration it has been who’s been making
all these disastrous operational decisions on the ground in Iraq. I
read something on Juan Cole’s blog, taken from AP, that suggested it had
been Bush himself who made the original decision to “go into Fallujah” to
retaliate for the desecration of the four US civilian contractors there.

Bush taking a major military decision like that?? Now, there’s
a scary thought, indeed.

… I’m in China at the moment. That’s why I’m not able to post
frequently– and also, why I’m not able to keep as well-informed on all the breaking news as I usually like to be. It’s certainly interesting to
see which websites the Chinese authorities seem to be blocking! So
far, what I’ve experienced as blocked are anything involving “Blogspot”,
and also the BBC.