I can’t decide whether I find it truly pathetic or quite criminal that US commanders in Baghdad are still– three years after invading Iraq– being described by reporters as trying to teach their troops a few of the fundamentals of waging war in built-up areas.
I mean honestly, how many times have reporters told and retold this exact same story (different general being brown-nosed to) over the past three years?
This, from the LA Times’s James Rainey today:
- Some American troops in Iraq have been their “own worst enemy,” unintentionally creating new insurgents by treating the Iraqi people in a heavy-handed or insensitive manner, according to the U.S. commander in charge of day-to-day military operations.
Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, in a weekend training session with troops and in an interview afterward, said he found a need to reemphasize to soldiers that they must use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect, in part because the insurgency has persisted and grown.
Actually, that reasoning is flawed. They should “use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect” because it is the right thing to do, because it is (or should be) in line with their professional values and training, and because they are obligated by the laws of war to do so…
Oh, and as a side-benefit of doing so, they might find it helps their ability to contain the insurgency?
Actually, it is probably ways too late for anything the US troops do in Iraq to make any scintilla of difference to the political outcome. Though they do have the capability to inflict considerable additional suffering on Iraqi families and should certainly be prevented from doing so.
Borzou Daragahi, also of the LAT, had an intriguing piece in the paper over the weekend titled, Iraq’s Shiites Now Chafe at American Presence, Perceived U.S. missteps, a torrent of angry propaganda and the sect’s new political sway have fused to turn welcomers into foes.
The whole of that piece is worth reading. It starts:
- A visitor need not go far or search hard to hear and see the anti-American venom that bubbles through this ancient shrine city, which once welcomed U.S. forces as liberators.
“The American ambassador is the gate through which terrorism enters Iraq,” says a banner hanging from the fence surrounding the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, among the most revered martyrs of the Shiite Muslim faith.
… For three years, most of Iraq’s Shiites welcomed — or at least tolerated — the U.S. presence here. In the weeks immediately after the American-led invasion, the mothers and sisters of Saddam Hussein’s Shiite victims clutched clumps of dried earth as they wept over mass graves and thanked God for ending their oppression.
The Shiite acceptance of an American presence allowed troops to concentrate on putting down the insurgency in western Iraq, which is led by Sunni Muslim Arabs. With the exception of an uprising in mid-2004 by followers of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, the south has been relatively quiet and peaceful under the sway of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
But now the mood has shifted. Perceived American missteps, a torrent of anti-U.S. propaganda and a recently emboldened Shiite sense of political prowess have coalesced to make the south a fertile breeding ground for antagonism toward America’s presence…
I have been writing about the likelihood of this happening for, h’mm, three years or more at this point. Lt.-Gen. Chiarelli and his officers may want to go back and read what I was writing, for example, here, in May 2003.
There, I was looking at the way that the Shiites in South Lebanon gradually shifted from being general supporters of Israel’s military invasion of their country in 1982 to being militantly anti-Israeli just– er– three years later…
Not a bad piece, though I say it myself…
Looking at the prospects of radical change in the US-Shiite relationship in Iraq, I wrote there:
- of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?
Hey, it still seems like a good idea.
Even better: Don’t go invading and threatening other countries in the first place! Please!!!
The emboldened Shiites seem to want the Palestinians out of there, not only the Americans.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4755083.stm
The refugees are to be housed initially in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Hasake area of northern Syria.
Is that Arab hospitality? Absorb them for another 50 years in refugee camps? What is wrong with permanent residency + citizenship instead?
“Don’t go invading and threatening other countries in the first place!”
I second that emotion.
Your comments about why American troops ought to treat Iraqi civilians with the respect due every human being remind me of a story I heard many years ago, from a cabinet meeting of the administration of Mayor John Lindsay of New York. The Welfare Commissioner was pressing the Police Commissioner about the problem of police brutality toward minority civilians and the need for the police to be more understanding of the problems of the Black community. Finally, the Police Commissioner said in exasperation, “Look! I got a bunch of guys who like to ride around on motorcycles and carry guns. You want ’em to be sociologists, too?”
This is not intended to demean the many conscientious people in the military who struggle every day to understand what’s the right thing to do and then do it. But the nature of the job is such that it’s going to attract a lot of people who like to carry guns, wield power, hide behind reflective sunglasses, and generally act out all the macho stereotypes. If they didn’t learn any differently on the playgrounds of America, it’s a rare person who will learn it in Iraq.
“It is only when more people in the US begin to fathom the totality of the destruction in Iraq that one may expect to hear the public outcry and uprising necessary to end the occupation and bring to justice the war criminals responsible for these conditions. Until that happens, make no mistake: all of us participate in a new Iraq, our hands dyed in the blood of innocents.”
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051006Z.shtml
Great reporting as always. You have consistently been on target analysing Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine, Darfur, etc.
More journalists in the blogoshere and beyond should take note of your analyses. Of course the performance of the mass media in the last five or six years has been atrocious. And the fact that so few journalists in the mass media hit the target indicates how limited their industry has become. The way drunken C. Hitchens got suckered into his role of champion for imperialism is the best proof.
The interests shaping the mass media through their editorial control are as restrictive today as they were in the days of Hearst’s empire and the “sinking” of the Maine. One proof is the knee-jerk reaction many people have when they hear or read well informed analyses of the Middle East. Such as those periodically trying to shut down or obstruct webblog discussions here at JWN and other places on the internet.
One of the areas of reporting that has been most restricted in Iraq is coverage of the role Americans have played in Iraq’s inter-militia street battles. The impression created by the mass media is that US troops stand by innocently in Iraq as they are unable to control centuries old hatreds Iraqis feel toward one another. Yet there is no doubt Americans have aided and abetted one set of militias against other sets of militias as Iraqis seek to sort out who controls various forces (police, security, army) through the ministries of interior and defence.
Do you know anyone who reports on this subject in the way Reidar Visser reports on the role of Sistani and the dynamics inside Shi’a politics? If so, it would be great if you could point to some of this information, and maybe link to other web sources. I once saw a report by a Post reporter who looked at the US role in inter-militia fighting in areas around Mosul in the north. This report noted the US shift from support of Kurdish peshmerga to Sunni groups.
Whatever role US strategists play in this militia fighting, it is bound to be what finally ensnares American troops in their new military quagmire. Much is made of the fact that Iraq is not like the jungles of southeast Asia, and so the ending of Bush’s military venture is not supposed to end like Vietnam. However, the complex rivalries and contests between Iraqi militias is the equivalent of a jungle of trouble.
I expect that when Iraqis get down to resolving the problems of Mosul, Kirkuk, and Baghdad, this is when Americans will start looking for the evacuation helicopters to ferry them outside the country. Kirkuk must make Beirut in the 1970s look like Switzerland.
Keep up the great work!
The nightmares that fill the Baghdad night
In the ‘new Iraq’ beloved of Bush and Blair, women can be arrested just for complaining.
by Haifa Zangana, May 10, 2006
Davis,
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget,” said David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, in 1949.
The great catastrophe