I hope you have all now read the table I posted here yesterday, containing my notes on the text of the new US Army-and-Marines counter-insurgency manual co-authored by Gen. Petraeus.
It gives what I understand to be broad permission for those engaged in counter-insurgency operations to “eliminate” broad classes of those whom military commanders judge to be “extremists”.
That is, for the military to engage in extra-judicial executions.
(We could note that Israel’s broad pursuit of that policy has quite failed top bring a solution to its problems with its neighbors any closer.)
On a related note Bill the spouse pointed out this morning that in the penultimate slide (“Key Operational Shifts”) in the PowerPoint presentation on the “Iraq Strategy Review” that was distributed by White House staffers yesterday, the third change noted is from “restrictive ROE [Rules of Engagement]” to a new state of affairs in which “Iraqi leaders [are] committed to permissive ROE”. It’s not clear there whether these “permissive ROEs” are for the Iraqi forces or the US forces, but either way it looks like very bad news.
It strikes me that we, the US citizenry, have no excuse whatever these days for claiming that “we don’t know” what is being done by our leaders in our names. This is the case regarding this new permission for extra-judicial executions, as well as what continues to go on in Guantanamo and other prisons run by the US military around the world, and a number of other clear US infractions of the laws of war.
In South Africa today, nearly every white citizen claims he or she “never knew” what the apartheid government was doing in his/her name prior to 1994. In many cases, those claims seem non-credible. But at least the apartheid government had what one might call the basic “decency” not to go about advertising its more heinous rights abuses far and wide. Our government, by contrast, seems to have little shame regarding its current and ongoing abuses.
No to extra-judicial executions! No to torture! Bring the troops home now!
2 thoughts on “The Petraeus doctrine and extra-judicial executions.”
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re “Iraqi government committed to permissive Rules of Engagement”, chilling enough in itself, but please also note that Bush specifically talked about a major “mistake” that has now been corrected: The Iraqi government had been placing “too many restrictuions” on US military operations, but now the US forces will be permitted “to enter these neighborhoods…home to those fueling the sectarian violence”, a clear reference to Sadr City (pop. between 2 and 3 million, or around the size of the Palestinian West Bank in population). I have a couple of posts drawing attention to the “Palestinian” character of what is being set up here.
Helena
I have been too subtle.
In Bush’s New Generals I pointed you at Frank Kitson’s book which links to John Nagl’s book based on a a French Officer’s lessons from Algeria and the british in Malaya.
John Nagl appears in your golden oldie “How to NOT to win in Iraq” and is now a Lt Col on Sec Def staff.
One might suspect that some of Massu and Bigeard’s thinking may have rubbed off on General Petraeus.
So as I predicted they are going to do Battle of Algiers in Sadr City. The Paras won in Algiers. Go watch the film. The number of dead and injured will depend on how good the intel is.
I wonder if Laura Bush ever got her husband to read Hamlet. The corpses are all over the stage by the time the inadequate dither has finished, and someone else entirely takes over the kingdom.
Horatio
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ reads: all this can I
Truly deliver.