Pat Lang has pointed out that “the IDF/IOF does not routinely have any professional cadre of well-trained sergeants capable of enforcing discipline.” This factor has allegedly contributed to Israeli soldiers acting badly.
The inference is that such behavior would never occur in well-trained armies.
Or would it?
New Statesman: Conventional armies are a sledgehammer to crack a nut when it comes to fighting guerrillas.
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The sweep was a co-operative action between [US Army] Delta Company of the 2nd Battalion 12th Cavalry and the Iraqi Army’s 246th Battalion. The plan was for the Iraqis to lead and the Americans to provide security and back-up. With engines throbbing, the force waited for 45 minutes at the start line for the Iraqis to arrive.
“And you think they haven’t been calling their buddies in there to tell them to shift their sorry asses?” growled Sgt Penning in disgust. By the time we rolled into the middle section of the Baghdad neighbourhood of Ghazaliya, there wasn’t a single shot being fired in our direction. Any insurgents were long gone. But the hapless residents were not. They watched, almost impassively, the random violence of the searching troops, too frightened to object. Some of the houses, whose Christian or Shia owners had fled, were empty. Occupied or not, if no one quickly answered the demands to open up, gates, doors and windows were smashed down or blown open with shotguns.
Inside, damage was done to anything breakable. Living-rooms became a jumble of furniture. Beds were overturned, cabinets thrown down, shelves emptied on to floors and beds: an orgy of destruction and arbitrary searching.
Global Policy Forum: How and Why the US Encouraged Looting in Iraq
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The widespread looting in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and other Iraqi cities, following the collapse of the Ba’athist regime of President Saddam Hussein, was not merely an incidental byproduct of the US military conquest of Iraq. It was deliberately encouraged and fostered by the Bush administration and the Pentagon for definite political and economic reasons.
Thousands took part in the looting in Baghdad which began April 9, the day the Hussein government ceased to function in the capital city. Not only were government ministries targeted, and the homes of the Ba’athist elite, but public institutions vital to Iraqi society, including hospitals, schools and food distribution centers. Equipment and parts were stripped from power plants, thus delaying the restoration of electricity to the city of 5 million people.
Perhaps the most devastating loss for the Iraqi people is the ransacking of the National Museum, the greatest trove of archeological and historical artifacts in the Middle East. The 28 galleries of the huge museum were picked clean by looters who made off with more than 50,000 irreplaceable artifacts, relics of past civilizations dating back 5,000 years. The museum’s entire card catalog was destroyed, making it impossible even to identify what has been lost.
The US military stood by and permitted the ransacking of the museum, an incalculable blow to Iraqi and world culture, just as they allowed and even encouraged the looting of hospitals, universities, libraries and government social service buildings. The occupation forces protected only the Ministry of Oil, with its detailed inventory of Iraqi oil reserves, as well as the Ministry of Interior, the headquarters of the ousted regime’s secret police.
Winter Soldier: ‘We Have to Share This Pain’
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“War changes people. You do not come out of a combat zone the same,” Iraq war veteran Chanan Suarez Diaz told the audience while moderating the veteran’s panel. “War is very numbing … it comes to a point that you see so much destruction you become numb. This bullsh*t about bringing democracy or liberation is nonsense – we’ve killed over one million Iraqis.”
Josh Simpson explained his work as an Army counterintelligence agent in Iraq. “We would go to houses without any evidence, arrest people, and pay our source hundreds of dollars. This was common. It was a crazy cycle.”
“We were raiding houses every night in Mosul,” he continued. “You ransack their stuff, then ask our officer who he wanted to detain.”
The number of people detained was a measure of success for a unit, Simpson explained. “People’s mothers would be grabbing me, asking me why I was taking their child away, and I never had an answer. It’s terrible to push an elderly Iraqi woman away so you can take her child and load her into your Stryker vehicle, when you don’t even believe they belong there.”
Helena correctly observes:
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I am repeatedly surprised by the wilful blindness of Israeli political and military leaders who can’t see that these traits and behaviors are massively counter-productive to their people’s longterm wellbeing. How on earth do they think that such behaviors will help make the region in which they live more peaceful and thus provide the basis for Israel’s own longterm security?
We could (and should) say the same about US political and military leaders.
The inference that war might be okay if it would be conducted by disciplined troops should be rejected. War is never the answer. It brutalizes young people to the point that they enjoy killing, as shown in this video.
While we jump on the Israeli army let’s also get our own house in order. There are valid reasons why, just as Gazans hate Israelis, Iraqis hate Americans and want them (their “liberators”) out of their country. Ditto for Afghanistan.
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Don Bacon is a retired army officer who founded the Smedley Butler Society several years ago because, as General Butlewr said, war is a racket.
Don, thanks for this good complement to my slightly earlier post.
I completely agree with you that war is NEVER the answer. (No surprise there.) And I agree with you that it’s a complete chimera to think that wars can ever, actually, be fought in a “clean” way that inflicts no suffering on noncombatants. To that extent, all the vaunted “Laws of War”, which seek to reduce to an absolute minimum the suffering that wars impose on civilians and other noncombatants, offer what might be described as the dangerously misleading false promise that this is indeed possible.
The development of allegedly “smart” weapons holds out the same promise of reducing “collateral” damage to civilians to or near to zero.
Regarding the Laws of War, it’s a complicated moral argument. I believe the first and central proposition to advance, very forcefully, is that War is Not the Answer, and its waging should therefore be outlawed as a matter of urgency. The arguments of those who claim “We had no alternative except to go to war to solve the problem(s) we faced” needs to be countered at every opportunity. There are always alternatives to war and violence for dealing with even tricky challenges; and these alternatives, if well chosen, can bring results that are more assured and longer lasting.
However, inasmuch as wars are in fact fought despite our best efforts to prevent them, regulating the way they are fought does probably make some sense, in terms both of minimizing harm to noncombatants and also– equally importantly– strengthening some of the fundamental notions of the equal humanity of all human persons. In the laws of war as in human rights law, there is no distinction between people on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, or any other basis. All alike are equally deserving of regard and protection. crucially, the needs of “my” country’s citizens are never allowed to prevail over those of the “opposing” country. I think that principle of universality is very important.
Meanwhile, it remains an indubitable truth that wars can’t, in practice, ever be fought in ways that are totally “clean.” One reason for this is that combat itself brings out the worst demons in everyone who participates in it. Because it breaches the fundamental human taboo on killing it threatens to bring tumbling down the entire house of cards of the morality of soldiers, especially those who are psychologically vulnerable. There is, therefore, a strong sense in which it’s not correct (or, not sufficient) to blame the individual soldier who perpetrates the combat-era atrocity. One needs to lay the blame firmly where it belongs: with the politicians who initiate the war, those high-level military commanders who both enable and execute that decision, and– in a democratic country– that large portion of the population that actively supports the decision to launch and wage the war…
I completely agree with you that people in the US are in no position to “throw stones” at the Israeli government and people for their present bellophilia.
In a narrow way, though, Col. Lang has a point. I agree with you that even well-disciplined military forces can inflict enormous suffering on civilians and quite deliberately. This is true of the militaries of democracies, something people in the mainstream don’t like to admit. For instance, the bombing and shelling of Vietnamese villages wasn’t conducted by frightened or sadistic undisciplined teenagers. And Operation Speedy Express (which Nick Turse wrote about in detail in the NATION recently) was a bloodbath basically encouraged by the commanding officer’s obsession with having a high bodycount.
That said, a disciplined military which is ordered to be respectful to civilians is better than an undisciplined bunch of kids with guns. I’ve never been in war, but I’ve read conflicting accounts by veterans of how US forces behave in Iraq now or in Vietnam back then and also with Israel forces. Allowing for the fact that some of the nicer accounts might be self-serving lies, it’s also possible (and in fact likely, as best I can tell) that there were dramatic differences in behavior from unit to unit, depending on what signals the commanding officers sent or what they allowed to happen.
All armchair speculation on my part, though.
Helena,
I cannot agree more that most (if not all) of the belligerence of Israel’s actions vis-a-vis the Palestinians is rather counterproductive and only further embroils the very untenable situation we are witnessing (the latest “war”, if you could call it that, being no exception). But how long must be continue to conclude that this is not a deliberate policy to keep the Middle East tilted towards Israel’s favour? By favour, I define it being that this instability benefits the hawkish wing of Israel’s society.
It’s tough to figure out exactly what Israel’s officials are thinking as we are not clairvoyant but surely they have plenty of intelligence available to them to know that this is the outcome and that more of the same can only lead to more hatred and more separation. Isn’t it really that outcome which Israel wants? A Palestinian state totally demoralised and debilitated subjugated to Israel’s pressure, hence more resistance closer to Al-Qaeda style and then more reason to keep this militancy strong (since it is the biggest block fueling Israel’s GDP).
Their indifference to Palestinian life also figures in this equation. It has been forty years? Isn’t that precedence enough to figure out that this is not going to work? They cannot be “stupid” like you stated in your latest post. It has to be what they really want.
Of course I’m not against laws of war or training for war. The fact is that they could be applied rather well to ground combat in past ‘conventional’ wars. While laws and training were violated these variances could be treated on some level as aberrations. Now, not so much.
The problem is that warfare has changed and is now, for the Israelis as well as the Americans, even by ground forces, principally directed against civilians both in the attack and in the extended occupation phases. The situation then spirals out of control, experience has shown, in the sense that laws and training are now superseded by the laws of the jungle.
Unfortunately some of the US training has been oriented toward seeking revenge for 9/11 by killing . . .I won’t repeat the derogatory terms for Arabs. I assume that the IDF troops were similarly propagandized. It’s the same in any war.
The ‘boy next door’, faced with an unfriendly population, then reacts in violent, illegal and untrained ways to the situation that he finds himself in, thanks to the government that recruited him and that placed him there. He acts as a ‘recruiter’ himself for the resistance, and the situation spirals out of the control of any rules.
In other words ‘the boy next door’ unlike the ‘good old days’ of ‘the finest generation’ is no longer in a war, that is combat against another trained and disciplined military force, he is in a hostile environment surrounded by real or potential enemies that might kill him and he has no way of knowing who’s dangerous and who isn’t. He might (1) shoot anything that moves, (2) ransack a house and brutalize its inhabitants in revenge for a buddy’s death, or do anything else that the rules say he shouldn’t. Who can blame him.
So the old parameters don’t apply very well any more in our everlasting ‘war on terror.’ If the president can send Predators against our ally Pakistan to destroy property and kill people, and be applauded for it, then how can we expect a trooper surrounded by potential enemies to act any better? The president is safe in the oval office and the troop is on the dangerous street!
Put it this way: A lot of us won’t go to some sections of our own cities, will we. Well, these kids have to go to places ten or a hundred times worse (for them). So then it’s not difficult to forget the rules.
Was the military-on-civilian violence worse in Gaza than in Fallujah or Mosul, or Guernica for that matter? Do we have reliable yardsticks comparatively to measure atrocities? Or should we? (I don’t think we should.)
or, as Helena wrote on a later posting:
“That people who normally have full command of their capacities for both rational thought and human empathy suddenly lose those faculties when they’re thrown into a situation of great– and often officially stoked– mass fearfulness.”
And, I would add, there is nothing more fearful than to be placed on the mean streets of Baghdad or Gaza by one’s government, the same government that made that “officially stoked” the fearfulness.