Category: Iraq-2007-q2

On Thursday, President Bush gave an address at the Naval War College that was seen by some as his response to the speech in which Sen.Richard Lugar last Monday publicly broke ranks with the President over Iraq.
Bush’s NWC speech gained some notoriety– from Juan Cole and others– because in it Bush argued that Israel– which he described as “a functioning democracy that is not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities”– is “a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq”.
How not to win friends and influence people in Iraq and in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds, eh? Who on earth does the Prez have advising him on such matters??? (Oh, that old convicted felon Elliott Abrams. Enough said.)
But anyway, I read the whole speech and thought it significant enough, as a public expression of what exactly this President thinks he is doing in Iraq, and where he thinks he’s headed, that I decided to try to do one of annotations on the text. But I wanted to find a more dynamic way to do this than the simple “tables” feature I have previously used; and tried using “frames” in the HTML… After a couple of very frustrating mistakes, I found I can do this– but only in a separate web-page, not in the body of the blog posting.
Maybe this even has a slight advantage for some readers, since if you open it in a separate browser window you can then comment on it in this window?
Well, anyway, here at last it is.

I’ve been busy for three days with Bill, getting our new part-time digs in Washington DC set up. Saturday I drove sundry items of furniture etc up here in what felt like a HUGE truck. (It was actually far bigger than we needed, but it was all I could find to rent.)
Anyway, we don’t have our communications set up here yet; so blogging has been a bit difficult. Tomorrow we return to C’ville after our first foray in the new apt. Next week, I’ll be back in the apt and able to schedule the installation of the DSL, phone lines, etc.
Meantime, lots has been happening re Iraq, I know. So I’ll leave this comments thread open for y’all to comment.

The AP newswire yesterday carried an intriguing report about the US Navy using carrier-launched electronic warfare planes called ‘Prowlers’ to prowl around Iraq “trying to stop the scourge of roadside bombs by jamming ground signals from mobile phones and garage door openers.”
My question: How on earth can the people operating this electronic-jamming equipment be certain they will not also trigger life-threatening responses in pacemakers being used by Iraqi cardiac patients or in other ways cause potentially lethal harm to civilians?
The AP account quotes U.S. Navy Capt. David Woods, the commander of a Carrier Air Wing aboard the USS Nimitz (which is now in the Gulf) who is also described as “one of the Navy’s most experienced Prowler pilots” as saying that the ship’s Prowlers fly over Iraq “at between 20,000 and 30,000 feet… steering invisible waves of electromagnetic signals over areas where insurgent bombs may be waiting for U.S. convoys.”
The AP writer adds:

According to outside experts, receivers inside the Prowler’s tail collect radio signals from the ground, which are analyzed by an on-board computer. As threats are identified, the plane’s crew floods the area with electromagnetic energy that blocks the signal.
The plane’s computer is loaded with a “threat library” of hostile signals, which are used to match those on the ground. The jammers can block transmissions across wide range of frequencies, everything from TV and radio signals to mobile phones and the Internet.
But its jamming gear has no effect on bombs that are hard-wired to their triggers, Woods said.

So I guess my picture of what they’re doing is that they are flying around at between 4 and 6 miles high over Iraq, sending down large waves (“floods”?) of electromagnetic energy that may well end up blocking or otherwise interfering with electromagnetic signals being used at ground level to perform a broad range of tasks– some of which “may” (or may not?) be connected to physical attacks to US forces.
This strikes me as being a highly non-discriminating means of conducting warfare– i.e., one that fails to undertake the discrimination between legitimate military targets and (quite illegitimate) civilian targets that is positively required of commanders and military planners under the laws of war
As it happens, this morning I was checking in the ICRC’s excellent on-line library of texts in the laws of war to remind myself what these texts actually say regarding the unacceptability (or, indeed, illegality) of the use of military technologies and methods that do not undertake the necessary discrimination between military and civilian targets.
At this URL (PDF), I found a good, basic compilation of The rules of international humanitarian law [i.e. the laws of war] and other rules relating to the conduct of hostilities. From it I extracted two key texts relating to the question of discriminate/indiscriminate attacks; and I cut and pasted those into this eaiser-to-use HTML file. (I have underlined and bolded there various clauses that are of particular relevance in recent and current Middle East conflicts. I did that markup for reasons other than the writing of this post.)
If you scan through that file you will see that Article 51 of Additional Protocol 1 (1977) of the Geneva Conventions is particularly focused on the need to take active steps to avouid indiscriminate attacks. Clause 4 of Art. 51 reads:

4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

Article 57 of the Protocol lays upon military commanders and military planners a positive responsibility to exercise “due diligence” to ensure that the attacks they undertake are neither “indiscriminate” in the defined sense nor “disproportionate” (regarding the foreseeable proportion of harm inflicted upon persons versus the military value– if any– of the objective.) It says, in Clauses 1 and 2:

1. In the conduct of military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects.
2. With respect to attacks, the following precautions shall be taken:
(a) those who plan or decide upon an attack shall:
(i) do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not subject to special protection but are military objectives within the meaning of paragraph 2 of Article 52 and that it is not prohibited by the provisions of this Protocol to attack them;
(ii) take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects;
(iii) refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;

(b) an attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one or is subject to special protection or that the attack may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;
(c) effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.

Now, it is true that US government has not yet ratified Additional Protocol 1. But it has signed it. And though it has not yet ratified this precise language, it certainly has for a long time been a full party to numerous other laws-of-war agreements that– in somewhat less detail– include strict clauses about the need for both discrimination and proportionality in the planning and conduct of military operations.
That’s why that (somewhat admiringly phrased?) AP report gave me cause for concern. I really do not understand how, from a height of 4-6 miles, the operators of the Prowler’s electronic jamming equipment can undertake anything like the required degree of discrimination between military and civilian targets and take anything like the steps that would be required to avoid or minimize harm to civilians.
Can any readers who understand more about electronic warfare provide us with any more details or information that might allay (or sustain) my concern in this regard? Or, can anyone steer me to accounts that Iraqis or others may have written about any effects that these floods of electromagnetic energy have on their lives at ground level?

Good for AP’s Charles Hanley, who has a piece on the wire today noting that US warplanes have been dropping bombs on Iraq at twice the rate of a year ago.

He writes,

In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to U.S. Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press.
…At the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S. airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body Count, a London-based, anti-war research group that maintains a database compiling news media reports on Iraqi war deaths.
The rate of such reported civilian deaths appeared to climb steadily through 2006, the group reports, averaging just a few a month in early 2006, hitting some 40 a month by year’s end, and averaging more than 50 a month so far this year.

This increasing use of US airpower might “feel good” to some of the fliers involved. But it is probably having a very negative effect on the progress of the counter-insurgency campaign being waged by US (and compliant Iraqi) ground forces in the country in the context of the continuing “surge”. It is an essential mantra of COIN ops that “the most important battle-space is in the mind of the host country nationals.”
It is a simple but continuing truth of human psychology that most people don’t like to be bombed, and tend not to be well disposed to those who bomb them.
Hanley gives some snippets from an interview with Col. Joe Guastella, the U.S. Air Force’s operations chief for the region. He quotes Guastella as saying that the increase in Iraq-focused air ops “has a lot to do with increased pressure on the enemy by [the Multinational Corps-Iraq]– combined with more carriers.”
It seems a lot like what he’s saying there is, “We bomb more because the additional aircraft carrier battle group here in the Gulf allows us to do that.” What sad and mindless militarism.
Hanley does not give us any account of Guastella being questioned closely by the reporters who interviewed him there at the regional US air headquarters as to how, precisely, increased use of aerial bombardments was helping to win over the hearts and minds of Iraqis. He does give a few excerpts from the USAF’s daily briefing, which are numbing in their opacity and bellicosity.

Ever since Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said on Wednesday that the administration is now aiming for a US troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea, there has been a flood of commentary, most of it highly criticial.
I wrote merely that it seemed “hilarious”, because so inappropriate. But as he so often does, Dan Froomkin caught the essence of the matter when he wrote Thursday, “the analogy is troubling. And flawed. And dangerous. And telling.” In that column he provides his own astute analysis of why those adjectives are apt, plus a broad roundup of other people’s comments on the matter.
I just want to add a couple of points:
(1) The whole idea that the US might send military forces sailing to distant places around the world, with guns, cruise missiles, and nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles ready to deploy almost anywhere at a few days notice, is something that may have come to seem “natural” to many US citizens during the Cold War, and evidently still seemed okay to many of them in the presidential election of 2004. Today, it seems– and in my view, rightly– more and more like an anomaly on the world scene, and one that needs to be reviewed and corrected.
Who asked the US to act as the world’s policeman, anyway? Back in the emerging-Cold War context of the early 1950s, the US was able to get some South Koreans to ask them to deploy there. But in the global security (and political) climate that we have today, why would anyone think a continuing US military presence would be “natural” at all?
(2) The notion that the US might have a “South Korea-style” continued military presence truly is, as Froomkin noted, an extremely dangerous one. However, if the US had a presence in Iraq today that was exactly like its presence today in South Korea, matters would be a lot better for the Iraqis than they are at present.
Primarily, you wouldn’t have extremely heavily armed US forces blundering around most of the country’s cities and highways causing tensions and destruction of lives and propoerty just about wherever they go by virtue of both their presence there and their actions there. And you wouldn’t have the US holding Iraq’s central government structure and its decisionmaking as virtual “captives” within a fortress-like, heavily (US-)guarded compound in the center of Baghdad…
Instead, you’d have the US forces corralled in a small number of bases, and also as “tripwires” along a border with… well, with which of Iraq’s neighbors in particular would that be? And all of that presence would be clearly regulated by a Status of Forces Agreement concluded with, as is currently the case in South Korea, a generally well accepted and democratically accountable government.
(I note that getting to this position in South Korea has not, however, been an easy or always pleasant process. US-protected “South” Korea was governed by military rulers for many years. Its US-constituted intelligence body, the KCIA, was a fiercer younger brother of Washington’s CIA… Etc., etc. So there is a huge remaining question of how the Bushites could even foresee the process of transitioning the US presence in Iraq to a “South Korea style” of presence.)
But I think it’s still important to note that the current situation in SK is so much better than than the current situation in Iraq. So if the Bushites see an SK-style presence as their goal, then in some ways that can be seen as a helpful opening position in any negotiation they have over the future shape of the US troop presence in Iraq.
Great, if they want, as a first stage, to withdraw all their troops to barracks rather than have them careening around the country continuing to try to bend Iraq’s political system to their will!
But if there really are serious negotiations over Iraq’s future– conducted both by the various Iraqi parties and by the US and other relevant international actors– then there is no way that a permanent or near-permanent presence of US-commanded troops in the country would be the outcome of such negotiations.
… Anyway, as part of the reconsideration of the US’s posture in the world that surely must occur as part of the country’s and the world’s post-Iraq evaluations and deliberations, the idea that the US should anyway continue to behave as the world’s policeman– in Iraq, South Korea, or elsewhere– should surely come under close scrutiny.

Five British ‘security contractors’ were abducted by persons unknown in Baghdad today. This comes after the May 12 incident in Mahmoudiyah in which three US soldiers were abducted. (The body of one member of this latter group was found later.)
The apparent increase in the use of abductions of members of western fighting formations in Iraq is significant. For the anti-western insurgents, killing members of the occupying forces (and their ‘privately’ organized sidekicks) is much simpler. To do an abduction you need a larger ambushing/assault force, a get-away plan, and a relatively extensive safe area to retreat to.
The pro-western forces in Iraq must be losing control of significant swathes of land, if these assailants can undertake these abductions and then simply melt away into the landscape.
Plus, these assailants either had access to huge quantities of Iraqi police materiel, or themselves included a large number of police officers.
That Reuters report notes these details about today’s abductions, which took place in an Iraqi Finance Ministry building not far from Sadr City:

A ministry official who witnessed the kidnapping said it took place as several computer experts gave a lecture on organizing electronic contracts.
The gunmen entered the room led by a man wearing a police major’s uniform, the official said.
The gunmen shouted, “Where are the foreigners, where are the foreigners?” she said.
Police said gunmen in a large convoy of vehicles, typically used by police, had sealed off streets round the building.
It was the first reported kidnapping of foreigners since the Baghdad security plan began in mid-February and the first time Westerners had been taken from inside a government building.

Ten US soldiers were killed in Iraq today, bringing the month’s total so far to 114.
It is urgently time for the UN to convene an authoritative international peace conference at which all parties to the bloodshed in Iraq will negotiate the speedy, orderly, and complete withdrawal of all foreign fighting units from the country and the restoration of its true sovereignty.
In addition, surely all governments should reach agreement on making it illegal for their nationals to travel around the world as ‘guns for hire.’