Category: Military occupations

Saad Khalaf of the LA Times’s Baghdad bureau has a very interesting post over at the LAT’s Mideast staff blog, Baghdad & Beyond. It recounts a helicopter visit he recently made over portions of his city, Baghdad.
He writes,

This was the first time I had ever seen Baghdad from the air, and it was strange to see my home city looking deserted.
The city also looked wounded and traumatized. From above, Baghdad’s scars are even more obvious.
I saw the concrete blast walls and roadblocks that crisscross one of the Arab world’s great cities. Buildings that were damaged in the war five years ago still sat unrepaired. Piles of garbage filled the streets in neighborhoods such as Ghazaliya and Ameriya, which had witnessed recent street battles.
It all made me feel sad and frustrated. I felt like there were very few tangible results to show from the last five years of bloodshed…

Khalaf writes about the considerable misgivings he’d had about going along on this trip, which was organized by the U.S. Army. He and his American bureau chief were going along to accompany Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division who was visiting soldiers at a pair of U.S. bases south of Baghdad. He wrote that his wife of one year had asked him not to go but he told her, “No, I want to see this.”
I can understand why.
These days, most residents of Baghdad are trapped inside one of the huge cantonments that those big blast walls have carved into the city. They cannot soar above it looking down at the whole, as Khalaf was briefly able to do. (You can see his picture gallery from the trip here.)
As for someone like Gen. Lynch, he can criss-cross the city by chopper from time to time. But he will never really be able to understand the concerns, frustrations, and tempo of life of people living (if that’s really the word?) inside the city’s walled-off cantonments.
Different ways of seeing the city.
Imagine if Palestinians trapped in, say, Bethlehem or Nablus or Gaza could also take helicopter rides over their small country and see what has happened to it after 41 years of occupation.
I can understand the concerns of Saad Khalaf’s wife, and I can understand that he, too, may have had qualms about about traveling around so evidently in the entourage of the army that’s occupying his country. But I think the observations he wrote, based on the trip, are truly fascinating.
Let’s all work hard so that one day as soon as possible, Iraqis and Palestinians will all have the opportunity to soar freely into the skies above their respective countries and look down on its much-loved geography– from helicopters (noisy and polluting), or hot-air balloons, or whatever.
And that their skies are quite free of the military helicopters, fighter-planes, and attack drones with which, today, foreign occupation armies help maintain their system of violent control over each country’s rightful citizens.

I have been concerned about the Pentagon’s program to enlist anthropologists into its “Human Terrain System” (HTS) program ever since I first heard about it. The relationship between western “anthropology” (literally, in Greek, a “study of the human condition”) and various extremely exploitative colonial ventures over the past 120 years is very well-known.
Recently, I identified one of my key concerns with this latest version of the same-old, same-old attempt to use specialized knowledge about the condition of other peoples in order to subjugate and control them. It is this idea that our fellow-humans around the world could be considered, in the military sense or any other sense, to be merely “terrain” to be fought over, won, and controlled.
In military science, geographical terrain (from the Latin, meaning “earth”) is something that is to be studied, mapped, and understood– and then, that understanding is used in order to control and exploit that terrain.
So what are we saying about our fellow-humans if we say they are merely “terrain”?
Isn’t calling them “terrain” worse, actually, than using the many zoomorphic slur-words that are used to dehumanize and denigrate human “others”? Like former Israeli Chief of Staff’s infamous reference to Palestinians as “cockroaches” or “flies in a bottle,” or any other reference to opponents being merely “animals”… Other examples of zoomorphic denigration are too numerous to list.
The idea that our fellow humans in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else are merely “terrain” can be traced, most recently, to the US military’s late-2006 counter-insurgency manual (PDF here), as co-authored by Gen. Petraeus. One of the key arguments made there was that “the key battlespace is the mind of the citizens of the ‘Host Nation’.” (The whole COIN concept was built, we can note, on the key assumption that the US military would be waging its COIN warfare inside other people’s countries.)
So what the Human Terrain System program seeks to do is to provide the key cultural/sociological knowledge required for the US military to be able to control and exploit the minds of those other, non-US men and women.
Now, when a military is waging a campaign that control and exploit geographical terrain, some of that terrain may get chewed up, burned, or suffer other other non-trivial damage. How about when it is waging a campaign to control and exploit the mental “terrain” of our fellow-humans in a distant country?
The mental damage inflicted on subjugated others in the more known-of places like Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo is only the tip of a vast iceberg of damage inflicted.
Think of the million-plus children among the 2.5 million residents of Sadr City. How has their mental, social, and spiritual wellbeing been affected by the assaults the US military has launched against Sadr City over the recent weeks?
Think of the four million or so Iraqis displaced from their homes and scattered to places of distant (and always vulnerable) refugee over the past 30 months. How has their mental and spiritual wellbeing been affected?
It strikes me, though, that the people who run and implement the US military’s “Human Terrain” program are also suffering significant spiritual damage through their participation in this very anti-humane venture. They have been conditioned to believe that they have some kind of “right”, as contractors with or members of the US military, to intrude into, study, and map the lives of subjugated Iraqis, with the aim that the US military can use this knowledge to control and exploit those others.
That, to me, is what the dehumanizing term “human terrain” connotes.
How spiritually sick can a person get?
You can find a a good round-up of recent controversies around the HTS program here, on the Mind Hacks blog.
That blog post links to this recent Newsweek article on the program, and this subsequent piece on the Wired blog, in which the female anthropologist Montgomery McFate, one of the program’s main architects, defends it.
The Newsweek piece is titled “A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other”, and is illustrated with a photo of a female in full military combat gear, with a helmet and body armor, who is standing in what may be the public square of an Iraqi town. She is earnestly taking notes by hand in a little notebook.
In the piece, the writers, Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring write about one HTS participant that, “Though he wears Army fatigues and carries a gun, Griffin is a civilian, part of a controversial program known as the Human Terrain System.” They also write, “For their services, the anthropologists get up to $300,000 annually while posted abroad—a salary that is six times higher than the national average for their field.” Clearly, for many newly-minted anthropologists who have heavy grad-school debts to repay, the pay would be quite a draw. As, too, might the idea that they could “study” people foreign culture, thus building up their research credentials in the fild– and get paid quite handsomely while doing so.
Last October, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the professional body of US practitioners and teachers in the field, issued a strong statement that measured the HTS program against the ethical standards of their profession and concluded that they disapproved” of the program. The statement added:

In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds. We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project. The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.
The Executive Board affirms that anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation. It is in this way, the Executive Board affirms, that anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.

In general, this is a good and strong statement. Personally, I would not have put in the explanatory clause with which the first of those paragraphs starts– or perhaps, I would have phrased it differently. I believe the ethical problems they earlier identified– and in particular the impossibility of obtaining the “informed consent” of subjects of study in a context when the “anthropologist” in question is wearing the uniform of and carrying the gun of an occupying army– make the project “a problematic application of anthropological expertise”, regardless of how the war and occupation started. To believe that anyone can wear the uniform, carry the gun, be a member of a mutually supporting sub-unit of an occupation army, and be considered by anyone to be an objective observer– let alone a friendly fellow-human with whom a “native”{ person might voluntarily share one’s view of the world– simply boggles the mind.
(Why does the name of the Israeli “anthropologist” Clinton Bailey keep popping into my mind?)
The dilemma faced by many anthropologists seems similar to that faced by some humanitarian-aid workers in recent years. Back in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq., the US military made broad efforts to try to “enlist” the collaboration of many US relief agencies. At one point, Rumsfeld even openly said that the activities of such groups could act as “force mulitpliers” for the US invasion force (which otherwise might have to fulfill its own responsibilities to the Iraqi population as occupying power in Iraq.) I know that many of my friends in the humanitarian-aid community agonized over whether and how far to coordinate with the invasion force. They wanted to “be ready to help” deal with the humanitarian disasters that might accompany a US invasion of Iraq, but they also wanted to be able to do so in way that did not associate them with the policies and priorities of the invading/occupying army.
As the occupation ground on, year after year, the dilemmas continued. I have spoken to some western aid workers who strongly shunned any collaboration with the occupation forces, and who also, with great courage, refused to hire armed guards to accompany either their aid convoys or themselves. But the security situation got worse and worse. Their aid convoys became harder and harder to organize. I am not sure if any of those convoys are being organized at all these days.
This reminds me, too, of Harold Evans, the Quaker from Philadelphia who back in May 1948 had been named by UNSCOP as “municipal commissioner” of the internationally administered “corpus separatum” that, according to the 1947 Partition Plan, was supposed to be established in Jerusalem and a broad area around it. Evans reportedly got as far as Cairo, but he then refused to proceed any further until the British military who were in control there would allow him to do so without a military escort.
You could say that maybe some bloodshed could have been avoided in Jerusalem if he had gotten there to administer it? I think that to say that, would be to credit Quakers with too much power and influence!
Actually, the British were determined to stick to their timetable to take their military out of the whole of Palestine, regardless of whether (as occurred) Arab-Jewish fighting thereafter engulfed the whole of the area of Mandate Palestine, including Jerusalem. So I strongly doubt whether Evans would have had a chance to make a difference in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, though, he kept himself– and by extension, most other Quakers– unsullied from entanglement in the British military’s schemes.
In Evans’s case, and in the cases where people are trying to carry out unquestionably humanitarian aid missions, these can agonizingly tough judgments to make.
But in the case where anthropology professionals are being asked to gather knowledge about– and then, to share with a military occupation army– information about the mores and views of the “occupied” people, I don’t think the ethical judgment is a difficult one at all.

So now, after just under five years of rule by US military occupation, the historic city of Baghdad is drowning in lakes of human excreta. (Hat-tip Juan.) That item from AFP a couple of weeks ago reports that,

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen “as a big black spot on Google Earth,” said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

Welcome to Gaza.
Gaza has been under Israeli military occupation for just over 40 years, and has been slowly drowning in its own gathering lakes of sewage for several years now.
Maintaining working safe water systems, and therefore also functioning sewage-disposal systems, is a fundamental function of government. It is especially important in areas that, like Gaza or Baghdad, are both heavily populated and flat, and that therefore have no natural run-off system. (And even where areas are mountainous and do have good run-off systems, the people “below” need to be protected from the run-off from the people “above”, as the residents of numerous Palestinian villages in the West Bank that lie beneath Israel’s hill-top settlements can amply testify.)
Different things are going on in Iraq and in Gaza. In Iraq the Bushists are guided– as in all their actions, domestic and overseas– by a profound antagonism toward the role of government as such in providing good governance. Hence all their quite irresponsible outsourcing of so many central functions of government to politically well-connected private contractors operating for profit. Now I’m sure that in Baghdad, the US administration and its local allies/proxies have signed numerous contracts over the past five years, under which contractors were charged with fixing the city’s water and sewage systems. But with the Bushists’ broad and wilfull disregard of governance issues, those contractors’ performance was never adequately monitored, and no-one ever stepped in to say, “Okay, you contractors haven’t performed, so we’ll send in the Army Corps of Engineers to get this vital job done.”
As a corollary, we should note that people who run military occupation regimes have wide leeway to exercise a wilfull disregard for the wellbeing of the residents of the occupied territories since they are in no way politically accountable to them. Hence the need for the provisions of international humanitarian law that specifically codify the responsibility that occupying powers have for the wellbeing of these residents.
In Iraq, the question of “responsibility” for water treatment and other basic functions of governance was certainly considerably muddied by the whole elaborate political play by which a supposed “sovereignty” was handed over to Iraqi political figures, though in many significant regards their ability to exercise true sovereignty remains highly circumscribed.
In Gaza, what has been happening on the sewage issue has been a certain amount of wilfull disregard of the Gazans’ strong interest in this aspect of their basic physical wellbeing by the Israeli occupation authorities. But in addition, Israel’s government has also been intentionally starving Gaza of the electric power and other inputs required even to mitigate the most threatening aspects of the sewage crisis.
Read, for example, this horrendous first-person account, published by Reuters Alertnet, of how the sewage crisis has been affecting the wellbeing of Gazans since at least last summer.
The writer, Manal, says this:

It’s hard to imagine that someone could be excited about a water pumping station. But if you knew that this pumping station, if functioning, would serve as a barrier between your community and raw sewage then perhaps you would change your mind.
Six months ago this water pumping station opened right next to my home. It’s part of a system that serves 60 percent of the population in Gaza. We were pleased to hear this news as we had no other option before but to dump our untreated sewage in wells. As you can imagine, this posed an immense health hazard to all members of the community.
So when the news came that our sewage would be treated and we would no longer have to dump our own waste near to our homes, we breathed a sigh of relief.
The new station receives 30,000-40,000 cubic metres of waste water every day, and it should pump 120 cubic meters an hour through each of six water pumps. But this is Gaza. From the beginning, the station had only three pumps installed instead of the six planned. The closure of Gaza borders since June 2007 by the Israeli government has meant that the essential parts needed to build the remaining three could not come through.
Electricity cuts have been affecting the efficiency of the station. The emergency generator is not functioning well either as it needs maintenance but spare parts are lacking. The limited amount of fuel that is let into Gaza is not enough to run the generator for long hours.
… This station was supposed to be a blessing for the neighborhood. It turned out to be a curse, a health hazard for us all. And we are now facing a public health crisis.
Sewage water is filling the streets of the neighborhood surrounding the station, and flooding the nearby houses – the stench is unbearable.
Tenants in ground floor flats were forced to leave and move to live with neighbors in the higher floors. People have been reduced to using sand to absorb the sewage water in their houses.
The number of children who have been taken ill has increased considerably. Cases of diarrhea are mounting by the day. Even now children continue to play outside amongst the raw sewage – where else can they go?
What disgusts me is that this could all be prevented if the Israelis had just allowed the opening of one checkpoint to let the spare parts and fuel through.
Children started their new term this week even though there is sewage water in the neighborhood schools. As with all the problems brought about by the blockade, we have to continue our daily lives, otherwise we will have nothing left.
… I ask myself and I ask the international community – how can children get a good education in this environment? How can they look to a better future?

Read, too, the comments that the UN’s new Under-SG for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, made yesterday after he completed his first visit to Gaza:

“I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things that I have seen and heard today, which are the result of current restrictions and the limitations on the number of goods that are being allowed into Gaza,’ said Mr. Holmes during a day-long visit to the Gaza Strip. ‘Around 80 percent of the population is dependant on food aid from international organizations. Poverty and unemployment are increasing and the private sector has more or less collapsed. Only ten percent of the amount of goods that entered Gaza a year ago are being permitted to enter now,” he said.

The complete chokehold that Israel has exercised over every physical interaction between Gaza and the outside world needs to be ended– NOW.
And in Iraq, the six million residents of Baghdad also need to be saved from the stinking, health-threatening effects of military occupation. Governance in Iraq needs to be handed back to a genuinely sovereign Iraqi government that is accountable to its own people, not to any outside power.
Military occupation rule: it is always, potentially, a threat to the wellbeing and even survival of people and the communities they live in. It was never envisaged in international law as being a longlasting means of governance, but only a short-term stop-gap arrangement pending conclusion of a final peace agreement. These two occupations need to end.