Just World News with Helena Cobban

Regarding the responsibility of the US military and political command at the highest levels for the commission of atrocities by people at lower levels of the military ladder– as I just mentioned in this earlier post–the work of Ian Fishback, a captain in the 82d Airborne and a West Point grad, has been particularly courageous.
Fishback was most probably one of the main sources for Human Rights Watch’s recent report on torture and abuse being carried out by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, the WaPo carries the text of the letter that Fishback sent on Sept. 16 to Sen. John McCain.
In it, he wrote to McCain (from Fort Bragg, NC):

While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. On 7 May 2004, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s testimony that the United States followed the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and the “spirit” of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan prompted me to begin an approach for clarification. For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General’s office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men.
Instead of resolving my concerns, the approach for clarification process leaves me deeply troubled. Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is a tragedy. I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.
That is in the past and there is nothing we can do about it now. But, we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does not happen again. Take a major step in that direction; eliminate the confusion. My approach for clarification provides clear evidence that confusion over standards was a major contributor to the prisoner abuse. We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation.
Some do not see the need for this work. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Others argue that clear standards will limit the President’s ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable…

If you go to this page of the HRW report you can find the testimony of anonymous informant “C”, which is prefaced with this explanation:

C is an officer with the 82nd Airborne Division and West Point graduate who served in Afghanistan from August 2002 to February 2003 and in Iraq from September 2003 to March 2004. HRW spoke with him more than two dozen times in July, August, and September 2005. Below are excerpts from those interviews grouped by subject matter (the subject headings were supplied by Human Rights Watch).
At FOB Mercury, he was not in charge of interrogations but saw several interrogations in progress and received regular reports from NCOs on ill-treatment of detainees. He felt strongly that abuses there reflected larger policy confusion about what was permitted, and that the officer corps in particular has a duty to come forward and take responsibility.

Based on that and on the content of the testimony that follows, it certainly looks as if “C” is Capt. Fishback. In which case I’d like to send him my sincerest congratulations for acting as a fine, conscientious American and a responsible officer.

The body part porn story is (at last) reaching the English-language portion of the MSM. Today’s UK Guardian has a good short report on the NTFU website, written by Andrew Brown.
Yesterday, Brown and I briefly discussed the “trophy” nature of the images on the NTFU site– both the sexual-porn ones that are its usual staple and the body-part-porn ones that are its most shocking special feature. He quotes me as saying: “It is like finding Mistah Kurtz, sitting in the middle of the black jungle, surrounded by heads on stakes.”
The NYT also has a piece on the topic today. It’s by Thom Shanker. It gives no hint of the role that people in the blogosphere– Nur al-Cubicle, Christiane, I, others– played in getting this story to an English-reading public, but makes it seem as though the idea for the story sprang fully-formed out of Thom Shanker’s omniscient head.
Oh wait. Buried down deep here in the piece is a reference to Mark Glaser’s September 20 piece on the topic in the Online Journalism Review.
Shanker doesn’t, however, go as far as mentioning Glaser by name… Oh no. That would make it seem as though someone other than his own exalted self had been in the lead on this story.
(And nor, of course, does he mention Glaser’s citing of my role in helping break the story.)
Shanker’s “lede” in his “story” does not focus on the existence of the obscene, deeply troubling NTFU website. Instead, he leads with this:

The Army has opened an investigation into whether American troops have sent gruesome photographs of Iraqi war dead to an Internet site where the soldiers were given free access to online pornography, Army officials said Tuesday…

So what about this breathlessly announced Army “investigation”? What is it going to focus on??
It looks like, as usual, the lower-downs and grunts. (Think Lynndie England, but in this case most likely male.) Here’s Shanker:

Officials said the military’s preliminary inquiry was being conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. They said it had proved difficult to identify the military personnel who can be seen in some of the photographs wearing Army or Marine Corps uniforms but no clear name tags or unit markings.

But going after the grunts and foot-soldiers is really the “easy”– and I would say, the wrong and dishonest– thing to do. As I said in remarks quoted in Glaser’s article that are notably not cited in Shanker’s piece.
The outrage here, folks, is that members of the US military committed outrages of mutilation, killing, and desecration of bodily remains against their fellow humans in the first place. Not so much, I would argue, the boy’s-clubbish sharing of atrocity photos afterwards– though that is also pretty bad, and might at the margins incentivize the commission of further atrocities.
Those atrocities against Iraqis and Afghans were committed, in large part, because of the Bush administration’s wilfull and criminal disregard of its obligations under the laws of war. (See next post.)
Well, I’m truly delighted the story is getting out. A little due attribution to predecessors and a little less olympian assumption by the NYT’s writers and editors of the claim to their own omniscience would of course be even better.
(You can check out some of my fairly ground-breaking August writings on the NTFU issue here.)

Back in April, I published a CSM column in which I argued for two key changes in US policy toward Iraq.
Now, very belatedly, key portions of the west’s decision-making apparatus seem to have become persuaded of the value of these changes.
The first change I advocated was that, “The Bush administration should issue an authoritative declaration that the US has no claims of its own on Iraq’s territory or natural resources…” (That would include for permanent military abses.)
Today, the WaPo’s well-connected columnist David Ignatius, acting as the carrier of a set of crucial messages from the generals who head US Centcom to the broader US public, tells us that,

Centcom chief, Gen. John Abizaid… [and] his top generals … don’t want permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. Indeed, they believe such a high-visibility American presence will only make it harder to stabilize the country.

Right.
The second change I advocated back in April was that Iraqi and US policymakers should consider tweaking the plan for the transition to Iraqi self-rule, “so that what is drafted and voted on this year would be only an interim constitution, rather than the final thing…”
Today, the International Crisis Group– a well-respected global think tank that acts as a sort of policy-advice shop to the “better behaved” western governments, like the Scandinavians, the Canadians– has issued a report that states bluntly that the constitution-making process in Iraq has “gone awry”.
The report notes (probably rightly) that it is now too late to revise any further the terms of the constitutional text that will be voted up or down in a referendum October 15. But it urges the US to,

embark on a last-ditch, determined effort to broker a true compromise between Shiites, Kurds and Sunni Arabs that addresses core Sunni Arab concerns without crossing Shiite or Kurdish red lines. This would require that… the U.S. sponsor negotiations to reach a political agreement prior to 15 October concerning steps the parties would commit to take after the December elections, whether through legislation or constitutional amendment.

In other words– as now seems very clear from the terms of the present constitutional text itself– this text would be subject to very rapid amendment, and would therefore function only as an “interim constitution”, anyway. But the Crisis group report spells that out a lot more clearly.
The Crisis Group also urged two other key changes: that the number of present Iraqi provinces that could agglomerate into new “regions” should be four or less– to lessen fears of the emergence of a single, 9-province Shiite “super-region”; and to exclude low-level members of the old Baath Party from any future administrative or other sanctions.
Now, I know the International Crisis Group is not nearly as powerful as the US military. So I’ll leave you to follow up on the rest of their report and its conclusions on your own.
What was much more interesting to me was David Ignatius’s reporting from his high-level embedment with Gen. Abizaid and his supporting generals…

Continue reading “Realism from the generals (and the ICG)”

My good friend and esteemed colleague Juan Cole and I continue to disagree about whether the appropriate thing to call for now is the speedy withdrawal of all US (and UK) forces from Iraq, or the speedy withdrawal of only the US and UK ground troops.
In this post Friday, Juan called for withdrawing all the ground troops but leaving “a couple of air bases” in the Tel Afar region, “along with some Special Ops forces”. The stated goal there was to “forestall” the outbreak of an all-out civil war.
I disagreed.
Juan then wrote here yesterday:

My good friend Helena Cobban offers her own critique of my position on the need for some way of forestalling massive conventional civil war in Iraq in the aftermath of an Anglo-American withdrawal of ground troops.
She asks where a plan like mine has succeeded. I answer, Kosovo.

The following quotation comes from “Serbia loses another one”, the description of the Kosovo war of spring 1999 given in the IISS’s Strategic Survey 1999/2000:

In summary, therefore, Milosevic was persuaded he had to accept Western terms by a combination of diplomatic moves that isolated his regime, and the threat of a ground offensive. The air campaign by itself did not win the war; its use in combination with preparations for a ground offensive and clever diplomatic work achieved this feat.(pp.108-109)

Juan also wrote there:

Cobban mischaracterizes my plan insofar as what I propose is giving the new Iraqi army close air support of a sort that would allow it to face down conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone. There are now about 3000 Iraqi army troops that could and would fight in such a battle, and US air support would ensure decisive victories.

3,000 Iraqi army troops– even if they could be mustered and led effectively– is nowhere near what would be needed to ” face down conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone”. (Even if this were indeed the main threat that the US military and its local clients faced inside Iraq, which I highly doubt.)
In the case of Kosovo, the potential ground troop threat that helped persuade Milosevic to change his mind was one of a massive offensive by excellently trained, equipped, and led NATO ground troops. As we know, there are no units in the “Iraqi ground forces” that come anywhere close to fitting this description… Not least, because of the continuing, very acute problems with unit cohesion and loyalty inside those units.
If there were a “conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone”, then perhaps– just perhaps– “close air support” could be used to some effect.
But even then, not decisively… Think of the Israeli Air Force giving “close air support” to the IDF ground troops besieging Beirut in the summer of 1982. Even with that combination of punishing weaponry, the Israelis were unable to crush the PLO and its allied forces by using purely military power. At the end, because of tough fight put up by the Palestinian and Lebanese resisters, the length of time it took the Israeli ground forces to advance in street-by-street fighting, and the uproar the whole affair started causing in the whole of the Sunni world– the Israelis were forced to negotiate an exit for the PLO forces. That exit left them scattered– but it left their leadership basically intact and ready to open another front, another day…
But I doubt very much if the main “threat” to the pro-US order in Iraq would come from forces pursuing anything like a “conventional military attack”. In which case, the use of American “close air support” would be even messier yet, and politically even more damaging.
Also, as I noted in a comment I posted here this morning, the messy geopolitical outcome that now exists in Kosovo, six years after that NATO military “victory”, is definitely not the kind of outcome we would consider even faintly acceptable in Iraq. Indeed, if translated into an Iraqi context, the kind of chronic political irresolution, uncertainty, and gangsterism that mark today’s Kosovo would augur the continuation of major turmoil inside Iraq’s much more heavily armed confines.
Juan also wrote:

I don’t want to be thin-skinned, but I have to object to the ad-hominem approach of both Cobban and Achcar … in asking about my credentials to propose such plans. First of all, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, who headed the Department of Defense during and after the Iraq War, supposedly have such credentials…. Second, my thinking on these things generally tracks with that of scholars such as Barry Posen at MIT’s Security Studies Program, with which I have an affiliation, by the way. Third, the details of how the US military would accomplish a task would of course be left to the military people, who are experts in their own world; but over-arching goals can usefully be suggested by civilian analysts. Finally, I’m not exactly innocent of military history.

Okay, Juan, I apologise if I understated your familiarity with the principles of strategic analysis.
I do, however, still have to ask the question I asked earlier about how– after a total withdrawal of US-UK ground troops from southern Iraq– you would propose that the “couple of air bases” he proposes that the US keep somewhere in the Tel Afar area would get resupplied… (Who was it that said that armchair strategicsts like to talk about “grand strategy” but serious analysts always look first at logistics?)
Finally, some people have suggested that, since Juan and I agree on so many things, maybe we should not write so much about our remaining points of disagreement. I believe, however, that the main point on which we disagree is a very important one: namely, whether the US has some sort of “moral duty” not to “abandon” Iraq and pull all our troops out at this point, even if– as we both, I think, now agree– the troop presence has been pretty bad for the Iraqi people up until now.
It was in response to this claimed “moral duty” of the US that Juan fashioned the “two bases plus Special Ops forces” plan that he unveiled on Friday.
I note firstly, that Juan’s argument on the “moral duty” business is almost exactly the same as President Bush’s…. Essentially, “We cannot pull our troops out now, because a bloodbath would follow.”
I disagree. We do not know whether a bloodbath would follow. Post-withdrawal bloodbaths predicted with great confidence by numerous occupying and colonial powers in the past did not occur. (Most recently, Lebanon, May 2000.)
But we do know that the presence of the US occupation force in Iraq over the past 30 months has led to considerably more civil strife and lethal internal conflict than existed inside the country at the time of our entry in March 2003 (and indeed, for several years prior to that.)
So we cannot argue that the presence of US forces has been a stabilizing factor for Iraqis. Far from it.
Juan Cole may well agree with that statement. (Though I doubt that George Bush would.) But Juan then goes on to say that, because Iraq is so fractured and vulnerable to further strife, then the US should stick around to prevent escalation and if possible to mend it.
Like, we should invite a fox to stick around and “mend” and “secure” a half-ravaged hen-house– simply because we hold that same fox responsible for already having done most of that ravaging in the past?
I doubt it.
This version of what’s sometimes called “the Pottery Barn rule” always seemed to me to to be based on a deep lie.
Anyway, if readers want to see what my own plan is– as laid out in full here on JWN back on July 6, here it is: My 9-point plan “How to Exit from Iraq”.
(By the way, for more on the dangers of Kosovo, read #3 there.)
And if you want to see more of my argument why we need a pullout of US troops that is total, speedy, and generous, read this July 21 column in the CSM.

I’ve been reading the
post
Juan Cole had up Friday, in which he criticized an argument
Michael Schwartz made
as to why the US
forces should get out of Iraq
as soon as possible, and proposed his own “strategic plan” for what the
US
military should do in Iraq
.

I disagree with most of the arguments Juan makes there. As someone who has
worked in strategic studies on and off for twenty years now, I can tell you
that many of the supposedly “strategic” arguments he offers make little sense
in operational terms.

Moreover, as you will discover if you read further down in this post, there
is also some intriguing political news out of
Iraq recently. It points to the possibility
of a strengthening of a key Sunni-Shiite coalition there that could
cut the ground from under the feet of those who argue that the US (or British)
forces have some kind of a “moral duty” to stay in the country to forestall
all-out civil war there