Just World News with Helena Cobban

US military commanders in Iraq have identified a major new threat– Iraqi hospitals!
That seems the only conclusion to be drawn from this piece of spine-chilling reporting from the NYT’s Eric Schmitt:

Military commanders point to several accomplishments in Falluja. A bastion of resistance has been eliminated, with lower than expected American military and Iraqi civilian casualties. Senior military officials say up to 1,600 insurgents have been killed and hundreds more captured, altogether more than half the number they estimated were in the city when the campaign began.
The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.

This is an outrageous and criminal argument to make.
Not only (see previous post) has the US made a positive decision not to count Iraqi civilian casualties. But now, any independent institution that issues casualty reports is judged to be “a propaganda weapon for the militants” and on that basis is to be shut down.
Watch out, the people who run the excellent British medical journal, The Lancet! There might be a Tomahawk missile heading your way any day now!
There is a difference, of course, between The Lancet and Fallujah General Hospital. Fallujah hospital was actually, until it was shut down, providing urgently needed medical services to a beleaguered population. Shutting it down in a situation of anything less than immediate military necessity–if there had been snipers on its roof, for example–is therefore clearly a major violation of the laws of war.
No such argument of “military necessity” has yet been made. All we have is the claim that the hospital was a “propaganda weapon in the hands of the militants.”
This is so sick, so unbelievably tragic. How can US commanders make these outrageous arguments and believe that the people who hear them will simply nod sagely and say, “Oh yes, that makes good sense”??
Also, why should anyone take seriously their claim that the Iraqi civilian casualties in Fallujah were “lower than expected”, since they also clearly admit that they don’t “do” casualty counts.
I wonder, at the military briefing from which those quotes were taken, where the follow-up questions from the press were:
“Okay, so how many Iraqi civilian casualties have there been?” ” How many were you expecting?” ” Was it valid to go ahead and launch the offensive even if you were expecting that high a number of casualties?” ” Tell us what is actually being done to help the wounded among the Iraqi civilians?”
No, none of those questions appear to have been asked. The media people involved just went along for the ride. Virtually oblivious to the moral consequences of what they were writing about– not to mention, to the quite predictable fallout of the anti-humanitarian nature of US actions on the politics inside Iraq.
It’s as if they don’t even really see Iraqis as fully human, subject to normal human motivations and the natural human desire for personal dignity… But perhaps doing that would be a dangerous exercize.

Andrew Mack, former director of Kofi Annan’s strategic planning unit, has a very important and carefully argued piece in the Japan Times today. He focuses on the issue of the gross disproportionality between the numbers of deaths of US combatants in Iraq and those that the US military has inflicted upon Iraqi civilians.
A (dis-)proportion of 100:1, that is.
His conclusion:

essentially for political reasons, the U.S. has chosen to pursue a counterinsurgency policy that is almost guaranteed to generate a huge civilian death toll.
In the West there is justifiable outrage at the barbarous beheadings of foreigners in Iraq, but relatively little concern about the tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose deaths are the inevitable consequence of a U.S. strategy designed to reduce U.S. casualties.

I should note that–for people who believe in “just war theory” (a relatively late accretion into Christian doctrine, but one that many westerrners seem to believe in strongly)– the “proportionality” of military actions taken by one’s own side is very important.
So, actually, is the issue of the “probability of success”. I.e., just war theorists recognize that since war is itself massively harmful, you don’t want to have it drag on and be “unsuccessful”.
I guess the Bushies just didn’t read their St. Augustine before they launched this war?
Proportionality of military action, and in particular the need to take positive action to avoid the infliction of harm on civilians, is also an important principle in the international laws of war.
I went to the website of the ICRC, the body internationally charged with interpreting and guarding the integrity of the international laws of war, and I punched “proportionality” into their internal search. It came up with this lengthy list of materials.
One of them was this appeal, issued Nov 9, dealing explicitly with the situation in Iraq. It starts:

The ICRC reminds all those involved in the armed confrontations in Iraq that international humanitarian law prohibits the killing or harming of civilians who are not directly taking part in the hostilities.
It calls upon all fighters to take every feasible precaution to spare civilians and civilian property and to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality in all military operations.
[“Distinction” = the positive obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take active steps to avoid damage to the latter. Where such a distinction cannot be clearly made, commanders are obliged to assume that the individuals concerned are civilians until the opposite has been proved.]

Okay. How dispropotional have the US operations in Iraq been?
Andrew Mack, in the article cited above, builds on the results of the recent Lancet survey. He notes that the authors of that survey already recognized that Fallujah was such an extreme “outlier” in terms of the casualty totals inflicted there, that they had excluded the Fallujah figures from their global estimate of the death toll. He writes,

If the death rate from Fallujah had been included in the calculation, the “excess death” total would be closer to 200,000.
… It is important to note that the huge death toll is not due simply to the war — most violent deaths have occurred since the United States declared victory in April 2003.
The survey also shows that 84 percent of the violent deaths were caused not by rebels, but by coalition forces. And most of these deaths weren’t caused by soldiers fighting on the ground, but by long-range air and artillery strikes. Women and children together made up more than half of the violent deaths, with 38 percent of the total being children.

He notes:

Continue reading “Disproportionate violence”

Here are two good pieces of reporting by Dahr Jamail:
This is the latest post (Nov 12) on his blog. In it he describes driving round Baghdad with his driver/friend/interpeter Abu Talat…

One of our stops is at the home of Dr. Wamid Omar Nathmi, a senior political scientist at Baghdad University. An older, articulate man who vehemently opposed the regime of Saddam Hussein, he is now critical of the US policy which is engulfing Iraq in violence, bloodshed and chaos.
He told me that during the buildup to the siege of Fallujah, he had sent John Negroponte, the current so-called ambassador of Iraq, a letter which, along with several other points, asked him,

As part of the Bush/Allawist campaign to subdue Iraq’s cities, the US military has been turning off the water to many of them. You can imagine what this means for civilian families, hospitals, etc.
It is also a clear breach of the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which deals with precisely the issue of what is permitted and what not permitted during situations of siege and assault on cities.
Dan O’Huiginn and his colleagues from Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq* have pulled together a very useful briefing paper on this issue. It’s written from a UK perspective– drawing together the info on the denial-of-water issue for British MPs and urging them to act on it. I am sure that it could easily be edited to form an appeal to legislators and authorities in other countries.
Especially the US!
I note parenthetically that while many in the US political establishment argue strongly for respect of the provisions of international humanitarian law that apply to the treatment of prisoners-of-war, or wounded combatants, they generally seem less enthusiastic about arguing for the provisions that are designed to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation.
I’m wondering whether this is because, while there is an implied “reciprocity” in all the Geneva Conventions and annexes, it might be harder for Americans to imagine that their (our) homeland might ever come under foreign military occupation than it is to imagine that US soldiers might be taken prisoner in hostilities?
This failure of imagination notwithstanding, it seems evident to me that basic human ethics, as well as the provisions of international humanitarian law, should be a powerful argument for trying to separate civilians as much as possible from the horrors of war.
Also, as Dan and Co. argue in their briefing paper, it only makes good political sense in the Iraqi context for the US/Allawists to try to treat Iraqi civilians decently…
—
*Sorry I got the full name of CASI wrong in an earlier post.

I can’t add much to what everyone is learning, thinking, and feeling these days about Fallujah.
I just note that the current massive incursion of foreign (that is, US) fighters into the city is a tragedy and a travesty against all the norms of reason and international law.
The Guardian, citing NPR, is reporting some large-scale desertions among the Iraqi forces who were supposed to be “spearheading”, or at least accompanying, the US assailants:

One Iraqi battalion shrunk from over 500 men to 170 over the past two weeks – with 255 members quitting over the weekend, the [NPR] correspondent said.

That was a correspondent “embedded” with the US military who got and reported that story. Good for her (or him).
Juan Cole reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni party that has been in the interim government so far, is now threatening to quit it. Also, Moqtada Sadr’s people and the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars have both called on the members of the “Iraqi” forces to desert rather than join the operation against Fallujah.
If the “Iraqi” forces have indeed now lost two-thirds of that battalion– and who knows what has happened with other battalions?– it strikes me that once again, as already happened in April and July, the US-Allawist insistence on pushing forward with a militaristic assault has resulted in setting back the project to (re-)constitute a new national force, as well as to (re-)constitute a new national political order.
It is quite possible that the only people left in the “Iraqi” battalions after the big desertions, are Kurds. What will that do for inter-ethnic entente in the country, I wonder?
… It seems clear to me that the timing of the assault has been calibrated to fall between last week’s US elections and the opening November 22 of the “Iraqi reconstruction conference” in Sharm al-Sheikh. I guess the Americans wanted to have the worst of the assault all over and “mopped up” before the conference opens.
But who on earth knows what will happen between now and then? Violence will always beget more violence.
Timing-wise, the synchronicity between these extremely tragic affairs in Iraq and Arafat’s long demise in Paris is also very significant…

Continue reading “Fallujah: the new world “order””