I have just started reading the Schlesinger report on US detainee operations. Its main thrust, in my reading is to skewer Lt.-Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, until recently the commander of all the forces in Iraq.
Douglas Jehl, in this piece in Wednesday’s NYT, makes the judgment that the report “drew a line that extended to the defense secretary’s office.” I think that mis-characterizes the report a bit. In the part I’ve read, there are only a few references to any responsibility Rumsfeld or any other Pentagon suits might have had. But there are plenty to Sanchez and quite a few to Gen Myers, the head of Centcom.
The report seems to be a fairly serious piece of work, in the circumstances. (And yes, I write that in the full knowledge that their lenses and worldview are significantly different than mine.) The Commission members laid out a case that responsibility for the abuses should go high up both the military and Penatgon-civilian chains of command. In the Recommendations, however, they pulled their punches, notably not issuing there any explicit call for resignations or further prosecutions.
Elsewhere in the report, though, they do say the existing programs of prosecution should be pursued aggressively and perhaps augmented.
Here are some key passages from the Exec Summary:
Health professionals and U.S. torture
My friend Maureen’s son is a newly graduated medical doctor who paid for
his med school through a U.S. Army-run scheme and as a result is soon going
to be deployed to Iraq. I can barely imagine how worried she is about
the whole situation. Mo, this post is for you (and him).
I guess many JWN readers will have seen reference to
this
article, in the current issue of the premier British medical journal
The Lancet, in which University of Minnesota bioethicist Stephen Miles
pulled together the available evidence about the failures of U.S. military
medical personnel to abide by their professional duty–and the Geneva Conventions–
in their work in detention situations in Iraq (mainly Abu Ghraib), Guantanamo,
and Afghanistan.
As this
excellent editorial in the same issue of The Lancet summarizes
Dr. Miles’s case,
there are now reports
of medical personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq allegedly abusing detainees,
falsifying and delaying death certificates, and covering up homicides. No
unprompted reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel before
the official investigation into practices at Abu Ghraib. At Guantanamo Bay,
medical records were routinely shared with interrogators in a clear breach
of confidentiality and with the knowledge that such information can be misused
despite objections by the medical team of the International Committee of
the Red Cross, who in protest suspended their medical visits.
I’m glad that a number of global media organizations, including CNN, ABC
News, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, etc have picked up on Miles’s study,
even if only very briefly.
I note, too, that (the US branch of) Physicians for Human Rights has also
paid some good attention to the Miles study, which meshes in well with their
own continuing project to look at
“Dual Loyalty and Human Rights in health professional practise”
. The PHR folks have been carrying out that project in collaboration
with researchers at the University of Cape Town who are only too well aware
of how–during the apartheid era in South Africa–health professionals were routinely
forced by the grossly abusive state to violate their own professional ethics,
especially in situations of conflict against national liberation forces.
Welcome to the dilemmas and “conflicting loyalties” faced by the medical
personnel working with the US military in Iraq…
Pray for peace in Najaf (& new Golden Oldies here)
I just put up two more months’ worth of Golden Oldies onto the sidebar here.
Last November was quite a momentous month for Iraq!
October was a momentous month for our family. My elder daughter got married (and I was pretty busy helping out.)
BUT…. today, further bad news from Najaf. Reuters’ Michael Georgy at 21:38 EST has this:
- U.S. aircraft launched a fresh assault on Shi’ite rebels in the embattled Iraqi city of Najaf early on Sunday after talks on transferring control of the mosque at the centre of a two-week siege ran into trouble.
A U.S. military AC-130 gunship unleashed rapid cannon and howitzer fire on positions held by rebels loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Reuters witness said.
The attack lit the area with white flashes and was followed by a blast. Smoke drifted over the old city near rebel positions, and flashes were seen on the outskirts of the city. Tracer fire and orange flashes went skyward in reply.
Well, I was planning to go to Quaker meeting tomorrow anyway. I always go if I can. It restores a little space of calm, sanity, peacefulness, and loving-kindness in a world which, God knows, needs every ounce it can get of those qualities.
Now, even more reason to go.
It’s the policies, stupid!
More moaning and handwringing in Washington this week over the everywhere evident lack of success of the US government’s campaign to “sell” the US to the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world. Condi Rice gave a major speech at the US Institute of Peace Thursday on this theme. The next day, the WaPo‘s Robin Wright had a front-page article joining and amplifying the general bemoaning.
“Oh, if only some well-conceived p.r. campaign could come along and just unlock the magic door that would enable the always well-intentioned US government to explain its good intentions to the world’s Muslim masses” …That seems to be the theme.
People like Rice and Wright who harp on it so much either forget completely, or seek to minimize to near-zero, one simply fact:
It’s not the “values” or the “image” of the US that Muslims around the world “hate”.
It’s the policies, stupid!
So one more p.r. push–in a series that is already, let’s face it, very long and thus far completely unsuccessful– just ain’t going to succeed. Here’s my advice to Condi and her minions, and Robin Wright (who should know better) and all her colleagues in the major US media:
Why don’t you quit sitting around agonizing over whether “Radio Sawa” or some slick little new US-funded news magazine in Urdu will finally “do the trick”. And then start looking instead at the policies, the policies, the policies.
If US citizens and our appointed leaders really listen to what the grievances that other people around the world have about the content of the US government’s policies; if we/they engage in serious dialogue about those grievances, and then actually change the policies that are seen–in many cases, rightly–as bullying, imperial, abusive, and just plain unfair… If all that happened, then no slick p.r. campaign would even be needed to “sell” America to the 1.3 billion Muslims and the several billions of other, non-Muslim critics that the US has around the world.
Policies like what, you may ask?
US tanks rampaging in Najaf
Tragic folly. Tragic folly.
Why do the US tanks prowling round Najaf look so like the Israeli tanks prowling round Ramallah? Why do US tanks in Sadr City look like Israeli tanks in Gaza?
(Maybe because they are all embodiments of the same, extremely bullying mindset?)
But why, oh why, does anyone in the US chain of command think that such a naked use of crushing military force could even possibly be a way to build a lasting peace in Iraq?
Indeed, is any actual strategic “thinking” going on, on the American side, at all? Or is it simply that people up and down the chain of command are all just driven by the same childish desire to “put a major hurt” on Sadr’s supporters that was expressed by Marine Maj. Holahan on Tuesday?
That is a distinct possibility. It is also a very scary thought.
Najaf: US command chain broken
Yesterday evening I started to tease apart some of the political stuff that’s been happening in Iraq, over the now-linked issues of Moqtada’s stand-off in Najaf and the National Conference going ahead in Baghdad. Overnight, I started wondering about the decisionmaking on the US-forces side.
Who on the US side had made the decision to start and then maintain the confrontation against Moqtada? I wondered. The answers that are now starting to become available make depressing reading, and portray a command system for the US forces in Iraq that looks seriously broken.
These answers–which are still not totally complete–come in an informative piece in the NYT by Alex Berenson and John F. Burns. Datelined from Najaf, and citing officers in the local commands of the Marines and US Army right there in the city, the two men write:
- Acting without the approval of the Pentagon or senior Iraqi officials, the Marine officers said in recent interviews, they turned a firefight with Mr. Sadr’s forces on Thursday, Aug. 5, into a eight-day pitched battle…
They continue by noting that:
- Fighting here continues, and what the Marines had hoped would be a quick, decisive action has bogged down into a grinding battle that appears to have strengthened the hand of Mr. Sadr, whose stature rises each time he survives a confrontation with the American military. It may have weakened the credibility of the interim Iraqi government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, showing him, many Iraqis say, to be alternately rash and indecisive, as well as ultimately beholden to American overrule on crucial military and political matters.
Actually, I would describe the negative political consequences of that unbelievably rash decision by the local Marines commanders in much stronger terms than Berenson and Burns do.
Compared with the situation back on August 1, before the present round of escalation in Najaf, I think (for the reasons I indicated yesterday, and earlier) it is indubitably the case that Moqtada has become politically stronger inside Iraq, and Allawi weaker.
In addition, the all-important plan to rebuild a viable Iraqi security force has been set back considerably once again. And once again, as in the April round of escalations, the decomposing of a large chunk of the Iraqi security force has been caused by the US Marines going all gung-ho into a quite unnecessary local military confrontation and then–since they require a local Iraqi-force “cover–forcing the still-fragile Iraqi forces to join them and thus forcing the Iraqi forces into an unnecessary and politically challenging battle long before they are militarily or politically ready for any such test.
Is it any wonder that the fledgling Iraqi forces fell apart once again, when faced with such a test? Do the Marines have no learning curve at all, I wonder?
In both cases–April, Fallujah, and August, Najaf–these confrontations came almost immediately after the Marines, deploying to replace US Army units, decided unilaterally to change the “rules of engagement” under which the Army had operated, which in both cases had previously kept the Army units out of the known geographic areas where their presence would be seen as immediately provocative.
So here’s my second question: Why on earth would decisions like changing the existing rules of engagement be left to the local officers, rather than requiring authorization from higher up the chain of command?
The concept of “fire control” is a crucial one in the conduct of any military operations. At the small-unit level, it has to do with using resources efficiantly in order to achieve the objectives. At a larger-unit level it becomes more strategic and political, as well.
Did those escalatory, gung-ho decisions made by the local Marines officers serve or dis-serve the broad strategic objectives of the US in Iraq?
Politics in Iraq
The delegation from Baghdad did not get to meet Moqtada Sadr Tuesday. (I
wonder if that had anything to do with the possibility that the delegates
flew into Najaf on a US Blackhawk chopper, as Jazeera reported?) But
the news is that the delegation will try again Wednesday or Thursday …
Even more importantly, we should all be looking at the many signs there are
that a lively political process is currently underway inside Iraq today
. That, despite all the moves the US forces are constantly making
to try to escalate the military/insecurity situation.
It’s still hard to say how this political process will turn out. Contrary
to what some pro-Allawist people have continued to try to say, Moqtada is
nowhere near being “run out of town on a rail” (in the infelicitous phrasing
of US journo Chris Allbritton.)
Indeed, Moqtada has been doing really well, politically, over the
past ten days. Not least, he has forced the whole 1,300-member
Iraqi “National Conference” to focus almost totally on his issue, rather
than on the planned agenda of signing smoothly off on the election-prep plans
previously cooked up by Allawi and his cronies.
To try to get a reading on the political situation inside the
country, I’ve been doing a little search in “all the usual sources”–mostly in English,
but also Al-Hayat in Arabic. I found some very interesting items,
which I’ll just quickly list here.
Iraq: notes on (journalistic) sources
I want to go back briefly
to the
judgment
Juan Cole made Monday when he compared the coverage of the NatConf in
that day’s NYT and WaPo. Unlike me, he strongly preferred John Burns’s
coverage in the NYT, noting that portrayed the NatConf mainly as, “a mess,
disrupted by repeated mortar fire and by angry delegates who stormed the
stage to denounce the Allawi government and demand it cease military operations
in Najaf.” Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s
coverage
in the WaPo Cole described, by contrast, as:
an almost panglossian story of the triumph of democracy– noisy,
disruptive, but still triumphant. He reports that the delegates said they
had secured from Allawi a promise to suspend military action until further
negotiations could take place, and he seems even to believe that Allawi
gave such an undertaking and would abide by it!
Well, I read both stories carefully. What distinguished Chandra’s
for me was the wealth of useful and illustrative detail in it. You got
the sense not only that he’d been in the convention hall, but also that he’d
talked with delegates and generally understood what was going on. There were quotes from participants; there was the explanation of the voting system being deliberated on; etc etc. Burns
gave none of that. So I stand by my earlier judgment.
And it
rapidly became clear during the day Monday (as I noted
here
) (a) that most Iraqi forces had indeed stopped participating in the US
assault on Fallujah, and (b) that the delegates whad indeed won a commitment
from Allawi to allow some form of tnegotiation with Sadr to proceed.
So no, Chandra’s story was not a “panglossian story of the triumph
of democracy”. But it was fairly well-informed description of the
messy process of real politics that was starting to play out on the
conference floor. As I’ve noted before, not perfect, or perfectly
democratic politics. But real politics; and a process far, far preferable
to Allawi’s earlier pursuit of a “take no hostages” assault against Moqtada.
And, while I’m in a refuting kind of a mood, I’ll just spend a moment on
Chris Allbritton, a young US journo who once went to Iraq as a free-floating
blog-espondent but has now ended up working for Time magazine as well…
Faiza’s view: read it!
Friends, Faiza of A Family in Baghdad has a wonderful post up today, describing events in her life between August 11 and August 14–in English.
(She’s had it up in Arabic since 8/14; and I struggled to read it, realizing it’s extremely interesting and informative. Big thanks to “May” who does the translations for her!)
One of the things Faiza (and May) give us is a close-up description of one of the preparatory gatherings that were held before the big nationwide election-prep conference that started Sunday. It indicates that the level of democratic practice used in the whole election-preparation-preparation process has been very low. And therefore, the general political legitimacy–among Iraqis, who are, after all, the people whose views are central to this–of the whole process risks being correspondingly low.
This is what Faiza tells us she did last Wednesday:
- I took the day off today, and went in the morning to the Professional’s Union Conference, with my Doctor friend, whom I was acquainted with during the Business women Society. She is an active, educated member; I like her personality, and respect her experience. The Conference was held in Al-Elwiya Club Hall, and on our way we passed the most dangerous area, the Conference Palace, where you can see a fortress of fortifications, the American Army, and the new Iraqi Army Volunteering Centers, where we always hear about trapped cars exploding beside them…
We entered the Hall, there weren’t many people present. The subject of the gathering was a dialogue, and an attempt to contribute in the Democratic Process in Iraq. A National Conference will be held soon, and the Unions think they were given a small percentage of representation in it, and this gathering is an attempt to raise voices to the coordinating authority of that Conference. Our gathering will be attended by the State Minster of Civilian Organizations. Every Union chairman talked about his Union, its history, and the importance of its role in society, the Doctor’s Union, the Dentist’s Union, the Pharmaceutics’ Union, the Engineer’s Union, the Agricultural Engineers, the Geological Engineers, Teachers, writers, and the Assisting Paramedics Unions…
They demanded to be given seats by new percentages in the on coming Conference, in accordance with the volume of these Unions in society.
The Teachers Union represents (500,000) members, the Engineer’s Union (120,000), the Doctor’s Union (27,000), the Dentist’s (7,000), , the Agricultural Engineers (36,000)… The Teachers Union was established in 1935, , the Engineer’s Union in 1938. [HC note: this might appear to give them more legitimacy among their members than the present interim ‘government’?]
Then the Minister spoke, said he had listened to the view points, and will take them in consideration , that he is willing in his Ministry to receive any comments or complaints from any Organization working in Iraq. Then he gathered up his papers and left the Hall.
A delegation of two people came, and the conference chairman announced that they were a delegation sent from the coordinating authority of the National Conference, to speak about its organization, and answer our questions.
One of the delegation members spoke, said that the Conference has chosen about 1000-1200 Iraqi people, and those will elect a temporary National Council of 100 people, 20 seats of them belonging to members of the former Governing Council, which means only 80 people will be elected. Next Saturday is the date for the conference–voices rose in the Hall, and objections, when everyone was surprised by this news–, discussions were opened, and members of different unions spoke about not making known the date of the Conference to the public, nor was it clearly announced in newspapers or on T.V., that it resembles a dish cooked in the kitchen without the knowledge of the people– and this is a non-possible shame in the time of democracy.
They distributed a news journal in the name of the Conference, bearing a broad, red inked headline: The United Nation’s Delegate says that this Conference will be the first step on the road to democracy in Iraq.
I took the journal, then raised my hand, asking permission to join in the discussion, the man responsible for organizing the session signaled his agreement, so I came forward, the journal folded in my hand, announced my name and career, then started talking about the journal’s headline. I said: If this headline was true, where is the Democracy? We heard today about the Conference and its date, and that is two or three days ahead, so, what is the point in our gathering today? What shall be the outcome of our discussion? If every thing was pre-arranged and prepared, then what are we doing now? The Iraqis lived long years in the dark, now has come the time for them to practice Democracy, and this practice needs the people to be educated, for long months and years, the Conference should be talked about, the Iraqi’s right to participate in it should be made clear, because the Iraqi does not know his rights. That process of explaining and clarifying should have taken place in meetings, in all areas, organizations, and unions, and the security conditions should not have been taken as an excuse to run away from this responsibility, this transparency… This is the first step??? Such a full-of-mistakes -first-step, the Iraqis will spend coming years trying to correct the mistakes that are happening now. Then I repeat my question, what are we doing here today??
More re “Iraqi” forces and Najaf
The inimitable Yankeedoodle today cites a great little bit of Knight-Ridder reporting from Iraq about the scale of desertions from the Iraqi front-line forces who were asked to join the US forces in storming downtown Najaf.
He was also kind enough to post a comment with the nub of that story onto my post here yesterday.
I went to that link, which was to a dateline-Sunday story by Hannah Allam, Tom Lasseter and Dogen Hannah from Baghdad. There were a couple of other great vignettes in there which give more texture to the picture of what’s happening at different levels of the “Iraqi” forces as they confront the possibility of having to strike against the Sadrists in Najaf.
First, this:
- Sober-faced Iraqi colonels gathered inside the defense ministry command center, their cell phones ringing with continuous updates from the battlefield. American military advisers wandered in and out of the room, located at the end of a marble hallway in the massive, heavily guarded palace that serves as headquarters for U.S.-led forces and American civilian administrators.
“Aziz is trapped in the ancient fortress with two wounded men and two of his vehicles surrounded!” shouted one Iraqi officer.
The officers, most of them decorated veterans from the former regime, shook their heads at the thought of Iraqis battling Iraqis on sacred soil. Several said they would resign immediately if senior officers ordered them to serve in Najaf. They asked to withhold their names for fear of reprimand.
“I’m ready to fight for my country’s independence and for my country’s stability,” one lieutenant colonel said. “But I won’t fight my own people.”
“No way,” added another officer, who said his brother – a colonel – quit the same day he received orders to serve in the field. “These are my people. Why should I fight someone just because he has a difference in opinion about the future of the country?”
The story does also refer to, “an Iraqi military analyst inside the ministry [who] defended the assault, saying that crushing al-Sadr’s militia would finally bring stability to the volatile southern Shiite region and smooth the way to national elections.”
That guy apparently was not a serving military officer. (If he had been, presumably he’d have been referred to as such.) The KR report did not say how many people who were serving officers were in the group previously described. But the fact that they showed themselves so ready to express their opinions to, presumably, one of those three KR journalists, in a fairly public setting–and inside the defense ministry command center, no less–means that what we’re talking about inside Allawi’s new “army” is much, much more serious than just a few front-line units getting queasy.
… This certainly brings to mind what happened to the “new national army” that the US and its allies in Lebanon were trying to put together back during a certain portion of that country’s protracted civil war, in 1982-84…
In that army, too, a majority of the (conscripted) regular soldiers–and a fair number of their officers–were Shi-ites. And the Americans were trying to use their local allies and the recently re-formed national army to contain and beat back the newly emergent Shi-ite political power. (A politicial power that, there as in Iraq, had become hugely energized as the result of a humiliating recent foreign invasion and occupation…. In that instance, the original invasion was Israeli, but the occupation was sort of joint, Israeli-US… )
In this JWN post last November I referred back to the chapter of my 1985 book The Making of Modern Lebanon (pp.204-205) where I wrote about how, after the Lebanese army “loosed a heavy barrage of tank and artillery fire into heavily-peopled apartment buildings” in a mainly Shi-ite area of Beirut, the majority-Shi-ite units of the army simply defected en masse to the Shi-ite militia there…
Just three days after that happened, Reagan announced his decision to “redeploy offshore” all the US Marines who’d been in Beirut. In other words, withdraw.
Quite evidently, without the “cover” provided by a compliant “Lebanese” army, the US position was vastly over-exposed, and the Reaganites realized that. They had already, just the previous October, suffered the massive losses of the bombing of the Marines barracks there.
Can we expect a rapid and similar decision to withdraw to be taken now, with regard to Iraq? I think not, for a number of reasons…