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12-06-06, 8:49 am
A few odds and ends from, in the words of Borat, America’s “war of terror,”
In a raid west of Baghdad, U.S. forces destroyed two buildings, killing, in the language of the military “six suspected insurgents, two women and a child.” Pay careful attention to the language. What that means is that they killed six men, two women, and a child. Iraqis in areas where the United States is conducting counterinsurgency operations come in three kinds: women, children, and “military age males,” AKA “suspected insurgents.”
Thomas Ricks’ book, Fiasco, a devastating account of U.S. military operations during the first half of the war, and written based primarily on military sources, goes into some detail about how certain of the U.S. military commands in Iraq, particularly the Fourth Infantry Division under Ray Odierno, would routinely round up every Iraqi adult male in the area of a given operation, then holding them for months effectively incommunicado.
This kind of tactic, of course, as much as anything, led to the creation of a wide-scale insurgency. Once the counterinsurgency became well-established, it’s been an open secret that standard doctrine in large parts of the country, including Anbar province, calls for treating all military-age males as potential enemies. During the second assault on Fallujah, it was routine practice to turn back car-loads of people trying to flee the bombing if they contained even a single military-age male.
This kind of identification was a standard practice in the Vietnam War, especially in what were known as “free-fire zones,” and one of the clearest pieces of evidence that it had become effectively a war against the people. When every man is a potential enemy, you can’t possibly be a liberator, even if you want to.
President Bush recently hectored NATO about stepping up and making Afghanistan more of a priority. Lately, Afghanistan has been, as everyone knows, going the way of Iraq. An insurgency that feeds off of crimes and acts of negligence by the occupying forces and that is politically based in Pashtun irredentism (as that in Iraq was based in Sunni irredentism) has been using improvised explosive devices and suicide car bombings, with U.S. forces suffering a fatality rate (per soldier) similar to that in Iraq.
The solution, urged by the Bush administration and by, it seems, every respectable American observer, is to solve the problem that has emerged in Afghanistan by recapitulating the tactics used in Iraq that, we all know, solved the problem there so effectively.
Suitably chastened by the hectoring, key European countries like Germany have agreed to think seriously about joining the counterinsurgency in southern Afghanistan.
Last but not least, my favorite story of the last week. Iraq’s Interior Ministry has formed a special unit to monitor news coverage and take legal action against journalists who report, in their words, "fabricated and false news that hurts and gives the Iraqis a wrong picture that the security situation is very bad, when the facts are totally different."
Their first target is the Associated Press, for its story that Shiite militias, in revenge for the massive car bombings in Sadr City that killed over 200, took six Sunni worshippers at a mosque in the Hurriyah district, doused them in gasoline, and set them on fire. The Interior Ministry, run by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, claims that the source for the story, police Captain Jamil Hussein, does not exist – and the U.S. military has backed them up. The AP reporter who did the story claims two years of contact with Capt. Hussein, including numerous meetings with him in his office in the Yarmouk police station, where Hussein wore a police uniform – as well as corroborating claims from three different witnesses who live in the area where the killings took place.
I’m no big fan of the corporate media, but I think it’s pretty clear which side to trust. What a farce. First, under Saddam, Iraq has press spokesman Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who becomes known for his comical lies. Then we take over in Iraq and all of our spokespeople are reincarnated as Sahhaf – watch Tony Snow any time. Then, oddly, the Iraqis who come to the fore in new, democratic Iraq, with these two fine examples before them, bear a strong resemblance as well. And so it goes.
From Empire Notes
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