Nir Rosen on the Iraq War

Colonial war, Cheney-Bush style (the severed head is from an American ally)

Nir Rosen has a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone about a recent visit to Iraq and about the alleged "success" of the McCain escalation, The Myth of the Surge 03/06/08 issue; accessed 02/24/08). The photo by Danfung Denis featured above appears in the print edition, but not at this writing in the online collection. The caption says:

Violence in Iraq is on the rise again - and much of it is aimed at the Awakening, Sunni fighters who have abandoned Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans. At right, two U.S. soldiers pose with the severed head of an Awakening member - a U.S. ally - who was decapitated by Al Qaeda. (The soldiers were later reprimanded for their behavior.) The killing was intended to send a clear warning: Those who aid the Americans are marked for death. (my emphasis)

That image conveys better than any of the other photos in the print or online editions the sense that Rosen's article gives, of the American soldiers in a hopelessly hostile environment, with little hope of achieving anything like the Success and Victory that our Republican war fans tell us is withing grasp, someday, maybe 100 years from now, maybe 10,000.

It's particularly notable that these soldiers are mocking the dead, severed head of someone allied to the United States, killed for collaborating with them. It's hard to imagine that this level of distrust, contempt, and total lack of respect isn't conveyed to our Iraqi allies as well as enemies of the moment.

That photo, by the way, is the kind that makes our Republican war fans crazy. They don't want to see anything that shows the genuine ugliness of war, or that presents any member of the US forces as anything other than a comic-book heroic warrior.

Acceptable war imagery for Republicans: the sergeant is saying, "Keep movin', you lunkheads!! Nobody lives forever! So git the lead out and follow me! We got us a war to win!"

Despite the admiration it will no doubt inspire in some of our superpatriots, disrespecting the dead or using body parts as trophies is a violation of the laws of war. Although this is presumably more like to be done to the corpses of enemies rather than allies. H. Wayne Elliott writes in Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), "Dead and Wounded":

In 1967 a U.S. Army sergeant in Vietnam posed for a photograph. The photograph, later published nationally, showed the sergeant holding the decapitated heads of two enemy corpses. The soldier was court-martialed and convicted of "conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline." There were other reports of U.S. soldiers cutting the ears and fingers off the enemy dead. Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, denounced the mutilation of dead bodies as "subhuman" and "contrary to all policy and below the minimum standards of human decency." Not only is the mistreatment of dead bodies "contrary to all policy," it is also a violation of the laws of war.

The caption to the Rolling Stone photograph above says the soldiers were "reprimanded", which is not the same as a court martial. Maybe our generals consider the "minimum standards of human decency" to have sunk since 1967?

Rosen's article is one that really needs to be read in full to appreciate the effect. He gives several accounts of his interactions with the Americans and the allied Sunnis ("Sons of Iraq" is the name that the US has suddenly started using, apparently just a week or two ago). What's impressive, and depressing, is how little understanding in either the linguistic or psychological sense the American soldiers have, or can really be expected to have under these situations. But saying that is not meant to let our infallible generals off the hook for their neglect of things like Arabic language skills.

Here's one account that gives some of the flavor (one of the Awakening members with whom Rosen talks is named Osama):

As [First Lt. Shawn] Spainhour talks to the sheik at the mosque, two bearded, middle-aged men in sweaters suddenly walk up to the Americans with a tip. Two men down the street, they insist, are members of the Mahdi Army. The soldiers quickly get back into the Strykers, as do Osama and his men, and they all race to Mahala 830. There they find a group of young men stringing electrical cables across the street. Some of the men manage to run off, but the eleven who remain are forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wear flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit take their pictures one by one. The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist - they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. "I bet there's an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

As the soldiers storm into nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the Americans come up to me, thinking I am a military translator. They look bemused. The Americans, they tell me in Arabic, have got the wrong men. The eleven squatting in the courtyard are all Sunnis, not Shiites; some are even members of the Awakening and had helped identify the Mahdi Army suspects.

I try to tell the soldiers they've made a mistake — it looks like the Iraqis had been trying to connect a house to a generator - but the Americans don't listen. All they see are the wires on the ground: To them, that means the Iraqis must have been trying to lay an improvised explosive device. "If an IED is on the ground," one tells me, "we arrest everybody in a 100-meter radius." As the soldiers blindfold and handcuff the eleven Iraqis, the two tipsters look on, puzzled to see U.S. troops arresting their own allies.

When you read accounts like this, you realize just how [Cheney]ed we are in Iraq. (my emphasis)

I know it's not news that Cheney and Bush are fools over this thing. But one of the many ways in which that's true is that after convincing our media clowns that The Surge has tamped down violence, if they had had any sense of responibility or even good sense at all, they would have taken the opportunity to declare Mission Accomplished once again and start large-scale and fairly rapid withdrawal of American troops.

But they didn't. Aside from their geopolitical and oil-industry ambitions, I really do think that they must have no clue at all how to extricate the US from this situation. Nor do they give any convincing impression of actually caring.

This article really gives a good picture of what the arming and training of the Awakening Councils/Sons of Iraq means. And how it bought short-term cosmetic gains at the price of making long-term peace a more distant goal:

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups."

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.

"We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future." (my emphasis)

This is what happens when men like Dick Cheney, George Bush or John McCain are allowed to run the government.

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, nir rosen, surge