IRAQ: US terrorises civilians
BY ROHAN PEARCE
A November 19 press release from the US military's Central Command
was headlined, “Operations Make Iraq Safer, Improve Quality of Life”. It was
referring to the renewed offensive by US occupation forces against Iraqi
resistance fighters. The US invaders are “improving” the quality of life for
Iraqis with the aid of 500-kilogram bombs, F-16 fighter-bombers, heavy tanks,
the obliteration of the homes of “suspected” guerrillas, widespread arrests
and the strafing of Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, by AC-130
gunships.
Operation Iron Hammer (centred on Baghdad) and Operation Ivy Cyclone II
(Tikrit to Kirkuk) were launched in response to the downing of a US Chinook
transport helicopter and a Black Hawk helicopter in early November. On
November 11, the US carried out the first air strikes on Baghdad since it took
control of the city in April. Near Fallujah, where resistance fighters shot
down the Chinook, F-16s dropped three 230kg bombs.
Between November 12 and 16, US forces arrested more than 130 “suspects” in
areas north and west of Baghdad. According to a November 15 statement issued
by US Central Command, troops arrested 67 people “for further questioning” in
Ramadi in one 24-hour period.
Tikrit, birthplace of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, located north
of Baghdad, has borne the brunt of the crackdown. The British
Independent's Phil Reeves reported on November 18 that the US had
sealed the town with chest-high razor wire, only allowing Iraqis with
identification cards issued by the occupation regime in or out. “Hey this is
just like Gaza, isn't it?”, an Iraqi commented to Reeves.
US forces demolished between 12 and 15 homes in the area on November 16 and
17. A November 19 article by the Knight Ridder News Service quoted US Major
Gordon Tate's justifications for the demolitions, which were carried out by
Apache helicopters and tanks. “We don't just destroy their homes for no
reason”, he told journalists. “I don't want to say they [military commanders]
are cold-hearted. But if your house is used to make [homemade roadside bombs]
or house Saddam loyalists, that's within the rules of warfare.”
On November 19, the US announced that it had dropped two 900-kilogram
satellite-guided bombs near Baqouba, and 450-kilogram bombs on “terrorist
targets” near Kirkuk in northern Iraq. A military spokesperson told Agence
France-Presse that the targets, from which he claimed mortar or rocket attacks
had been launched, “may be abandoned buildings, they may be overgrown”.
Collective punishment
At a press briefing the day before, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, when
asked if dropping bombs on empty buildings was aimed at intimidating Iraqis,
said: “All of our military operations have a military purpose. Some are to
persuade. Some are to compel. Some are to kill. Some are to capture.”
Collective punishment is expressly prohibited under the terms of the 1949
Geneva Conventions. Article 75 lists it among the acts which “are and shall
remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever, whether committed
by civilian or by military agents”.
While the Iron Hammer and Ivy Cyclone operations are a massive escalation
of collective punishment, it's not a new policy. After the fall of Baghdad,
strict curfews and mass arrests were two of the tactics used by US forces to
try to crush resistance to the occupation.
In mid-October, the Independent's Patrick Cockburn reported, “US
soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have
uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in
central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who
do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops”. According to
the farmers, 50 families lost their livelihoods.
The latest operations are motivated by the original intentions of the
“shock and awe” terror onslaught that Washington had initially planned for the
invasion of Iraq. However, the massive global and US opposition to the war
forced the Pentagon to limit the scale of the invasion's bombing blitz in
order to reduce civilian deaths.
While the speed of the US “victory” over Hussein was welcomed by a White
House under considerable public pressure to limit US casualties, it did not
lead to the massive demoralisation and fear among the Iraqi population that
Washington felt it needed to minimise subsequent resistance to the occupation.
In January, architect of the “shock and awe” campaign Harlan Ullman
described its intent: “You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're
the general and 30 of you at division headquarters have been wiped out. You
also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In
two, three, four, five days, they are physically, emotionally and
psychologically exhausted.”
The motive for the latest US campaign of bombings and raids is to break the
will of the Iraqi population to resist. The escalation in overt displays of
firepower aims to counter the growing belief among Iraqis (which was warned of
in a November 10 memo from the CIA's station chief in Baghdad) that the
resistance movement can defeat the US occupation.
Echoes of Vietnam
Like many of the Bush gang's policies, the push for terror-based
counterinsurgency operations has been led by the so-called neo-conservatives.
In an October 26 Washington Post article, Gary Schmitt, a leading
figure in the Project for a New American Century think tank, and the American
Enterprise Institute's Tom Donnelly argued for a more vicious Vietnam
War-style counterinsurgency strategy: “Even in Vietnam, classic
counterinsurgency strategies and tactics proved successful — when given time
and effort. There is no reason to believe they cannot work in Iraq where the
insurgency problem is not as large or difficult, where there is no country
like North Vietnam providing major assistance to guerrillas.
“Make no mistake: the United States knows how to fight such wars. It even
has a how-to guide — the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual ... But the American
military experience distilled in the Small Wars Manual was largely forgotten
in Vietnam. Instead, the United States pursued the big-unit,
search-and-destroy approach... While Marine General Victor `Brute' Krulak
pushed for a pacification strategy, and the so-called CORDS program — for
Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support — was the kind of
coordinated all-agency effort envisioned in the Small Wars Manual, the Army's
`war of attrition' won out over traditional counterinsurgency strategy.”
The CORDS agency, established in 1967, combined personnel from the
Pentagon, CIA, the US Agency for International Development and the US
Information Agency. A 1992 article by the Baobab Press news service succinctly
describes the program as “destroy-and-develop”. In addition to propaganda
designed to mislead Vietnamese into thinking that the national liberation
forces were on the verge of defeat, the CORDS program involved the destruction
of entire Vietnamese villages and the creation of a police system “to create a
climate of absolute terror”.
The Baobab Press article described how “CORDS forces took advantage of
widespread destruction by initiating special `rebuilding' efforts to `reward'
persons willing to accommodate the Americans. Where homes and farms had been
entirely wiped out, resettlement was offered to those who would come to
ideological terms with the destroyers...
“The coercive impact of this destroy-and-rebuild formula was deliberate and
carefully pre-planned. By using such extreme measures to bring about total
dependency on western assistance, the `pacification' program exploited the
most basic human instinct — survival — to give US forces leverage over
Vietnamese peasants who tended overwhelmingly to be politically neutral or
loyal to the national unification effort.”
An October 9 report from the New York-based Guerrilla News Network
described how a comparable process was occurring throughout Iraq. GNN reporter
Gert Van Langendonck described how money poured has been into the Shiite town
of Balad, “US$1.2m so far — providing help with the water and electricity
supply, and fixing up schools”. But in the surrounding Sunni villages, “where
the Americans get shot at get slapped with an early 7pm curfew; they get four
hours a day of electricity and very little in terms of reconstruction
projects”.
In a November 16 New York Times op-ed, Max Boot, a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank and a contributing editor of
the neo-cons' flagship publication the Weekly Standard, also urged
the Pentagon to consider assassination programs like those the US carried out
in Vietnam.
Among Boot's recommendations, which included CORDS-style programs, was that
the Pentagon apply the lessons of the infamous Operation Phoenix. “Phoenix was
a joint CIA-South Vietnam effort to identify and eradicate Vietcong cadres in
villages”, Boot explained. “Critics later charged the program with carrying
out assassinations, and even William Colby acknowledged there were `excesses'.
Nevertheless, far more cadres were captured (33,000) or induced to defect
under Phoenix (22,000) than were killed (26,000).”
Many of those who Boot coyly describes as “cadres” were civilian supporters
of the Vietnamese national liberation forces. Douglas Valentine, author of
The Phoenix Program (Avon Books, 1992), described the operation as
“aimed at `neutralising', through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic
torture, the civilian infrastructure that supported the insurgency in South
Vietnam. It was a terrifying `final solution' that violated the Geneva
Conventions and traditional American ideas of human morality.”
The most infamous outcome of Phoenix was the massacre of more than 500
inhabitants of the Vietnamese village of My Lai in March 1968. Elderly
villagers were bayoneted to death, other villagers were raped and tortured,
and those still alive were ordered into a ditch, where US soldiers shot them
en masse.
From Green Left Weekly, November 26, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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