Iraq and Terrorism

by hilzoy

One of the things that always worries me about blogs is this: it’s incredibly easy for one incident to grab a lot of attention, and end up absolutely eclipsing everything else the participants have ever done. In some cases, this is perfectly appropriate: I do not know a lot about Jeffrey Dahmer‘s childhood, his relationships with his friends, or his work history, but I’m not sure what possible revelation could make me think that his being a serial killer and cannibal had just been blown out of proportion. In others, though, it’s not.

I mention this because I was reading this post by Digby, who is one of my favorite bloggers ever, and it contains this from CNN:

“Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded Marine expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the comments Tuesday during a panel discussion in San Diego, California.

“Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military members in the audience. “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.””

About which Digby says:

“This is just in keeping with Bush administration policy that all the most outrageous of his commanders and failed advisors must be promoted and commended.”

I just finished reading Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco, which has a description of Mattis that makes him sound a lot more complicated, and a lot more impressive, than the CNN article would indicate. (He also comes off pretty well in Cobra II, although the time period that book covers means that he has less of a role.) How that squares with the incident CNN reports (and which Ricks also notes) I have no idea. In Ricks’ book, the impressive part comes first, and so when I arrived at the episode CNN describes, I didn’t think “oh, a bloodthirsty neanderthal”; I though: how on earth did the guy I read about earlier end up saying that? I can imagine various possibilities — for one thing, Mattis generally comes across as someone who thinks: you have to be very fair and very smart in wartime, and you have to think about the morality of what you do, but that said, sometimes you also have to kill people. He also comes across as someone who genuinely likes being in the Marines, and who also likes fighting. It’s not impossible to think of ways in which a person like that might say something like what CNN reports, especially if you imagine that he really did mean the “some” in “It’s fun to shoot some people.”

I mean: I do not, myself, understand why someone would enjoy shooting any people. It’s a mystery to me, the way it’s a mystery that some people enjoy putting money into a machine that periodically spits small fractions of it back to them when cheesy pictures of fruit line up. But since there are people who genuinely like warfare, the armed forces is a good place for them, and I think a lot would turn on whether they recognize the importance of keeping that peculiar taste within extremely clear and well-structured limits. (The way it’s really important for someone with the sort of go-for-the-jugular competitiveness that a world-class athlete would need to keep that feature of her personality confined to her sport, and out of, say, her marriage.) As I said, I don’t know Gen. Mattis, so I’m in no position to say whether he does recognize that or not. But Ricks’ description suggests that he does, and so, in the interests of context and fairness, I will summarize and excerpt some of what Ricks says below the fold.

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by Charles

This may no longer be an issue in the present situation because so many civilians have fled southern Lebanon.  But if not there, the topic remains relevant because it is likely that one party or another will use human shields in future engagements.  In the Israel-Hezbollah War, Hezbollah has been clearly violating Article 28 of the Geneva Conventions for protecting civilians:

The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.

If Hezbollah does not allow civilians to leave, they are committing a war crime because it is illegal to take hostages.  There also provisions under Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions, although Israel (and the United States) is not a signatory.  However, the U.S. and Israel have accepted many of its provisions under customary international law.  When Hezbollah launches rockets from an apartment building into Israeli territory, that building has become a base for military operations.  Same principles apply for mosques, hospitals, schools, etc.  Each time Hezbollah launches a rocket, they are committing a terrorist act because their target is a zip code, not a military target.  So far, over 3,000 terrorist rocket attacks have occurred.  It is a legitimate act of self-defense to take out those launchers and rockets before militant Islamists launch again.  If civilians die in those counterstrikes, the fault lies with Hezbollah for putting their own people in peril.  Former professor of human rights Yoram Dinstein:

Customary international law is certainly more rigorous than the [Geneva] Protocol on this point.  It has traditionally been perceived that, should civilian casualties ensue from an attempt to shield combatants or a military objective, the ultimate responsibility lies with the belligerent [party] placing innocent civilians at risk.  A belligerent…is not vested by the laws of international armed conflict with the power to block an otherwise legitimate attack against combatants (or military objectives) by deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way.

The above is cited from his 2004 book The Conduct of Hostilities under the Law of International Armed Conflict.  Admittedly, Dinstein have may a bias toward Israel since he was a professor at Tel Aviv University.

Israel doesn’t have a spotless record in the matter of human shields either.  Just a month ago, the IDF used Palestinians as human shields for an incursion into Gaza:

After seizing control of the buildings, the soldiers held six residents, two of them minors, on the staircases of the two buildings, at the entrance to rooms in which the soldiers positioned themselves, for some twelve hours. During this time, there were intense exchanges of gunfire between the soldiers and armed Palestinians. The soldiers also demanded that one of the occupants walk in front of them during a search of all the apartments in one of the buildings, after which they released her.

IDF also illegally used Palestinian human shields in the Battle of Jenin.  According to Louis Rene Beres, professor of international law at Purdue University, human shields also fall under the category of perfidy, which is not permissible under international law (but ruses are okay).  So what is the proper response under international law when the enemy uses these perfidious acts?  In a September 2004 issue of Military Review, Daniel Schoenekase defines the different types of human shields–proximity, involuntary and voluntary–and raises questions about other groups such as civilian workers at a munitions factory.  Schoenekase puts forth "targeting principles" when the enemy uses human shields to prevent counterattacks:  military necessity, discrimination (distinction), humanity and proportionality.  Commanders must evaluate the following before giving the green light to striking a human-shielded target:

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by Charles

I wrote in an earlier comment thread that Israel is doing the work that the Lebanese army should be doing but cannot.  The simple answer to ending the current violence between Israel and Hezbollah is to degrade Hezbollah to the point where Israel can hand the keys to the Lebanese army, giving the government full sovereignty over its country.  Another Charles agrees with me:

The road to a solution is therefore clear: Israel liberates south Lebanon and gives it back to the Lebanese.

It starts by preparing the ground with air power, just as the Persian Gulf War began with a 40-day air campaign. But if all that happens is the air campaign, the result will be failure. Hezbollah will remain in place, Israel will remain under the gun, Lebanon will remain divided and unfree. And this war will start again at a time of Hezbollah and Iran’s choosing.

[Update:  Add Josh Trevino to the ranks, too, who adds a little more detail on tactics.]  The interesting part to this is that, by going in and treating the Hezbollah cancer in southern Lebanon, Israel is helping Lebanese abide by UN Security Council Resolution 1559.  This is exactly why the "international community" should refrain from speaking about what Israel should do and focus its attention on Iran and Syria, sponsors of these terrorists, and urge Assad and the Iranian mullahs to tell their Hezbollah puppets to cease fire and return the hostages.  The only diplomacy necessary from Condi Rice is "keep up the good work" to Israel and "hang in there and you’ll get your country back" to Lebanon.  To Syria and Iran, the diplomacy will be more nuanced, but the general message should be, "get the f**k out."

More below the fold, including lots of updates!

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by Charles

In an attempt to get up to speed on Haditha, I looked through a number of links to find out what witnesses said and to offer some commentary. Unlike John Murtha, I haven’t judged those Marines guilty because I’d rather wait until the NCIS finishes its investigation. But in the meantime, the following is what I was able to dredge up. It still clocks in at over 9,000 words but there’s still a lot we don’t know.

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by hilzoy

One of the many articles I wanted to write about while I was moving, but didn’t, was a question and answer session between Kevin Drum and Peter Beinart, which contained the following exchange:

KD: I went back and re-read some of your old columns from 2002 and 2003, and at various times before the Iraq war, you argued, among other things, that containment was no longer an option, that a war with Iraq wouldn’t detract from the broader war with Al Qaeda, that anti-Americanism would probably die away once we’d won, that preventive war was a good idea now that we didn’t have to worry about retaliation from the Soviet Union, and that you didn’t realize that the Bush administration was populated by ideological hacks. In the book, you go on to admit that you were wrong about WMD and wrong about the need for international legitimacy. That’s a hell of a lot to be wrong about, isn’t it? Especially since plenty of people were pointing out all these things at the time? (…)

KD: The obvious question, then, is with a track record like that why should anyone listen to you now?

PB: Anything one writes deserves to be judged by itself. The Democratic Party nominated someone in 2004 who had been flat wrong in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, I think most people would acknowledge that. Many people who were very prominent figures in the Democratic foreign policy debate and the Democratic Party in general–most of the people who were there at that time in 1991 were wrong about that. The vast majority of the party was wrong, and yet it still seems to me that we have things to learn from people like Sam Nunn or John Kerry. If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them. The people who were–and I think Al Gore is in this category–deserve a significant amount of credit, but the truth of the matter is, if you were looking for an untainted record, you would find very few people. (Emphasis added.)

This is just one more piece of evidence that Peter Beinart and I do not hang out with the same kinds of people. He (and other opinion writers) seem to find it obvious that almost no one whose opinions were worth taking seriously was right on all three wars. Among the people I know, however, that’s not true: almost everyone I know whose opinions on policy I take at all seriously was right on all three; and so was I.

This is not because I and mine are right all the time. We aren’t — along with many people I know, I was very wrong on welfare reform, for instance. But we were right on these three wars. And I think, contra Beinart, that the reason for this is that being right on all three just wasn’t all that hard, given certain basic principles. So I’ve decided to set out, for his future use, the principles that enabled me to make these three calls correctly.

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by Charles

Whether a war crime by U.S. Marines happened or not, there are problems in Haditha, just as there were in Fallujah. The failure is, in part, ours. As the Vietnam War and other insurgencies have shown, the clear-and-hold strategy works. Haditha has been cleared at least once (or at least attempted), but it has not been truly held. In the Guardian last August:

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by Charles

Several terms and phrases have floated across my computer screen the last few days, and I thought I’d dig into a few of them.  In a prior post on Muslims, a certain prominent commenter stated that there is a "massive sense of cultural humiliation in the Muslim world."  Perhaps there’s some truth to it, but I can’t help but interpret "cultural humiliation" to mean "we lost and our feelings are hurt!"  I don’t believe it’s a sound idea to craft policy based on another group’s emotional state.  After all, the saying goes, we can only control our own emotions, not the feelings of others.  It also sounds suspiciously like the victim card is being played, with those facing "cultural humiliation" to be the next candidates for interest group status.  Approaching psychobabble levels, there’s even a feelings-based community ready to fertilize and generate interdisciplinary research (both intra and interculturally) on macro, meso and micro levels.

In a Google search, "cultural humiliation" is oft applied to Iraq, Guantanamo detainees, Abu Ghraib, black American women, and so forth.  In a February 2004 essay by Jessica Stern of the Harvard Kennedy School of Goverment:

Individually, the terrorists I interviewed cited many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause. But the variable that most frequently came up was not poverty or human rights abuses ­as has been posited in the press but perceived humiliation. Humiliation came up at every echelon of terrorist group members ­leaders and followers.

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