“We Don’t Do Body Counts”
by digby
When I read things like this today in the Washington Post by Andrew J. Bacevich, I’m struck by the fact that people like me, and many, many others were talking about this stuff years ago and predicting the problems that would ensue. Now, the neocon experiment, full of inconsistencies and downright silly assumptions, has played out before our very eyes and its failure is there for all to see.
The article above is about one of those little discussed issues in the mainstream media, Iraqi civilian deaths, and how that has affected the ostensible mission in Iraq. Now why this subject hasn’t been an obvious topic in the press or among pundits and thinkers until now, I do not know, but it seems like a pretty obvious problem to me:
The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration’s narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: “We don’t do body counts.” Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam — where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success — and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.
Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It’s not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count — for internal use only — some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.
Through the war’s first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these “escalation of force” episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. “People who were on the fence or supported us” in the past “have in fact decided to strike out against us,” he recently acknowledged.
An occupying army has been shooting civilians indiscriminately (or at least it seems that way) engendering resentment among the population and they are just now recognizing that this might not have been the best idea in the world? Jesus.
This was a conscious decision on the part of military planners, by the way:
In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.
That certainly sounds like the American mindset post 9/11, doesn’t it? (And it sounds like the Republican mindset post WWII) So there’s no big surprise.
But there was something else going on among the ivory tower think tank neocons who were strutting around the world like little Napoleons during this period. They were hyping delusionary conspiracy theories like their pal the nutball Laurie Myelroie’s fantasy BS about Saddam and the first world trade center bombing and calling all the top military brass in to watch “The Battle of Algiers” to take the wrong lessons from it. And, most importantly, they were passing out an ignorant book called “The Arab Mind” throughout the military, which was apparently taken quite seriously by a fair number of officers:
“You have to understand the Arab mind,” one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book “Cobra II,” Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: “The only thing these sand ni**ers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.”
Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of “gooks” during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha — and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.
He doesn’t mention that the word they use now instead of gook is “Hadji” or “Ali Baba.” Same shit, different war. Maybe all wars. But this one is unique in the post war world. We did this one almost alone, based on lies and some hidden agenda which nobody has yet fully explained. Indeed, the consensus seems to be that these starry eyed neocon checkenhawk warriors each had their own reasons for wanting to invade, none of which were legal, moral or politically sellable.
These bully tactics came directly from the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and other simpleminded conservatives in the leadup to the war. Here’s Sy Hersh writing about Abu Ghraib back in 2004:
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.”
The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
Here’s an interesting discussion of the book’s bizarre sexual fixation. The fact that so many rightwingers devoured it and believed it says everything you need to know to know about their provincialism and their personal psychological issues:
But the larger point is that no one seems to have cared much about accuracy, neither Patai nor his neocon readers. Patai says more or less what we’ve long wanted to believe, and that was enough. And the objectifying, dehumanizing and contemptuous tone of Patai’s discussion of a people he claims to like is inseparable from his arguments. It is a great tragedy if it influenced American conduct in Iraq.
Well it did. And the tragedy is there for all to see. This strain of self-serving, unsophisticated thinking permeated the ranks of the conservative intelligensia that is running this nation (making it obvious that the reason these people had been mostly denied a place in academia was not because of their politics, but because of their shallow intellects.) As it turns out, George W. Bush’s small mind was emblematic of conservatism at the turn of the century.
Bacevich in the WaPo piece continues:
Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians — and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally — are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim’s death helped clarify her brother’s perspective on the war. “God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here,” he declared after the incident. “They have no regard for our lives.”
Yes, it has had widespread political implications, political implications predicted by many, many of us who could see that sending a bunch of Americans into the heart of the middle east with no knowledge of the culture, a lie for a mission, an officer corps convinced that Arabs were primitive creatures who had to be subdued by brute force and sexual humiliation and a political leadership that lived on starry-eyed dreams of American omnipotence and high-tech fairy dust — was a colossal mistake of epic proportions.
It was all there for people to see. Seymour Hersh saw it and he was called a terrorist by Richard Perle. That was par for the course.
Bacevich concludes:
For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. And although President Bush has remarked in a different context that “every human life is a precious gift of matchless value,” our actions in Iraq continue to convey the impression that civilian lives aren’t worth all that much.
That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon must get over its aversion to counting all bodies. It needs to measure in painstaking detail — and publicly — the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation. To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.
This was a very good article until this point. Our failure is already certain no matter what we do. The fundamental flaw in this entire enterprise is not how we did it, although the massive failures outlined in this article are so obvious that it’s imperative to discuss them on their own terms. In fact, I worry that what this failure of execution reveals is a military leadership so lacking in intellectual ability and so wracked with primitive racism that this country cannot count on it to actually defend us in case of a real war. The officer corps are supposed to be smart guys, not a bunch of idiots who would read some piece of trash like “The Arab Mind” and actually believe it — much less use it as the basis for tactics on the ground. This is a dangerous situation for America.
However, the fundamental flaw remains the invasion itself, a bad decision from which everything else flows. The lesson is that an illegal, dishonest war of choice is doomed on its own terms. In the modern world outright conquest is impossible and anything else cannot be finessed with spin and wishful thinking.
That we compounded that error with a comic book understanding of the people we were “liberating” and a lack of postwar planning that was criminal in its negligence is just more evidence of the perfidy of this administration and its congressional enablers. But the central problem remains that it is not how we waged the war, it’s that we waged it at all.
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