June 10, 2006

MARINES IN HADITHA: CATCH 23

YOU ARE A PREMIER WARRIOR—AN AMERICAN MARINE—AND MUST KILL OR CAPTURE ALL IRAQI INSURGENTS (SADDAM’S TRIBAL BROTHERS AND FOLLOWERS, MEMBERS OF AL QAEDA, ISLAMIC FANATIC JIHADISTS, AND ASSORTED ANTISOCIAL CRIMINALS) IN ANBAR PROVINCE.

BUT

YOU MUST BE A REPRESENTATIVE OF AMERICA AND WIN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THE PEOPLE OF ANBAR PROVINCE BY BEING FRIENDLY AND OUTGOING TO THE PEOPLE OF ANBAR PROVINCE WHO HATE YOU AND WISH TO DESTROY YOU BY PLANTING IEDS EVERYWHERE AND WHO WOULD RATHER DIE THAN COOPERATE WITH YOU.

CATCH 24

YOU MUST KILL OR CAPTURE ALL INSURGENTS IN ANBAR PROVINCE.

BUT

YOU MUST OBEY THE RULES OF WAR AND NOT INJURE ANY NON-COMBATANT EVEN THOUGH HE OR SHE SUPPORTS AND ASSISTS THE INSURGENTS BY PROVIDING FOOD, SHELTER, AND INFORMATION TO INSURGENTS.

CATCH 25

YOU MUST KILL OR CAPTURE ALL INSURGENTS IN ANBAR PROVINCE.

BUT

YOU MUST NOT INJURE NON COMBATANTS EVEN THOUGH THERE IS NO WAY OF TELLING INSURGENTS FROM NON COMBATANTS UNTIL YOU ARE SHOT AT BY SOMEONE.

CATCH 26

YOU MUST KILL OR CAPTURE ALL INSURGENTS IN ANBAR PROVINCE.

BUT

YOU MUST NOT INJURE ANY NON COMBATANT EVEN THOUGH THE INSURGENT PLACES HIM OR HERSELF IN THE MIDST OF NON COMBATANT WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS OR MOSQUES.

No great civilization has ever survived without great warriors. In any large army there are a few fighters and many more soldiers who support and provide what the fighters require—truck drivers, quartermasters, cooks, intelligence specialists—men and women who do their duty behind the lines. Warriors cannot fight without the support these soldiers provide, but they rarely face sudden death and mutilation, nor do they have to kill the enemy at point blank range without more than a moments reflection.

America’s great warriors, at least in the conventional wars over the past fifty years, are to be found in three or four premier outfits like the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, and the Marine Corps. When the military going gets rough, these are the young men that are sent for. So that was why, when the 82nd Airborne’s tour of duty in Iraq’s northwestern Anbar province—the most brutal battle zone in Iraq—was over, they sent in the Marines—the First Marine Division.

When the story broke in Time Magazine last March that a Marine humvee hit an IED that killed one Marine and injured several others last November and in the aftermath a group of the remaining Marines killed 24 Iraqis including women and children, and that an attempt at covering up what may have been a massive criminal act had also been uncovered, the left-liberal, war-hating, Bush-hating journalistic establishment could barely keep from peeing in their pants with excitement; could barely wait for an investigation of the case, for the facts to be developed before writing the headlines like “MY LAI AGAIN!,” “The Shame of Kilo Company,” “Quagmire!” “Sick War, Sick Marines, Sick Administration.”

Before coming to premature condemnation of our warrior Marines it behooves those holier-than-thou liberals who are not above enjoying freedom but only above fighting for it, to take into account the following:

The story that Time Magazine broke back in March was based on the eye-witness accounts of two children who were coached and prompted for many days beforehand by an Iraqi Journalism student who is a member of the “Hammurabi Human Rights Group.” The children were interviewed at least a week after the incident and had been interviewed dozens of times since. In a CNN interview, Iman, who is nine years old, says (through a translator), “I was planning to go to school. I was about to get out of bed. I knew the bomb would explode, so I covered my ears. The bomb exploded. The bomb struck an armored vehicle. I don't know if it was a humvee or an armored vehicle. When the bomb exploded, they came straight to our house.”

If the “innocent” children knew about the IED outside their house, did the “innocent” grown-ups know about it? Who among the neighbors knew about it? If any of the “innocents” who knew had warned the officials of the area then perhaps Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas might still be alive.

But in a place like Haditha such cooperation is not likely. Here is what John F. Burns, one of the most objective correspondents in Iraq, has to say about the situation in Anbar Province. “Last summer, in two separate attacks over three days, Taliban-like insurgents operating from bases at mosques in the city [of Haditha] killed 20 Marine reservists, including an enlisted man who was shown disemboweled on rebel videos that were sold afterward in Hidatha’s central market.”

Anbar province and Haditha with its 90,000 residents has been a persistent trouble spot since the beginning, “clearly the toughest patch assigned to American troops in Iraq.” It is where the center of the insurgency exists and its Sunni population remains spiritually faithful to Saddam Hussein. Anbar is a vast, sparsely populated region that borders Syria and has become the “conduit for volunteers from elsewhere in the Arab world who have been at the core of the insurgency’s Islamic militant wing and the perpetrators of many of the suicide bombings and beheadings.”

Burns’ view of Haditha is supported by other journalists. Omer Mahdi, reporter for the Guardian, was given access to the city by the insurgents because they did not realize he worked for a British news¬paper. He would have been killed if they had. He wrote: "Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel. That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been re¬vealed. They are the sole authority, running the town's security, adminis¬tration and communications. It is a miniature Taliban-like state." The Guardian article disclosed routine dawn beheadings and savage beatings, which are all videotaped and sold on DVDs. Children laugh at the cruelty and delight at the news of double beheadings scheduled.

It should be noted, as John Burns points out, that the Army is doing the investigation of this matter and there is an interservice conflict between the Marine Corps and the Army about warrior culture. The Army has a distinctly softer attitude toward insurgents than the Marines, what the Army leadership calls the difference between “kinetic” and “non-kinetic.” Burns goes on to say, “In this context, ‘kinetic’ refers to the kill-and-capture warfare that has been the Marines' traditional way of battle, and ‘non-kinetic’ to the efforts that Generals Chiarelli and Casey have stressed — to reach out to local leaders, help build civic institutions, rebuild infrastructure and provide jobs, undermining the insurgency's appeal.

“General Casey tells American units that it is the military's non-kinetic activity that will win the war, as much as or more than the kinetic. But it is not a gospel that has found much favor — nor, Marine commanders might say, much relevance — in the fight-to-the-death crucible of Anbar.

“Reporters who have spent time embedded with the Marines return, almost invariably, with a strong sense of the comradeship that binds the units and an admiration for the discipline and fitness drilled into the fighting men, and, not least, for the lengths the corps is prepared to go to get reporters to the battlefront and to protect them while they're there.

“But the harsh Marine battle tactics make an impact, too…. they resort quickly to using heavy artillery or laser-guided bombs when rooting out insurgents who have taken refuge among civilians, with inevitable results.

“Something of this… was suggested when a senior Army commander involved in planning the Falluja offensive — and convinced of its necessity — visited the city afterward alongside Marine commanders. He expressed shock at the destruction, along with concern at the reaction of 200,000 residents whom the Americans had urged to flee beforehand. "My God," the Army commander said, "what are the folks who live here going to say when they see this?"

Well, if they are at all like Horsefeathers they will be shocked, shocked, to find that war is hell, that houses, even whole cities get destroyed, “innocent” men, women, and little children get killed. The fact is that collateral damage is a stark fact of war, and has been since war was invented.

The notion that we should disadvantage our Marines—our best warriors, young men we’ve trained to a fare-thee-well to win battles and kill the toughest enemy—by telling them to “win the hearts and minds” of the residents of Anbar Province—Arabs who, in the unlikely event that their hearts and minds were susceptible of being won, would become instant targets of insurgent death squads—such a notion is immoral and self-defeating. There are no “innocents” in Anbar Province, there are only our enemies and friends of our enemies.

If our young Marines err, in the course of their war against terrorists and insurgents, on the side of self-protection they should not be penalized. After all, those who are really responsible for all deaths in Anbar Province and Hidatha are the insurgents and those who support them. They could instantly reduce collateral damage among the Iraqi people by not using populated cities to hide in. Our Boots on the Ground are the only guys who have the right to decide what degree of force is required when they’re on the line—not some liberal journalist whose life is not on the line, or some flabby politician, or some career-oriented, bureaucratic, desk-jockey brigadier.