U.S. pilots targeting a house where they believed insurgents had taken shelter killed a family of 12, Iraqi officials said Tuesday. The dead included women and children whose bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping.
A U.S. military statement said that an unmanned U.S. drone detected three men digging a hole in a road in the area. Insurgents regularly bury bombs along roads in the area to target U.S. or Iraqi convoys. The three men were tracked to a building, which U.S. forces then hit with precision-guided munitions, the statement said.
Once again, civilian leadership desires to take the "cheap" shortcut of using airpower to strike at enemy ground forces. The obvious advantage to this is the political one; our pilots don't have nearly as great a chance of being wounded or killed bombing a house as our ground troops do clearing it. Unfortunately, no use of power can be as ill-suited to counter-insurgency as the air strike. It is simply impossible for pilots thousands of feet the air, acting on intelligence from drones or filtered through layers of command from someone on the ground, to know with the accuracy of troops on the ground if what they're hitting is an insurgent hide-out or a house full of civilians. But despite the fact that about zero Americans are going to lose as much sleep over 12 dead Iraqi civilians as they would over five dead Marines, you can bet the Iraqis will keep count of the cost, and every dead Iraqi child is yet another propaganda tool for the insurgents, and yet another moral defeat for us.
3 comments:
You're dead on target (excuse the pun). What so few Americans realize -- thanks to the corporate press -- is that we have been bombing the poor people of Iraq every month. I read a report somewhere that bombing raids are on the increase, almost 250 in December alone. This is rarely mentioned in the newspaper; if it is, you can find one column inch on page A26.
The problem, again, is that although plenty of people in the military know this won't work, when faced with current circumstances the temptation is strong to remove flesh and blood troops from the ground, and make it a "clean" war (from our perspective).
Part of that is just military philosophy. It is actually part of American doctrine to "find, fix, and destroy" the enemy. We're supposed to be fighting the kind of enemy you can do that to. We're supposed to be fighting them in an environment in which we can do that. It's how Westmoreland treated the enemy forces in Vietnam; as if they were a Soviet-style army that we could use that strategy against. We do not train primarily for counter-insugencies. As a matter of fact, we relegate that almost exclusively to Special Forces, even though we faced that situation in Vietnam and all throughout the cold-war era in our small conflicts around the world. Also think back to Somalia. There's a clear parallel in how the military tried to use military force in that situation.
There's the other part of the problem: when you put the military in charge of a situation, they want to come up with military solutions. I'm not saying there may necessarily be any other way than going and destroying the enemy on the ground, but what all strategies did we try to disrupt the insurgents? What did we do to remove the reasons for the insurgency? Did we ever think of it as a Palestine-Israel situation where it might just be possible to come up with a diplomatic solution?
The other factor involved is that when you get civilian pressure on the military to solve a problem militarily but without a lot of bloodshed on our side, there's only one way they can do that, and that's with airplanes and bombs. We preferred that strategy in WWII and Vietnam, and even Panama. The civilian casualties can reach astounding numbers very quickly.
This is the wrong way to go in Iraq. It will only make us lose sooner and give fuel to anti-American terrorists at the same time. We must come up with a better plan.
Let me play the role of the cynic. I agree with Nat-Wu that "This is the wrong way to go in Iraq. It will only make us lose sooner and give fuel to anti-American terrorists at the same time."
For those who want to perpetuate the "endless war on terror", I think they both know and embrace the points laid out above. You can't have a good war supported by the public without a diabolical enemy. And what's the best way to manufacture a diabolical enemy? Kill with impunity (and hide the fact you're doing it).
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