The Mechanics of Mass Slaughter

I link to many articles while writing here, but I really don’t anticipate that people will actually go read the linked article. People are busy and do their own thing anyway. And this is no different – it’s an article, The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness, from The Nation, where Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian interviewed fifty Iraq veterans selected at random. If a person had time, it’s an interesting collection of impressions. If not, I’ll give a brief recount through my own jaundiced eyes.

I read and have been influenced by the Johns Hopkins study that claimed that, as of last year, 655,000 Iraqis had been killed since the US invaded, and that most of these were civilians. Similarly, I read where the civilian death toll caused by the American invasion of Vietnam was in the area of 3-4 million. What is hidden from view, what nags at me, is the mechanism by which this killing is done. Americans are no different than any other people, except that we have more weapons. But we don’t set out to simply kill for killing’s sake.

But it is happening. Iraq, like Vietnam, is turning out to be a killing field.

In Vietnam, as we learned in the ensuing years, the mechanisms were many, but the primary ones were use of free-fires zones, where terrified Americans soldiers were authorized to shoot and kill any target that moved, and by massive aerial bombing, most directed at South Vietnamese targets, where villages, towns and cities were completely leveled.

In Iraq, bombing is going on and not being reported. Hopkins claims that 15% of the civilian victims (about 100,000) are caused by US bombs.

56%, however, is reported to be by gunshot wounds. Much of the violence is Iraqi on Iraqi, as anyone watching American media will testify. (Around 13% of the deaths were attributed to car bombs.) But just as much is American on Iraqi. That’s not reported so much.

In the article, US soldiers talk about their everyday encounters with Iraqis. Usually, the American is armed, the Iraqi not.

Several of the soldiers did nothing but late night and early morning raids on Iraqi homes. Soldiers would burst in, Gestapo-style, and roust everyone out, turn the house on end, and often arrest young Iraqi men.

According to interviews with twenty-four veterans who participated in such raids, they are a relentless reality for Iraqis under occupation. The American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away as suspects.

Raids normally took place between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city infamous for its prison, located twenty miles west of the capital, with the Third Brigade, First Armor Division, First Battalion, for one year beginning in March 2003. His descriptions of raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other veterans who served in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit.

“You want to catch them off guard,” Sergeant Bruhns explained. “You want to catch them in their sleep.” About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

By such methods are new insurgents created.

But the most disturbing impression left by these interviews is the low regard soldiers hold for Iraqi civilians. All are regarded as potential enemies. While officially the US sets high standards for troop behavior and prosecutes malefactors, in practice, civilians are often killed randomly, accidentally, or intentionally with disregard, and nothing is done. There are no consequences. As a result, there is very little incentive for US soldiers to minimize Iraqi casualties.

Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they would report a unit member who had killed or injured “an innocent noncombatant.”

This is very much like Vietnam. Soldiers are constantly on guard, not knowing who is friend, who not. They all look alike. A child could be a weapon, a pregnant woman could be a suicide bomber. So when soldiers patrol the streets, they are on high alert. When there is an incident, the guns go off, sometimes wildly.

Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.

Poor training doesn’t help.

American troops in Iraq lacked the training and support to communicate with or even understand Iraqi civilians, according to nineteen interviewees. Few spoke or read Arabic. They were offered little or no cultural or historical education about the country they controlled. Translators were either in short supply or unqualified. Any stereotypes about Islam and Arabs that soldiers and marines arrived with tended to solidify rapidly in the close confines of the military and the risky streets of Iraqi cities into a crude racism.

The article highlighted the testimony of fifty Iraq veterans. They described scores of civilian deaths. Project fifty on 160,000 troops, 180,000 mercenaries, a four year protracted conflict, add the number killed by American bombs, and the numbers of dead Iraqis reported by Hopkins begin to jive.

Hopkins has been treated with scorn and derision by people who, incidentally, don’t want to know any real numbers anyway. They just don’t want the question to be asked. But this article goes along way towards answering the inconvenient question – we know how many, but how so many?