Matthew Yglesias: Why Are We in Iraq?

he quotes Spencer Ackerman:

Matthew Yglesias: Traffic Stop: Spencer Ackerman:

Geoffrey Millard, a soldier with the New York National Guard, was a general's assistant in Iraq. He related a story he attended a briefing his boss about: a soldier at a traffic control point, faced with a speeding, oncoming car, "made a split-second decision" to fire "more than 200 rounds into the vehicle," killing its inhabitants. "He then watched as the mother, father and two children were carried from that car.

"That evening, as it was briefed to the general -- and I flipped the slides for that briefing -- Col. [William] Rochelle, from the 42nd Infantry Division, DISCOM [Division Support Command] commander -- and I have to apologize for a little vulgarity here, but I feel it's intricate for my testimony -- he turned in his chair to an entire division-level staff, and he said, and I quote, 'If these fucking Hajjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"

To me, in a sense, it's these checkpoints incidents, more than anything else, that exposes the fundamental folly of occupation.

If you're an American, it's just not going to be tolerable to have a bunch of foreigners who only speak Arabic manning traffic stops while heavily armed and ultimately accountable only to an all-foreign chain of command. Nobody would put up with that -- it's absurd. And of course if an American cop had put 200 rounds into a car and killed a whole civilian family over a traffic violation there would have been a shitstorm about it in local politics and the legal system. Even if the shooter evaded any criminal sanction, there would be consequences -- you couldn't possibly just brush it off and put the guy back out there directing traffic!

And conversely, suppose you were asked to finish up your basic training and then go to a foreign country where you don't speak the language but there is a domestic insurgency that forms one part of a complicated patchwork of oft-violent political machinations that you have no way of understanding. You've got a gun, some of your colleagues have been blown up, and here's car speeding right toward you. How am I going to blame you for opening fire? And can you imagine orders going down the chain of command asking U.S. soldiers to radically increase their chances of getting killed in order to somewhat reduce the odds of Iraqis being killed in good faith mistakes? Or putting your life in the hands of your fellow soldiers and then turning around and ratting them out if their errors led to loss of civilian life?

The whole thing is maddeningly impossible. I can't at all imagine the right way to handle these situations. Shrugging it off with an "If these fucking Hajjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen" clearly isn't the right answer, but is there one? I say, no there isn't -- there's just no good way to be a long-term occupying power. American soldiers are (rightly) accountable to American politicians who are (rightly) accountable to American voters but that means they can't be the ultimate source of authority in Iraq in any kind of reasonable way.

Comments

[Pepito]

Yes, I guess the situation is perfectly symmetrical and both parties are equally responsible, aren't they?

In my case, I would totally blame you for opening fire, as it's clear that you have no business there and that nobody is drafting you, so it's your choice to participate in these imperial adventures. But what do I know? I'm not an American, so I'm not as likely to show my patriotism by providing a partial justification as you seem to be doing. Sorry to break it to you, but there's the victim, and there's the aggressor, and that family that got hit by 200 bullets is not the latter.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

What's this nonsense about American soldiers being "rightly" answerable to American commanders and voters?

American soldiers in Iraq should be day to day answerable to a United nations command, and they are in fact answerable to the International Court of Justice.

Shooting people up on the street is a crime, and some of these guys are going to be punished for it.

Dick Cheney, don't plan on travelling outside the US after your term is up. Doug Feith, stay home.

George Bush? Maybe you can get away with pleading incompetence, insanity, or both...

[bigTom]

The reality, is these are mostly kids, who thought they were advancing themselves by signing up. Many thought they were doing the good patriotic thing. But the military doesn't allow you to quit and go home just because you now perceive the real nature of your assignment. And, we are there for the oil. And the contracts. And to paint liberals as weak and unpatriotic for not supporting the mission. And of course for the oil. And for the power projection bases. But these later are really just about intimidating other people with oil.

[vtcodger]

Nothing here that wasn't easily predictable in 2003. Why would anyone vote for a leader Bush, Cheney, McCain, Clinton who failed to predict it? Individual positions on the the Iraq War resolution are largely a matter of record. I'd urge my fellow Americans to look them up before voting and to weigh them VERY heavily in their decision making over the next decade or so. People who supported this war are not IMHO remotely qualified to hold public office at any level.

[Robert Sneddon]

There is a way to carry out a long-term occupation of a foreign country. You deploy troops and keep them in theatre for ten years or more so they learn the local language, marry local women and raise families there. It's how the Raj in India lasted over a hundred years, after all.

[anonymous]

It's like watching the WOPR work out that nuclear war is unwinnable in "War Games."

Now if only Matthew Broderick had taught this lesson to the childlike-in-their-innocence pundit class *before* they got their war on in 2003, things might be better now.

Of course, since I just read an article telling me that we should seriously think about invading Myanmar, I suppose better late than never.

[Paul G. Brown]

I, for one, have some sympathy for the General (though a lot more for the soldier, and a tremendous amount for the Iraqi family).

How else can the General respond in this situation? He knows it's screwed up. Everyone knows. He knows everyone knows. So he responds to it in a way that lets everyone 'keep face', and keep buggering on.

What SHOULD he do? Resign his commission, or refuse to obey orders that lead to this kind of incident. But in his position I doubt I would have the spine to do that.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

.

During the late 1960's I worked for the Church (I was the office boy of a Washington think tank, and did occasional assignments in Mississippi and elsewhere -- fortunately with the Justice Department, the FBI, and the well-armed Deacons for Defence covering my back.)

During that time I worked with two senior military men, one the Admiral who desegregated the US Navy, the other the Marine Corps General who had commanded the very tough invasion of Tarawa in good Marine Corps fashion, from the beach. The latter spent a couple of years with us implementing LBJ's food programs for the poor in the South.

The General Officers I know are brave men and women.

There are clearly some good ones still around, too. Gen. Tommy Franks' sensible judgment that Donald Rumsfeld is the dumbest fuck on the face of the Earth (with which I concur, since I worked with Rumsfeld when he was a dolt Congressman from Wisconsin) shows that there are some military men around with both sense and the ability to express it.

I'm with Yglesias and Ackerman on this one: the guy in question is not fit for his job.


.

[anne]

"I, for one, have some sympathy for the General (though a lot more for the soldier, and a tremendous amount for the Iraqi family)."

I, for one, have no sympathy for vicious self-defeating destructive prejudice, not to mention the needless destruction of a family.

[Michael Sullivan]

"And of course if an American cop had put 200 rounds into a car and killed a whole civilian family over a traffic violation there would have been a shitstorm about it in local politics and the legal system."

20 years ago, I'd write it that way. Now, I think it would depend a lot on just who that civilian family was and where it happened. And whether that officer could plausibly (or even just not completely implausibly) suspect that "drugs" or "terrorists" were in that car. If our fascist leaning don't start swinging the other way, in another 20 years, that sort of thing will start happening regularly here.

Only slightly less egregious cases involving no-knock warrants already *do* happen here, and those cops often end up with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Try tracking Radley Balko's blog for a while, and especially watch how many brown-shirts are ready in comments to treat every possible thing a police officer does as ordained by the angels of god almighty.

[anne]

We need to leave Iraq and Afghanistan and stop bombing Pakistan and Somalia, but I have disturbingly little confidence we will find a change with Barack Obama and I am much bothered by this. There will be tremendous pressure on Obama from general officers and foreign policy specialists to remain in Iraq, let alone to remain in Afghanistan. Obama must be pushed to clarify intent on leaving iraq completely and immediately during the campaign.

[Steady Eddie]

anne, once an Obama Administration identifies and isolates or gets rid of the brown-nosing senior officers who this malAdministration has put into the top of the military, I expect you will find a vast number of career military types who hate the war in Iraq and want to get out of there ASAP because it is destroying the Army (at least). And Obama would not be who he is and would never have gotten where he is if he had put much stock in the "very serious" foreign policy pundits and think tank parasites.

[Just a Statistic]

According to the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), a Department of Defense research operation:

"Interview data revealed eight frequently mentioned motivations underlying recruit enlistment decisions. These were Historical Interest, Self-improvement, Job/Skill Training, Money for Education, Floundering, Time Out, Get Away/Escape, and No Other Jobs/Prospects. Other influential factors included the desire for job security and insurance benefits, and the opportunity to travel, to meet new people, to be challenged, and to serve the country."

With the exception of serving the country, which falls dead last, the reasons for enlisting can mainly be categorized as hope for personal development or relief from poor prospects or conditions, some of which sound desperate, which is exactly in line with my experience. I grew up in a rural town outside the Bay Area. This was the only place my parents could afford to give their 3 sons a home and not an apartment, but this required them to commute hours each and every day to the jobs for two high school graduates in the Bay Area that would support a house in rural nowhere. My high school never even heard of AP classes. The art teacher was also the trig teacher. And yet my parents were supposed to shoulder 25 grand a year for each kid to get a UC education, which we somehow, someway ended up qualifying for. Somehow they had to do this even though every Christmas they went deeper and deeper into credit card debt to give us young ones the meager appearance that we weren't as far down in life as we were. The magic word scholarship comes up, but neither of my parents went to college or were friends with anybody who did. College is a culture and we were on the outside. How do you get in...someone has to share knowledge of how to pay when you can't pay but don't qualify for financial aid because financial aid does not reflect the cost of living in your area. The GI Bill was my only hope to escape the viscious cycle knowing what I knew. I don't think people realize the effects of generational accumulation, whether that be monetary or cognitive. We had no accumulation and we surrounded by many just the same.

I went into the Air Force and made it out alive with the GI Bill. One high school buddy got turned into ground beef checking out an elementary school in Afghanistan. Earlier, I said, "Why did you go into the Army and not the Air Force or Navy where you're much more likely to get out alive?" He said, "I'm too stupid. I scored too low on the ASVAB. Only the Army or Marines would take me so I chose the least bad of the bad situation. I'm not like you. I'm never going to college."

For some, life is a game of constant survival under constant seige...and when you crack, it's all your fault...except in the military where people understand it's all FUBAR and you stick together, going down together.

[mere mortal]

"And of course if an American cop had put 200 rounds into a car and killed a whole civilian family over a traffic violation there would have been a shitstorm about it in local politics and the legal system. Even if the shooter evaded any criminal sanction, there would be consequences -- you couldn't possibly just brush it off and put the guy back out there directing traffic!"

You mean, unless the victims were black, right?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/25/sean.bell.trial/

"Bell, 23, died in November 2006 in a 50-bullet barrage -- 31 fired by Oliver -- hours before he was to be married. Two of his companions were wounded in the gunfire outside a Queens nightclub."

"Alexander Jason, an expert witness for the defense, produced a video demonstrating how quickly Oliver could have fired off 31 rounds, including a pause to reload."

Including a pause to reload.

"you couldn't possibly just brush it off and put the guy back out there directing traffic!" Oh, really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26about.html?_r=1&fta=y&oref=slogin

"Within minutes, the matter of Sean Bell — shot to death by police officers who tried to stop his car about 4:15 one morning while they were dressed as patrons of a topless bar and flying almost no flags of their real identity — would return to the Police Department."

[A]

There is a precedent where U.S. and other western forces went "to a foreign country where you don't speak the language but there is a domestic insurgency that forms one part of a complicated patchwork of oft-violent political machinations that you have no way of understanding."
namely the end of World War II in the Pacific, where the western allies presumably 'liberated' the countries which had been occupied by the Japanese Empire. This is described in the book "In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia" by Ronald Spector (Random House 2007). In his last chapter, Spector also approvingly quotes studies (by Edelstein and others, I forgot) that remind us that most occupations have not been successful (and for those in Asia after WW II, only the disarming/repatriating the Japanese could be considered a success). The post-WW II occupations of Japan and Germany are quite an exception.--
The difference between that conflict and Iraq now is that the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. at the time was much concerned first with extricating itself from there; and later involvement was part of an anticommunist strategy (whatever its merits); Iraq seems to be so much worse, being entered, on the basis of lies, without any strategic need nor consideration nor any thought about what could be accomplished by this invasion and occupation.