At Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, some American soldiers had become so inured to the torture of Iraqi inmates that they made a screen saver of naked Iraqi captives stacked in a “pyramid” with their tormentors looking on and laughing in the background.30 By contrast, on January 13, 2004, Sergeant Joseph M. Darby of the army’s 372nd Military Police Company turned over a computer disk of similar photos from Abu Ghraib of American soldiers torturing Iraqis to the army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He said that the photos “violated everything that I personally believed in and everything that I had been taught about the rules of war.”31 Sergeant Darby had not stopped thinking.
No Pentagon civilian or American officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel has so far been prosecuted for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib and other acts of torture and murder in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, another proof that, as a consequence of our half century of devotion to war, we unintentionally abandoned our republican checks on the activities of public officials and elevated the military to a position that places it, in actual practice, beyond the law. In so doing, what we have created is a large corps of desk murderers in our executive branch and the highest ranks of our armed forces. These people have replaced their ability to think and judge with “cliches, stock phrases, and adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the defilement and looting of ancient monuments and museums in Baghdad as the American occupation of that country began by saying, “Stuff happens,” and then joking that he did not think there were that many ancient vases in Iraq.32
It is, of course, natural for political and military leaders to try to put favorable interpretations on their policies. In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, this has meant making statements that consist of little more than flat contradictions of evidence or specious reinterpretations of law. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for example, has tried to legalize the Bush administration’s decisions to torture prisoners of war by arguing that a “new paradigm renders obsolete [the Geneva Conventions’] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”33 But the allegedly new paradigm is apparent only to Gonzales, and in any case he lacks the authority to nullify a ratified treaty.
Richard Myers, a four-star air force general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared categorically to Fox News, “One thing we don’t do is we don’t torture,” as if that disposed of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison.34 In speaking to our European allies about extensive evidence that the CIA was operating secret prisons and torturing the inmates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “With respect to detainees, the United States Government complies with its Constitution, its laws, and its treaty obligations. Acts of physical or mental torture are expressly prohibited. The United States Government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.” She mentioned that there had been cases of the “unlawful treatment” of prisoners, but added that “the horrible mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib that sickened us all ... arose under the different legal framework that applies to armed conflict in Iraq.”35 She failed to explain what the nature of this different legal framework actually is or how this squares with a ban on torture “wherever [it] may occur in the world “
Commenting on the unauthorized bombing of civilian villages in Afghanistan, former secretary of state Colin Powell said on German TV, “We spent a huge amount of money and we are putting our young men and women on the line, every day, to put in place a form of government that was decided upon by the Afghan people. And we are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We’re very proud of it. It’s been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again in Iraq.”36
As Arendt suggests, it is precisely when such absurdities and flights from reality replace clear thinking that evil enters the picture. What follows are but three illustrations of the consequences of the failure of our political and military leadership to think: the systematic killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq; the creation of a global network of both known and secret prisons around the world in which our troops or intelligence agents routinely torture the inmates; and the way the military’s attitudes at the time of its 2003 assault on Baghdad led to the destruction and desecration of some of the world’s oldest known human artifacts.
During World War II in East Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army contrived one of the worst euphemisms ever used to mask criminal acts— namely, “comfort women” (ianfu) to refer to the women and girls abducted in occupied countries and sent to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for Japanese officers and soldiers.37 This phrase will probably haunt Japan until the end of time. A comparable term invented by the United States military is “collateral damage,” meaning its killing of civilians and the destruction of private property while allegedly pursuing one or another of its unilaterally declared acts of “liberation.”
“Broadly defined,” says a U.S. Air Force training manual, “collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces.”38 This military euphemism has been substituted for plainspoken words that might induce guilt in airmen when they bomb and strafe defenseless communities or in soldiers when they kick down doors of private homes, rush in pointing assault rifles at women and children, and sometimes rob residents under cover of searching for enemies or contraband. The military also certainly hoped that its adoption of such a neutral, inoffensive expression for ones that might offend or suggest unpleasantness would strengthen the resolve of its soldiers and perhaps prevent them from being held accountable for war crimes.
“Collateral damage” is nowhere recognized, or even mentioned, in humanitarian international law. In fact, intentional attacks of any sort on civilians are prohibited under “Common Article 3,” which applies to all four Geneva Conventions. The United States has signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions (although it never ratified two supplemental protocols of 1977 that spelled out the international rules of war in greater detail). Common Article 3 prohibits “at any time and in any place whatsoever” violence, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and outrages to human dignity against protected persons—that is, “persons taking no active part in hostilities,” such as civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. “Such persons are, in all circumstances, entitled to respect for their honor and religion, and must be protected against insults and public curiosity. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised to obtain information from them or third parties. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”39
Among the gravest contemporary instances of “collateral damage” were the sanctions enforced against Iraq between 1991 and 2003 and the slaughter of Afghan and Iraqi civilians in the wars waged by the United States after 9/11. On May 11, 1996, the CBS television program 60 Minutes made famous one of the more notorious statistics in the history of Iraqi-American relations. In an interview with then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, correspondent Lesley Stahl said, “We have heard that a half million children have died as a result of the sanctions [in Iraq]. That’s more than died in Hiroshima.” Then Stahl asked, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” Osama bin Laden cited just this statistic as one of the reasons al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In her 2003 memoir, Madam Secretary, Albright amended her comment this way: “I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaw in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.”40 Her clarifi
cation, however, was even more disingenuous than her earlier indifference to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. As a former ambassador to the United Nations, she was certainly fully informed about the sanctions program and its impact.
During the Gulf War of 1991, the United States drove Iraq from Kuwait but stopped short of invading Iraq itself. Nonetheless, President George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser, General Brent Scow-croft, were determined to do everything in their power to make postwar Iraq ungovernable, to stimulate revolt within the country, and to force Saddam Hussein from office. During the war itself, the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems.41 Dr. Thomas Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, analyzed a large number of declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents on the bombing and concluded that American officials were well aware that the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s civilian water sanitation systems would cause increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality.42 The primary document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” dated January 22, 1991, argues that Iraq’s rivers “contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.” Later documents state that the sanctions imposed after the war explicitly embargoed the importation of chlorine in order to prevent the purification of drinking water.
A Washington Post analysis of the air war published on June 23, 1991, quoted typical, although unnamed, Pentagon strategists on the bombing campaign, one of whom suggested that” [t]he definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear.... They do live there, and ultimately people have some control over what goes on in their country.” Another air force planner asserted, “We wanted to let people know. Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”43 In 1995, Colonel John A. Warden III wrote in Airpower Journal, “[Destruction] of these [electric power] facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.”44 A team from the Harvard School of Public Health suggested in May 1991 that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing.45
The bombing itself violated international humanitarian law and made the United States liable to charges of war crimes. Article 54 (2) of the “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1), June 8, 1977,” explicitly states, “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”46 As noted earlier, the United States is not a signatory of Protocol 1, but this does not absolve it of the charge that its behavior was profoundly immoral.
The sanctions themselves reinforced and deepened what the bombing began. Jacob Hornberger, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, quotes State Department officials who helped negotiate U.N. support for our actions as saying that these were the “toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history.”47 On August 2, 1990, the United States and Britain obtained U.N. Security Council Resolution 661 freezing all of Iraq’s foreign assets and authorizing the cutting off of all trade. This embargo lasted until the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. In its history, the U.N. has imposed economic sanctions only fourteen times (twelve of them since 1990), but according to Joy Gordon, the leading authority on the subject, “only those sanctions on Iraq have been comprehensive, meaning that virtually every aspect of the country’s imports and exports is controlled.”48 The American and British governments claimed not to have sequestered imports of food and medicine—hence Albright’s pretense that all Saddam Hussein had to do was comply with the U.N. to preserve the health of his people—but the two allies so restricted Iraqi exports that it had no money to buy such necessities. Columbia University professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist and one of the leading analysts of the effects of sanctions on Iraq, says that “Iraq’s legal foreign trade was cut by an estimated ninety percent by sanctions.”49 In particular Iraq was not allowed to import any of the parts it needed to repair its electrical and water purification systems.
The United States and Britain went to extraordinary lengths to keep U.N. documentation of what was happening inside Iraq from being made public. But the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) nonetheless monitored the situation, and in 1995, its researchers wrote to the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, that 567,000 Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. That figure may have been an overestimate, but it led to the U.N.’s “oil for food” program in 1996, which was supposed to remedy shortages of food and medical supplies. It did not work out that way, however, because the U.N. banked the proceeds from the Iraqi oil sales it now permitted in New York and skimmed off 34 percent to pay Kuwaiti claims of war damage against Iraq as well as its own expenses. The United States insisted that a further 13 percent go to the Kurdish autonomous area in the north. There was thus much less money available than the public was led to believe.
In addition, the U.S. government reserved the right to veto or delay any items Iraq ordered, exercising that power often and in secret. As Joy Gordon, who teaches philosophy at Fairfield University and is a prolific writer on the Iraq sanctions, noted, “In September 2001 nearly one third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational-supply contracts were on hold. Between the springs of 2000 and 2002, for example, holds on humanitarian goods tripled.” Among the items the United States stopped from entering Iraq in the winter of 2001 were dialysis, dental and firefighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, and printing machines for schools.50
Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Baghdad, observed that food shortages were virtually unknown in Iraq before the sanctions, but that from 1991 to 1998, “children under five were dying from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,600 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month.”51 Using his 1999 study, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children,” as well as other studies and his own later recalculations, Richard Garfield estimated that, through 2000, the sanctions had killed approximately 350,000 Iraqi children.52 This is the most widely accepted figure today. When Denis Halliday, the United Nations coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 to protest the effects of the sanctions, he condemned them as “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq” and called their implementation “genocide.”53 Given that the United States had starved the Iraqis for over a decade and caused the deaths of several hundred thousand of their children, one wonders why former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and others believed American invading forces would be welcomed as liberators.
In the wake of 9/11, a new threat to civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan materialized in the form of random killings by America’s often poorly led and unaccountable armed forces. These victims were “shot by snipers, strafed by helicopters, buried under the rubble of their houses by bombs, incinerated by fire, and left to rot in the streets of cities like Fallujah [Iraq] to be gnawed on by dogs.”54 The military keeps no public record on their numbe
rs—what Boston Globe journalist Derrick Jackson calls “this atrocity of silence”—but the evidence indicates that in Iraq in the first years after the invasion such killings by Americans amount to between twice and ten times the people slain by insurgents’ bombs.
On June 2, 2005, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that, over the previous eighteen months, insurgent violence had claimed the lives of some 12,000 civilians, whereas the estimates of the numbers killed by the American military ranged from a low of 21,000 to over 40,000.55 In July 2005, Dr. Hatim al-Alwani, head of the Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad, released his group’s estimate that the total number of Iraqis killed from all causes since the U.S. invasion was 128,000, including those who died in the U.S. assaults on Fallujah. A year later, the American public began slowly to awaken to the U.S. military’s lax discipline in using lethal force against civilians. Serious cases of out-of-control marines executing the elderly, women, and children at Haditha, Ishaqi, and elsewhere amounted to the equivalent in Iraq of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.56
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic Page 4