Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  And one sees the same ethos, the same super-power and super-value, among the frontline fighters as in Mogadishu. The one-sidedness of this mode of battle is, again, dramatic. The tankers use thermal sights to find enemy targets by their body heat, and vehicles by their engines and exhaust. The regular optical day sights are also good enough to hit standing Iraqis who, relying on the naked eye, may not even know there’s a tank in view. As Zucchino paraphrases his protagonists: “Some of the dismounts would stand up right in the open. Gibbons would cut them in half with the coax and he and Booker would shake their heads and mutter, ‘What the hell are these guys thinking?’ ”

  The US heroes are consistently mystified by what the Iraqis are thinking, as they stick up their heads and have them blown off. Don’t they know we have thermal sights? The Iraqis aim wildly, but the US machine guns, used properly, can’t miss: “their computers corrected for range, lead, temperature, wind, munitions temperature, and barometric pressure. The tanks knocked down the fedayeen one or two at a time as they ran across open spots.” The Iraqis continue to fight in the only way they know how—on their feet, with small arms, breathing and therefore generating heat images. They die as they are glimpsed. “They were not giving up. It seemed suicidal—men with nothing more than AK-47s or wildly inaccurate RPGs were charging tanks and Bradleys. It was like they wanted to die, or worse, they didn’t care,” the tankers think. This is simply the logic of a higher form of life regarding a lower.

  A large part of the apparatus of the US military is of course still oriented to preventing US deaths. Colonel David Perkins, the commander of the 2nd Brigade tank force that made the final “thunder run,” had to instruct his officers specifically that the primary goal of the mission was not to avoid the loss of American life: “He told his commanders that the mission’s main goal was not to avoid getting anyone killed. It was to force the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

  Yet the strategy of survival reappears, in the usual ways. When a tank battalion’s commander learns that some enemy soldiers are playing dead, standing up to shoot after the tanks’ main guns have passed, he decides to have his men “double-tap” all visible bodies—that is, to shoot the wounded and the dead, lest they prove to be a threat later. His officers and gunners put it into practice: “Anyone in an Iraqi uniform was going to die. It didn’t matter that they were wounded or pretending to be dead.” Because the US forces make their assault using a capital city’s highways in the early morning, civilian cars are also on the highway’s on and off ramps, and when they can’t be differentiated from enemy “technicals” and suicide cars, they must be destroyed. Zucchino again, paraphrasing his interviewees: “Deep down, [the tankers] knew they were inadvertently killing civilians who had been caught up in the fight. They just didn’t know how many. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming at the column was violently eliminated.”

  John Keegan takes note of the problem, blaming the civilians for not staying home:

  Such incidents had proliferated throughout the campaign. Civilian vehicles had time and again driven at high speed into firefights, as if their occupants were oblivious to the dangers of war all about them….One of the most bewildering characteristics of this strange war was the apparent refusal of civilians to accept that a war was indeed going on. They drove about, in vehicles easily mistaken for the “technicals” used by fighters, as if the Americans should understand that they were on a family outing or on their way to market, as they often were. The result was the spectacle of dead fathers or slaughtered children in bullet-riddled cars skewed across the roadway.

  As in Mogadishu, when real danger presents itself, US methods turn truly annihilative. During the Baghdad fighting, Iraqi forces mounted counterattacks at three crucial highway cloverleafs on Highway 8. The US fighters fired tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, but still more attackers appeared, and the commanders began to fear the enemy might break their perimeters and overrun their positions So they lowered their restraints. Residential buildings bordered the highway. It became necessary not only to shoot the visible enemy inside the windows, but to take down the buildings. Zucchino:

  Hornbuckle was concentrating on four- and five-story buildings to the northeast and the southwest, where RPG teams were able to fire straight down on his men dug into the cloverleaf. They were civilian buildings in a residential neighborhood, but under the rules of engagement they were now legitimate targets because they were being used by the enemy to attack American forces. Hornbuckle had first ordered his Bradley crews to fire high-explosive Twenty-five Mike Mike straight through the windows, where he could see the RPG teams firing and moving….

  The captain had his mortar team fire….The mortars chopped the buildings down, floor by floor.

  With the threat continuing from neighborhoods along the route, the commander of China Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Twitty, gives an order to stop asking for orders, and just bring mortar fire down on the residential neighborhoods. If you sense a threat, he orders, “just level it. Take it down. Call artillery.” He will end any threat to his men—no matter who may be in those neighborhoods.

  —

  My concern, however, is actually mostly with the enemy fighters, however loathsome a portion of them are, however grateful we are when American lives are protected, however necessary it was that the Saddam regime lose, and lose as quickly as possible.

  Why should it matter when killing is as one-sided as this? It may seem a perverse exercise to say which specimens of military killing qualify as war, and which others do not. I know it will seem equally perverse to militarists and pacifists.

  Some people claim that war is just the application of force to another group or nation until it submits. Ideal war then tends toward a totality of violence. Clausewitz began the tradition of modern thinking in this vein. Though he understood war’s motives to be based in state policy, he believed war’s prosecution to tend inevitably toward the “extreme,” toward “limitlessness.” This is often called a “realist” position.

  The first thing you have to believe, to view war differently, is simply that war is a distinct long-standing human enterprise, bound by rules, and that it’s a conflict between populations, rather than mere combat by soldiers or conquest by mighty rulers. Our ordinary language holds to this, in retaining such distinctions as those between war and massacre. The rules of war, too, grant immunity from violence to those who surrender, are wounded, or are taken prisoner. The rationale is simple—anyone who cannot provide a threat is no longer subject to killing.

  Certain actions which seem morally allowable along the progress toward their perfection, when their goal is possible rather than actual, may became disallowable if they ever reach that goal, arriving at a perfected state. Every general in history may have dreamed of a war in which he killed all of his enemies without a single death among his own men. But the dreamed-of situation was never attainable, and its unattainability was crucial to war’s ethical acceptability. Once the United States can annihilate large percentages of our foes in war with minimal losses to ourselves, we have entered a different moral universe.

  One of the peculiarities of the newest US technologies of war is that they make enemy soldiers resemble disarmed persons or prisoners of war. At the start of the war in Afghanistan, the United States quickly destroyed all Taliban defenses against high-altitude aerial assault. The United States then began bombing Taliban soldiers. We killed Taliban soldiers sitting in “frontline” positions. We destroyed personnel in rear supply positions. The United States at no time stood to the front or rear: only above. Our pilots stood out of range of any threat these soldiers could present them. A ground force had not entered Afghanistan. It is a paradox of technology to make armed combatants as helpless before our weapons as the categories of disarmed soldiers whom it would be unlawful to kill.

  Elaine Scarry once defined war as a reciprocal contest of injuring. Behind any military conflict—she agrees with Clausewitz—lies a
crisis of policy, as one group wants to compel another to accept its will. But how should it be, Scarry asked, that wars can be won or lost between populations in a way that prepares each side to consent to rewrite its deepest ideologies, or remake the constitution of its society—and all because of an action so uncivilized and terrible as the maiming and killing of soldiers in war? As occurred in Japan and Germany in 1945, and as we are hoping will occur in Iraq in 2004 (also, we should note, as occurred in the United States at the end of the Vietnam War), societies wind up changing their beliefs and self-conceptions because of the outcome of a contest that seems to “realists” to have to do only with killing power.

  This kind of war requires minimum mechanisms of consent by which a population can support or isolate its fighting representatives. In a liberal democracy like the United States, those are the mechanisms of a free press and representative government. In any loose or undemocratic state, they may simply be the power of the populace to provide or withdraw shelter, to respect fighters’ secrecy or hand them over to the enemy.

  But it also may be the case that any war which produces a lasting settlement might require two-sidedness—require, that is, the sense that a war actually occurred, a contest of representatives, with the real power to hurt each other, and recognize and count their losses, and equally be subject to the odd combination of skill, strength, and blind luck that means the battle is not always to the strong. It might also require time for campaigns to be drawn out, as two populations observe the carnage and ask themselves if the deaths are worth it—whether, that is, the ideas and principles incarnated in the fighters are worth the loss and pain, or whether to change ideas.

  Some wars end without ending, and without producing a state of peace or stability, as is the case today in Somalia, in Afghanistan, and—so far—in Iraq. These failures result either from an incomplete eradication of the “enemy,” as the US government and its military spokesmen tend to declare, or from the defective and permanent “tribal culture” of peoples not organized on liberal-democratic lines, as pundits and area-studies experts tell us. But one also has to ask whether the manner of carrying out a war, when the war is not quite a war, might somehow undermine the permanence of any settlement.

  —

  On May 1 of last year, George W. Bush flew to an aircraft carrier and unfurled his banner: “Mission accomplished.” Major combat operations were over. The war against the Iraqi government was done. That government was destroyed.

  The paradox is that we began to see the crucial conditions of war return only when war was declared over—in an occupation that the United States had not prepared for, and that we citizens are now slowly coming to recognize and understand. We return to war, in some form, at a moment when war is unacknowledged—when an exchange of deaths, a slow and visible process, undoes the one-sidedness of our glorious, barely visible three-week war last March and April.

  In mid-April of 2003, tens of thousands of Iraqis protested against an occupation, but that was lost in the end of what we had declared to be our war, while we were preparing to declare it over. US troops fired on the demonstrators twice in three days, killing at least fifteen and wounding seventy-five. Back in April, the first revenge attack was reported in Fallujah—and this news, too, was lost. The United States and the United Kingdom finally declared themselves “occupying powers” in May, seeking the protection of international law to take temporary control of Iraqi oil supplies. The situation worsened rather than improved. By mid-June 2003, the drip of dead Americans, ambushed or bombed, had begun. Attacks on US soldiers during the fall, Patrick Graham recently reported in Harper’s, reached “roughly fifty per day” in Al Anbar province alone. By January of this year, 2004, says Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post, US forces were suffering an attack, on average, every forty-one minutes. Whatever the frequency of attacks, as of this writing, 810 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, only 108 of them during the three-week war. Nearly 4,700 have been wounded—some of them grievously, we know, since US medicine can stop death and undo wounds but can’t save exploded arms and legs, which have to be replaced with artificial limbs.

  “Heroes without war” acquires another meaning, in the Iraq situation—when US troops fight so remarkably, and against such weak states, that a “war” can be held to twenty-one days, too short a time for anyone to understand what is occurring, too quick a sequence of battles to be meaningfully represented by the press. It also made too compressed a victory for either the defeated population or the victor to learn whom they would be living with, in the odd intimate proximity of an occupied nation and a distant foreign power—as we shipped our reserve troops and entrepreneurial citizens over, to speed the transformation.

  We begin to learn, however. And so do the Iraqis. By observing the Americans, the Iraqi insurgents could see firsthand how much we watch each of our military lives. The Iraqis could not kill our best fighters in a planned war. But it didn’t matter who a dead American was. It didn’t matter, in the occupation, if the person killed was a fuel convoy driver, an Army Reservist rotated from weekend training to overseas duty, a National Guardsman who usually protected the USA from natural disasters, or a Marine patrolling the street.

  No Iraqi can face off against our frontline fighters. And it doesn’t matter if the American is not faced down. He or she can now be blown up by what even the press calls an IED, an “improvised explosive device”—an old artillery shell, invariably, wired with a fuse. A highway full of booby traps, like a barrage of carelessly fired mortar rounds, will eventually hit someone. And the new deaths are added to the balance sheet of American lives, each one mattering more than fifty or a hundred Iraqi fighters in our calculus. So the Americans’ higher register of life can be used against us. A steady hemorrhaging of lives, one or two a day, could force our recognition of the opposite side, whom the American fighters still find unintelligible, and whom the American public hear about only as “dead-enders,” “foreigners,” or “terrorists.”

  The act of mutilation—performed by boys and townspeople, though the ambush was arranged by fighters—is a way of getting us to see what we Americans value most, as we watch it be undone. We respect “clean” killing; this is filthy mistreatment of the already dead. We care more about one or two or three of our own inviolable and invincible soldiers’ bodies (and our military cares, especially) than we do about mass killing. Six civilians and a journalist had been shot dead in Fallujah by US troops the Friday before the mutilations. Very well, the civilian mob would show us what we are like.

  Ironically, several weeks before the mutilations, the Marines had been brought in to replace the 82nd Airborne in part because they were more polite, more decent, closer to the ground in their fighting methods than the paratroopers they replaced, more likely to win “hearts and minds.” Then the mutilations occurred. The Marines joined a battle more like Mogadishu than anything that had occurred in Iraq during the actual war. Reports have been spotty and contradictory. The Marine tactic seems to have been to enter the city to draw fire, then pulverize the sources of fire. Close air support was used in neighborhoods inside the city, from Cobra helicopters launching Hellfire missiles, to cannon-firing AC-130 gunships, to bombs from F-16s. The director of the Fallujah General Hospital reported six hundred people killed and twelve hundred wounded in one week. He said the majority were civilians; the Marines insisted 95 percent were “military-age males.”

  April also proved to be the bloodiest month for American forces since the war. One hundred and thirty-five soldiers died and eleven hundred more were wounded. The Fallujah insurgency continued a year-long chronology of Sunni Muslim resistance. Simultaneously, however, the Shiite Muslim forces of Muqtada al-Sadr and his anti-American Mahdi Army were rising against US troops in Najaf, Karbala, and elsewhere. Twelve Marines were killed in a single seven-hour firefight in Ramadi on April 6—nearly two-thirds of the number killed in the long-ago fight in Mogadishu.

  We swore the people we are fighting would
cheer their liberation. We are living inside our worst-case scenario, in which Sunni and Shia can be united for only one cause, to resist us. This is something for the political scientists and intelligence agencies to explain. But the wider issue is that the news reports seem to indicate that the many disparate insurgents—who themselves are often destabilizing and extremist groups—are coming to look like representative forces. I do not mean that the actual fighters represent the will or ideas of a majority, or even a significant minority, of the people (or peoples) of Iraq. I simply mean that these varied groups, fighting a common enemy, are coming to seem like a force with whom citizens can come to identify or disidentify—just as Americans identify and disidentify with the actions of the US military and its civilian leaders, who order our fellow citizens to kill and die in our name.

  This occupation, in reassuming the condition of war, will change the self-conception of the Iraqis, or our own—if only we have the nerve to look steadily at it, and think. The United States is making a claim on what Iraq should be: secular, human-rights-based, economically privatized and open to foreign investment, and as democratic as it can be while ensuring permanent friendly ties with the United States. When we make this claim backed by our military, we are also making claims about our United States—for example, that we have the moral, national, and humanitarian authority to overthrow tyrannical governments in favor of democracy and free-market economics.

  The insurgents, in turn, are making claims about the way they want their own country to look: theocratic, Islamist rather than Western, traditionally repressive rather than egalitarian and rights-based, “Arab” rather than globalized, independent rather than occupied. They are also making claims about how they want the United States to be: not expansionist, not dominant, not spreading Western values, not capable of imposing rights-based freedoms, equality-based democracy, or free-market globalization.