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The sordid news from the Iraqi prisons under American control should not have come as any major surprise. This is war, and war is a sordid business. Atrocities accompany all wars. That's one reason why it's so hard to find much writing that praises war as a noble and virtuous activity.
But there's more to the scandal than that. These abuses appear to be a direct consequence of the way that America went to war with Iraq.
Go back a couple of years, when the Pentagon was leaking plans for an American invasion. The Bush Administration wanted to go to war, and the announced reasons, like weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi support of Al Qaeda, don't matter much now. What matters now is the occupation after the war, and the evidence increasingly suggests that the Bushites avoided the topic.
Even though the State Department, the CIA and various
military planners warned that Iraq would be unstable after
a regime change,
inside the highest circles, the
party line was that the Iraqis would welcome us as
liberators. All would go quite well after Baghdad fell and
oil revenues paid most of the cost of reconstruction;
anyone who questioned this assumption was regarded as an
anti-war wuss whose opinion could be disregarded.
This was made clear in an article in the
January/February edition of The Atlantic by James Fallows:
The problems the United States has encountered are
precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned
against.
But you don't have to be an expert, just a history buff, to see that occupying armies almost always face some resistance from the locals. The occupiers respond with reprisals, in ways that do not win hearts and minds.
Go back to our own Civil War. As the Union armies pushed into the Confederacy, they won military victories, like Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's capture of Atlanta on Sept. 4, 1864.
Sherman tried to minimize the possibility of attacks on
his occupying soldiers by ordering the civilian population
of Atlanta to move elsewhere -- an order that was denounced
as cruelty.
He was at the end of a tenuous supply
line, more than 100 miles of single-track railroad, which
was often attacked by both regular and guerrilla enemy
forces. He fought the regulars; as for the irregulars, any
farmhouse thought to be sheltering them got burned to the
ground.
It soon occurred to Sherman that he didn't need a supply line if he kept moving; the famous march to the sea followed. In a military sense, Sherman's campaign was a success, but in a political sense, it's been 140 years, and there remain Southerners who curse his name and delight in flying their old flag.
During World War II, the Germans occupied northern France. Despite what you may have heard from our governor about Gallic poltroonery, there was French resistance, ranging from sabotage to the killing of Wehrmacht officers. The Germans responded with firing squads and torture chambers; in some occupied areas, entire villages were massacred on account of one attack in the general area.
Just as our authorities point out that the Geneva
Conventions don't apply to non-military resistance
personnel in occupied areas, the German authorities issued
an announcement in Paris: International Law does not
grant to individuals taking part in subversive activity
within the territory of the Occupying Power, the protection
which regular soldiers may claim.... The occupying power
considers and will continue to consider members of
resistance groups as terrorists
who will not be
treated as prisoners of war and will be liable to the
capital penalty.
History shows than any occupying army, be it Sherman attempting to restore the lawful authority of an elected government or the Nazis brutalizing Europe, can meet resistance after the formal battles conclude.
So it shouldn't have come as any surprise that some Iraqis would organize and attack American supply convoys and the like.
Now consider an American commander there, responsible for the safety of his troops. He would be remiss in his duties if he didn't try to collect information from captives about these attacks, so that he might prevent them in the future. The temptation to abuse would be difficult to resist.
And that's why planning before an invasion is important. Our occupations of defeated countries after World War II went much better. But back then, the experts who anticipated, and planned for, the resistance after a military victory were heard and respected, rather than ignored and scorned.
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