The
Economist is a conservative magazine. It supported the war in Iraq. It endorsed Bush in 2000, and its endorsement of Kerry this year was an ambivalent one that criticized him more than Bush.
But its Dec. 29 story on Iraq paints a chilling picture of the behavior and attitudes of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
More below the fold.
I'd hate for this thread to degenerate into soldier-bashing, so I'll say this: the primary responsibility lies with the politicians, not the individual servicemen thrust into an unfamiliar country with the wrong training.
What have U.S. soldiers done?
Never mind racial profiling: troops are using distance profiling:
...bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: "Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied"... Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: "If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them," says a bullish lieutenant. "It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people."
Troops are highly paranoid. Insurgent bombs and attacks disguise themselves as civilians, so now virtually every civilian is suspected of being an insurgent. Shoot first and ask questions later:
...marines say they shoot at any Iraqi they see handling a phone near a bomb-blast. Bystanders to an insurgent ambush are also liable to be killed. Sometimes, the marines say they hide near the body of a dead insurgent and kill whoever comes to collect it...
...marines rarely see their attackers. When fired upon, they retaliate by blitzing whichever buildings they think the fire is coming from: charred shells now line Ramadi's main streets. "Sometimes it works in the insurgents' favour," admits Rick Sims, a chief warrant officer. "Because by the time we've shot up the neighbourhood, then the guys have torn up a few houses, they're four blocks away, and we just end up pissing off the locals."
Many soldiers now have contempt for the civilian population, sometimes crossing the line into racism:
American marines and GIs frequently display contempt for Iraqis, civilian or official. Thus the 18-year-old Texan soldier in Mosul who, confronted by jeering schoolchildren, shot canisters of buckshot at them from his grenade-launcher. "It's not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it," he explained. Or the marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: "Where's your black mask?" and "Bitch, where's the guns?" In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. "That tells us the people here are OK," said Corporal Robert Joyce.
And Abu Ghraib most certainly was not the act of a few bad apples:
...Pleased to find an enemy [a captured insurgent] who understood English, marines say they queued up to taunt him; one told him he would be gang-raped in Abu Ghraib...
...they detained 70 men from districts identified by their informant as "bad". In near-freezing conditions, they sat hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been detained at random; several had been held because they had a Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver and a tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: "One, two, three, jihaaad!" A middle-tier officer commented on the mission: "When we do this," he said, "we lose."
Before I read this article, I opposed immediate withdrawal; the original invasion was surely wrong, but cut-and-run would only make the situation worse.
Now I think cut-and-run is the best option.