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Jewish World Review March 31, 2003/ 27 Adar II 5763
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Our military commanders and their civilian chiefs are
constantly congratulating themselves over the
extreme precautions they are taking to avoid civilian
casualties and suffering in bombing Iraq. They can
boast of their "targeteers" who are enjoined to
focus on strictly military aiming points, avoiding
"dual-use" targets such as the electrical supply,
which was shut down in the first Gulf War of 1991 ---
but not this time.
The civilians we mean to liberate
would be inconvenienced, and some would be
endangered, including babies in incubators. Yet
electricity is specifically useful to operate any
number of military devices from anti-aircraft radars
and all fixed radios to the air-conditioning units that
keep less hardy biological warfare agents alive and
well.
The broader effect of an uninterrupted electrical
supply is also significant in preserving Saddam
Hussein's power to intimidate potential dissidents,
boost the morale of his loyalists and force the
population at large into displays of eager obedience,
even devotion. Television and radio broadcasts are
still being received all over the country, conveying
the all too credible threats and sometimes beguiling
promises of the regime.
More generally, also, the continuation of electricity
helps to prolong Iraq's abnormal normality, in which
more than half the population has never known any
other ruler than the terrifying Saddam Hussein,
lethal security chief since 1968, all powerful since
1979 if not before. Hitler's power lasted 12 years,
but Saddam has held life and death powers over
every Iraqi for 35 years. Given that the Bush
Administration's goal is to overthrow him, the
exclusion of electricity from the target list seems
peculiarly self-defeating. As it is, although American
forces are advancing upon it, sandstorms permitting,
the regime's ability to control Baghdad's population
is seemingly undiminished, precluding any immediate
hope of a spontaneous revolt even in Saddam City,
the huge slum of a million Shias, where Saddam is
especially hated, by all accounts.
Even purely military targets cannot simply be
bombed. Once dual-use targets are excluded, it is
the turn of the "weaponeers" to impose their own
exclusions. They first work out what it would take to
destroy a target, anything from a smallish 500 lb
bomb or cruise missile warhead to the common yet
devastating 2,000-pounders, or even one of the
scarce extra-large bombs of 4,000 lb and up. Next
they calculate the weapon's radius of destruction
around and beyond the target, and therefore its
potential to inflict collateral damage on civilians,
carefully differentiating between more contained
blast effects on concrete or brick, and the broader
threat of flying glass.
That rules out another entire set of targets judged
too close to civilian dwellings, including Iraq's
Ministry of Defence no less, which would be the
equivalent of the Pentagon if Saddam Hussein had
not arrogated to himself most of the powers of his
defence minister. Still, even if the operational
centres of military command are elsewhere, the
ministry is the administrative arm that keeps Iraqi
forces supplied and paid.
Finally the lawyers of US Central Command
intervene and they can serve no purpose at all
unless they find ways to exclude more targets. That
is easily done, because, by way of indirect effects
actual or possible, the destruction of any number of
targets can be held to cause the deaths of innocent
civilians. Bomb a bridge being used to send Iraqi
troops to the front, and ambulances to the district's
hospital cannot get through either; destroy trucks
being loaded with ammunition, and leave the next
load of water-purification chemicals undelivered.
More straightforwardly, the lawyers rule out the
bombing of Iraqi and foreign media facilities,
including the Al Rashid and other hotels favoured by
foreign reporters - whose basements are therefore
safer than any bomb-proof shelter for command
posts and even Saddam himself.
Were this a matter of ethics, there would be much to
debate, but it is not. The prolongation of war caused
by half measures kills many more people - including
babies denied incubators and much else by wartime
disruptions, as well as thousands of Iraqi conscripts
compelled to fight and die by regime terror squads -
than the restricted collateral damage of precision
bombing ever could. The incomplete target list is a
symptom rather of the deep ambivalence of the
Bush Administration as it wages its entirely
discretionary war by choice, in which shallow
calculations of public relations masquerade as a
moral stance.
Having started its war to eliminate the dictatorship
of Saddam, the Bush Administration should do
everything it can to do so as quickly as possible,
even if television viewers must be denied those
artichoke-colored pictures of the Baghdad skyline
under bombardment.
For Saddam's policemen and militia loyalists are still
arresting, torturing and executing Iraqis - some as
deserters or dissidents - while in Basra
demonstrators in the streets have reportedly been
massacred wholesale by mortar fire.
Long ago, Karl von Clausewitz, the supreme
theoretician of war, explained why every attempt to
prettify its essential violence with inconsistent acts
of moderation, every refusal to use maximum force
when it can be purposeful and no mere rampage,
adds to the human costs of war by extending its
cruelties and deprivations, and even more by
delaying the arrival of the desired peace that is the
only possible goal of any rational war.
Soon enough American troops in Baghdad, and in
lesser degree British forces in Basra, will have to
confront the permanent and universal tactical
advantages of any urban defense. One is the infinity
of barriers to visibility and direct fire created by an
infinity of walls, which largely nullifies the
advantages in range, precision and concentration
bestowed by superior infantry and tank firepower,
while reducing most forms of air power and artillery
to a downright marginal role - especially if the
avoidance of civilian casualties remains the dominant
priority.
Another advantage of the defenders is the
fragmentation of forces that high-rise buildings
impose on attackers, if they cannot simply be
bombed out. Infantry and armor control the space
around them with their observed firepower, but they
can only do so in two dimensions. If troops must
secure high buildings floor by floor, it might take an
entire battalion to clear a couple of ordinary office
blocks. With only 30 battalions or so in the entire US
offensive so far, or perhaps 40 when the latest
reinforcements arrive, as against hundreds of tall
buildings in central Baghdad alone, the arithmetic
would imply a very slow, very bloody conquest.
But if the psychological hold of the regime on its
subjects can be broken, quite another arithmetic
would apply. As it is, only a small percentage of all
Iraqis in arms overrun till now - certainly less than 5
per cent - have fought back in any way. They have
moreover done so in clumsy and ineffectual ways in
most cases, because the skills and experience of
Saddam's most loyal followers, his secret policemen,
Ba'ath party enforcers and tribal militia "martyrs",
are best suited to terrorize defenseless civilians,
rather than to fight well-trained soldiers.
Very likely, that small percentage could be further
reduced by using the strongest possible tactics right
at the start of any urban warfare - demolishing tall
buildings, for example, rather than fighting through
them floor by floor - as well as by denying all use of
mass media to the regime by cutting electricity.
Again, not only American and British soldiers would
avoid injuries and deaths but also far greater
numbers of Iraqis. If the Bush Administration does
not have the stomach for that, preferring to
endanger Allied troops (including Captain Jonathan
Luttwak US Army) rather than accept the odium of
bad publicity from scenes of ruined buildings and the
inevitable civilian casualties that go with them, it
should not have chosen to start a war in the first
place.
What is already happening in this war is not
encouraging. A soldier or Marine -- American or British
it is just the same -- comes under fire from a sniper in
Umm Qasr, Nasiriyah, or any other place for that
matter. It is always said correctly enough that every
episode of combat is a unique event, a
non-repeatable conjunction of terrain, weapons,
tactics and, more important, of skills, combat
discipline, unit cohesion and general morale on both
sides. Yet these days every episode of combat is
exactly the same in two all-important ways: no
American soldier may be killed without grave
repercussions up the chain of command all the way
to President George W Bush, and no enemy civilian
may be hurt to prevent that soldier from being killed.
Actually, the very phrase is obsolete, for we keep
being told that Iraqis at large are not our enemies
at all, but rather our future democratic friends that
we must liberate. All this is very nice but what about
that soldier or Marine who comes under fire? Can he
call in attack helicopters with their rapid-fire cannon
and missiles? Can he ask for the close air support of
fighter-bombers or even the big bombers of the US
Air Force? Or, more prosaically, can the standard
remedy of past wars be used, to blast out the sniper
with artillery or tank gun fire? It depends, of course.
Certainly yes in open country with no visible civilians
round about, certainly not if the firing is coming from
a farmhouse or apartment block full of civilians ---
even if the sniper has already killed fellow soldiers
or even if he is holding up the entire unit's advance.
At some other time in some other place, our soldier
or Marine may himself agree that civilians should
never be harmed in combat, but in his immediate
predicament he cannot just ignore the huge
contradiction that leaves him exposed to deadly fire.
His enemies can use any and all weapons at hand,
but he cannot have the support of even a tiny
fraction of America's enormous firepower. Is he
therefore doomed to die? Of course not, because he
is not in Normandy 1944, or in the wars of Korea or
even Vietnam, when it was still accepted that in war
soldiers and perhaps many of them must die.
Our soldier or Marine is in Iraq 2003, where the
Bush Administration and Tony Blair for that matter
must pay a stiff political price for each combat death
of this discretionary war in our post-heroic age. So
long as families still commonly had several children,
so long as some commonly died anyway because of
endemic childhood diseases, combat deaths were
fundamentally accepted as normal, instead of being
viewed as extraordinary outrages. It is not therefore
because of any decay in patriotism or -- if one
believes in such things -- of any decadence in the
nation's character, but rather the inevitable
consequence of our changed demography, by which
the emotional capital of most families is invested in
just one male child, whose death is a limitless
tragedy. That is why it was not television imagery
that made the Vietnam war what it was, contrary to
a thousand legends, but something altogether less
superficial, at a time when a growing population was
already composed of ever smaller families
increasingly possessed of only one male child.
The absolute proof is in the exactly parallel response
of Soviet society, which was traumatized by the
casualties of the Afghanistan war even in the
absence of any televised scenes of carnage at all. A
total number of casualties over a period of 10 years
inferior at some 14,000 to those of many a single
day of past Russian battles - had a most powerful
impact in spite of censorship and dictatorship
because it arose from the deepest level of society,
the family. First, it imposed prudent if not downright
evasive tactics, then years of outright military
passivity which we now know were ordered by the
Kremlin to avoid casualties, then finally Gorbachev's
withdrawal. The Bush Administration is full of
seemingly determined people. It remains to be seen
if they are more determined than the tough old
Bolsheviks of the late Soviet Union.
So what happens next, with our soldier or Marine
under fire who may neither be killed nor kill freely?
Nothing, mostly. If that sniper is well ensconced
among civilians, he must be waited out if he stays
where he is, if his position cannot be circumvented.
British immobility around Basra exemplifies this
outcome, a negation of the purpose of war. None of
this has been a crippling limitation for the American
forces so far in their fast advance to Baghdad, in
which most islands of resistance were best
by-passed anyway, so long as there was another
road for the essential columns of fuel trucks coming
up just behind (ammunition supply is no problem
with so little combat).
But what will happen when Baghdad is reached?
Unless the regime collapses in a last retreat to Tikrit,
as one must fervently hope, American troops
entering the city will encounter snipers, random
shooters and would-be ambushers who will certainly
be ensconced among civilians. Nor can they all be
circumvented without subjecting the city to the
agony of protracted siege that would combine the
horrors of repression by roving terror squads -- as in
Basra already now -- with those of starvation. The
answer that Clausewitz would offer is to use
maximum force as purposefully aimed as possible. It
remains to be seen if the Bush Administration will be
consistent by authorizing tactics as forceful as its
strategy.
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By Edward N. Luttwak
JWR contributor Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Comment by clicking here.
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