Using the same playbook?
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Abraham Lincoln
The new Iraqi government, led by Nuri al-Maliki, the Shia Islamist prime minister, is launching a number of national reconciliation initiatives including the release of thousands of detainees and possibly an amnesty for sectors of the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency. Alongside these carrots, Mr Maliki plans to use the stick of a massive security clampdown centred on Baghdad, where scores of Iraqis are dying each day in sectarian carnage.
Is this a good idea? I think it is, although of course the devil in the details has yet to be fleshed out. (And al-Maliki is no "Islamist," as FT says, though he is certainly Muslim.)
[T]he amnesty plan is likely to include pardons for those who had attacked only U.S. troops, according to a top Iraqi adviser. The adviser characterizes those attacks as "a patriotic feeling among the Iraqi youth and the belief that those attacks are legitimate acts of resistance and defending their homeland." "These people will be pardoned definitely, I believe," the adviser said. "We can see if somehow those who are so-called resistance can be accepted if they have not been involved in any kind of criminal behavior, such as killing innocent people or damaging infrastructure, and even infrastructure if it is minor will be pardoned."
PM Maliki himself said,
Reconciliation could include an amnesty for those "who weren't involved in the shedding of Iraqi blood," Maliki told reporters at a Baghdad news conference. "Also, it includes talks with the armed men who opposed the political process and now want to turn back to political activity."
It's certainly no coincidence that Maliki's announcement coincided with the opening of a widespread and vigorous offensive against insurgents, conducted by American and Iraqi forces. (It does make me uneasy, though, to think some Iraqi insurgents may now think they can off an American or three in coming days and get off scot free by then applying for amnesty. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!) As for the devil of the details: it's yet to be stated how an amnesty applicant can prove he attacked only Americans, or whether a simple declaration will suffice. The amnesty proposal specifically does not cover criminal activity and explicitly does not include anyone who killed or wounded any Iraqi, whether civilian or not. Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, a top adviser to Maliki, said,
"The government has in mind somehow to do reconciliation, and one way to do it is to offer an amnesty, but not a sort of unconditional amnesty," Kadhimi said in a telephone interview. "We can see if somehow those who are so-called resistance can be accepted if they have not been involved in any kind of criminal behavior, such as killing innocent people or damaging infrastructure, and even infrastructure if it is minor will be pardoned." The reconciliation effort pioneered by South Africa after the collapse of apartheid might be a model, Kadhimi said. "One way was to admit what you have done and you will be forgiven, and maybe parts of this can be considered. Because once we see people coming forward to admit what they have done, and it's within the areas the government has the right to pardon, it could happen."
Even eventual pardon of Iraqi-killers was not ruled out by al-Kadhimi, who indicated that such pardons would need to include a means by which families of the slain could receive compensation in some way.
When assessing the amnesty proposal, we need to keep the main thing the main thing, however emotionally unpleasant that may sometimes be. And the main thing is ending the insurgency, but not necessarily by killing all the insurgents, so that a free, democratic and peaceful Iraq may emerge.
Financial Times continues,A broad-based but targeted amnesty to reunify Iraqis and isolate the extremists may be the last chance to save the country from breaking up into a series of warring states run by militias. An amnesty is indispensable, even if it may not be enough.
As the FT points out, the interim government of Iyad Allawi floated this kind of proposal two years ago, but the Bush administration knocked it down. Since then, Sunni and Shia militias and warlords have waxed in power. "[T]he essential nature of the conflict has changed from a guerrilla war against the US-led occupation to a sectarian war between the winners and losers in the new order ... ." Captain Ed says of the amnesty proposal,
This sounds appalling, but it probably reflects the reality of Iraq today, and will be the only realistic way to bring an end to the infighting. We can demand that Mailiki rescind the offer, but a refusal would only burnish his credentials as an independent leader. In fact, we should protest to give him that chance. I would like nothing more that to see the cowards hand from the nearest gallows, but insisting on that point would likely make almost everyone ineligible for the amnesty. Maliki has already narrowed down eligibility to those who have not attacked civilians, which will prove problematic enough to enforce. At some point, Iraq needs a national reconciliation if it is to avoid a civil war. The Shi'a and Kurds will have to find ways to connect to the Sunni minority on a rational political basis, and the best way to get to that stage is to combine a crackdown on insurgents and a ban on militias with a general amnesty for those who wish to return home and live normal lives. Their motivation has not been radical Islam in most cases but sectarian hatreds and a reaction to occupation. If we want to stabilize Iraq, we will probably need to bend on this concern, as hard as it will be, in order to hasten that reconciliation and help the Iraqis move farther away from politics at gunpoint.
Quite so. I would also suggest that amnesty objectors in Congress or elsewhere might consider some history. Harper's Weekly reported on May 13, 1865:
By his proclamation of the 8th of December, 1863, President LINCOLN granted a full pardon —with certain exceptions which we will presently state—to all who had been in rebellion, with a full restoration of all rights of property except in slaves and in cases where the rights of third parties had intervened, and upon condition of taking and subscribing and keeping in-violate an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the Union under it, and to abide faithfully by all the laws of Congress, and by the proclamations of the President in regard to slaves, so far as they are not repealed or declared void by the Supreme Court.
Exceptions to this amnesty were those who held Confederate government posts, served as the CSA's diplomats and any CSA general officer or CSA navy lieutenant or above, and some other exceptions. But Confederate soldiers up to colonels were offered amnesty if only they swore allegiance to the US Constitution and pledged not take up arms against the Union again. Furthermore,
On April 9th 1865, when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the men and officers were "allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside." This stipulation allowed Confederate soldiers to return to their homes without the threat of trials for treason.
On May 29, 1865, President Andrew Johnson provided for amnesty and the return of property to those who would take an oath of allegiance. However, former Confederate government officials with the rank of colonel and above from the Confederate army or lieutenant and above from the Confederate navy, and people owning more than $20,000 worth of property had to apply for individual pardons. Though it was difficult for ex-Confederates to ask for a pardon for something they did not believe had been wrong, thousands did ask for and receive amnesty from President Johnson.
On Christmas Day 1865, Johnson granted an unconditional pardon to all Civil War participants except high-ranking military and civil officials. In May 1872 the Congressional Amnesty Act gave the right to hold office again to almost all Southern leaders who had been excluded from public office by the 14th Amendment.
Fascinating Fact: President Johnson was so liberal in granting pardons that the Radical Republicans believed he was giving away the Northern victory.
I'll give the last word to Rick Moran:
I don’t like it any more than you do.
The prospect of granting a limited amnesty in Iraq – especially to those Iraqis who participated in attacks on Americans – sticks in my craw. I believe that amnesty would cheapen the sacrifice made by the more than 2,500 Americans who have given their lives in Iraq and would be a slap in the face to the families of the fallen.
But all things considered, it may be the price of a full, unqualified victory in Iraq – a stable democratic government that promises full political participation for all Iraqis and that would be an example to follow for the rest of the autocratic Middle East.
This was the goal when we initiated the overthrow of Saddam. And achieving that goal would hearten democrats in the entire Muslim world while striking a huge blow at al Qaeda and their brothers in terror across the Middle East.
Yes, We have to keep the main thing the main thing, however bitter that may be.
Cross-posted at Donald Sensing.com
Update: I was talking with a former Marine with combat service in Iraq who told me that his fallen compatriots died for Americans, not Iraqis. "If amnesty makes America more quickly secure then it honors their sacrifice because that's what they died trying to accomplish."
I've no major qualms with this, though I would exclude those involved in suicide bombing American forces - simply because the ideology behind suicide bombing isn't nearly the same thing as the basic nationalism behind waging a guerilla war against foreign troops.
(Obviously, the bombers themselves would be hard to pardon - but they require support to function.)
I wonder if al-Sadr would cloak himself in the amnesty, or whether the actions of his 'vice and virtue' enforcers would count against him.
Read the above with this context.
(Replace "*" with "o" in url, put there because of WoC filtering)
Amnesty is nothing more than a policy tool that should satisfy a cost / benefit analysis. On the benefit side, we give occasional amnesty to tax evaders and illegal immigrants because we know that these individuals are difficult to detect. Similarly, insurgent are secreted in communities which are generally supportive. You would like to see community attitudes change and an amnesty might help make that leap from "well, everybody was doing it" to "that was then, this is now." But generally the policy benefit is to forgive prior bad acts with the expectation of future goodness.
The cost of the amnesty is the foregone benefits of forgiven misconduct. In tax cases, this is easy; its lost revenue from penalties. The major cost of amnesty though is the potential to encourage future bad acts. The penalties for post-amnesty misconduct must be severe and ideally coupled with renewed vigor in enforcement. Also, the perceived value of the amnesty by insurgents will be increased by the degree of expectancy that the amnesty will not be repeated.
I'm not sure why one would limit amnesty to killers of Americans. If we are using the Lincoln analogy, the goal is to heal rifts between warring communities. Americans don't plan to be a part of that community. Nor do they expect to be in the country seeking vindication in criminal justice system. The value of an American-only amnesty may not be perceived to be high if you believe the Americans will leave in the next year or two and nobody left in Iraq will care that you killed an American soldier.
For whatever the laws of war are still worth (not much, IMHO) amnesty for those who killed US soldiers makes a certain amount of sense. Soldiers are the most legitimate targets for guerrilla war--certainly more legitimate than Iraqi civilians. Those who attacked US soldiers are declared misguided guerrilla fighters (amnesty), those who attacked civilians are terrorists (death/prison/exile).
The larger strategy is probably a pan-Iraqi front against Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Sunni groups have a chance now to break with the jihadis and make their peace with the new Iraq. It will be next to impossible to determine which Sunni fighters attacked Iraqi government forces and which attacked Americans, but it probably is possible to identify those involved in organizing suicide bombings and kidnappings.
It's a symbolic thing. They mostly can't catch insurgents of any stripe. Or rather, they catch some of them mixed in among 4 times their number of more-or-less-innocent civilians.
But the symbolism of saying they forgive people who fought americans is useful. Also I agree with PD Shaw, once the americans are gone iraqis would like to brag about killing americans without admitting to crimes.
"It's a symbolic thing. They mostly can't catch insurgents of any stripe. Or rather, they catch some of them mixed in among 4 times their number of more-or-less-innocent civilians."
This is absolutely 100% incorrect and in fact the opposite of the reality on the ground. I'm extremely confident of this- my best friend just got back from the sand box and i've had his rundown and it meshes with exactly what the milbloggers are saying:
The military catches insurgents and terrorists every single day absolutely red handed. They catch hundreds and thousands of them. They catch them seconds after firing a rifle and then dropping it when return fire starts and holding up their hands, after throwing a grenade and turning to run and falling down, they catch them with every kind of ordinance you can think of in their homes, they catch them planting IEDs with explosive residue all over their arms. Now these might not be high profile intl terrorists by any means (many are simply collecting a paycheck quite literally for taking a pot shot at an American), but they are certainly not good guys. The vast majority of the guys they catch red handed are released within days or weeks. It is a simple fact no the ground that we turn these guys over to the Iraqis and somebody gets bribed, or a their cousin the Shiek makes a call, or the guards simply get bored and these guys walk. My buddy told me he's personally arrested the same people caught with bombs etc on their person mulitple times and its very common.
Thats why this is such a tempest in a teapot. We've been de facto offering amnesty for years. There is a catch and release program going on with insugents in Iraq that would make the US border patrol blush. This initiative is a good idea for the simple fact that nothing different is going to have to be done at all. Might as well reap some benefits from it.
Michael Yon had an incredible post about the catch and release program he witnessed first hand:
"LTC Kurilla repeatedly told me of - and I repeatedly wrote about - terrorists who get released only to cause more trouble. Kurilla talked about it almost daily. Apparently, the vigor of his protests had made him an opponent of some in the Army’s Detention Facilities chain of command, but had otherwise not changed the policy. And now Kurilla lay shot and in surgery in the same operating room with one of the catch-and-release-terrorists he and other soldiers had been warning everyone about."
Doesnt get much more first hand than that.
Another great man, Thomas Hobbes, knew a bit about calming a civil war. He distinguished crime by a few with a general uprising:
In other words, no justice without peace first.
Mark's "catch and release" points underscores for me that Americans are not the proper subject of an amnesty. What's the incentive for the quick release insurgent to accept amnesty? The Americans aren't doing anything. They'll be leaving. If I'm a reasonable insurgent, I would be worried that 3-5 years from now, when the insurgency is lost, the victors finally get around to trying everyone. Continuing an insurgency against the government might at least push the day of reckoning back.
Mark, you're telling me that we catch a few insurgents -- hundreds and thousands -- repeatedly. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands (or by now perhaps millions) of insurgents out there. I'm not disagreeing with you and I don't think you're exactly disagreeing with me, we're talking about different tragedies. Plenty of those to go around.
Anyway, I think we're getting closer to the day the iraqi government invites us to go away. That might resolve a lot of these issues.
I don't think there are hundreds of thousands of insurgents (we would see much higher casualties- the current levels as tragic as they are are indeed low historically), but there are surely tens of thousands (and many more sympathizers and enablers certainly). Now if the Shiia decided they wanted rid of us in a serious fashion (not just a few thousand of Sadrs goons causing trouble- if Al Sistani ordered us out for instance) that would be the level of violence you are suggesting, and we couldnt stay long in the face of that.
My point is A. releasing the one's we do catch is abysmally stupid, but i suppose we've grown numb to stupidity by now B.since we're not holding most of them anyway we might as well leverage a deal with the Sunnis if we can.
The Sunni may well be finally to the point of realizing that they are in serious trouble if we leave before there is some sort of national stability established. The death of Zarqawi might actually have one major impact in Iraq on the ground- it cost the Sunnis their only active foriegn ally. The Shiia were afraid of Zarqawi and probably wouldnt ask the US to leave before he was neutralized. With that impediment gone, J may be right, the Shiia may be ready to see the backs of the US. The Kurds and the Sunni together (with a few Shiia castoffs) have enough clout to halt the government from having things entirely their way.
There are definitely not hundreds of thousands of insurgents, or even tens of thousands. Baghdad probably has a couple thousand at most, but the hard core insurgents and terrorist number less than a few hundred.
As for amnesty, we've already given it to the Shia. Remember Sadr? Remember the war we had with his Mahdi Militia? He "joined" the political process and he and his fighters basically got complete amnesty. Now he controls large parts of the police and military and has the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of poor and disaffected Shia youth.
It seems a little one-sided to give the Shia's complete and total amnesty and not give the Sunni's any amnesty.
And I'd like to point out that this is a separate issue from foreign fighters. FF's are not insurgents, they are terrorists. I don't think there is any way in hell the US or Iraq will give any sort of amnesty to foreign fighters. It will be reserved for Sunni Iraqi insurgents except for a handfull of the worst offenders.
The amnesty needs to follow a massive roundup, and the people determing the amnesty need to be the Iraqis. There are going to be some folks with blood on their hands who will retain power.
I know for a fact that letting former combatants assume power in governence happened in the Civil War, but with certain caveats. Quantrell and his ilk never got reconstructed. He was either shot or hanged, and I don't care to rediscover which; he died on a date not of his choosing. Lee, the supreme combatant, was the epitome of reconstruction, founding a prestigious university in Lexington, Virginia, named for George Washington. The criteria for reconstruction has to be absolute. The ceremony has to be settled on some type of cultural bedrock: an oath you don't break. And it has to be of terms that Iraqis accept, not neccessarily by us.
However, most of the insurgents are, at their most benign, criminals. At their most malevolent, they are like Zarqawi: mymidons who advance their goals expressly through killing that begets more killing. There isn't enough soul there to reconstruct. Any amnesty that happens needs to occur after a large scale, long term round up. Release the innocent and the ones in prison that you think are utterly harmless or will be productive to the state, according to a fixed criteria. Inter or hang the dangerous and the criminal.
And again, the Iraqis need to be the ones to do it.
Mark, we've had about 20,000 casualties. The insurgents have surely had 100,000 casualties and it hasn't slowed them down at all. Of course there are hundreds of thousands of them left. They aren't tremendously effective against us.
Agreed, if all the shias started putting out IEDs too we'd run out of supplies in a month.
We were at one point holding 70,000 or so of them, and that also didn't slow them down at all. Maybe if we increased that to 500,000? 10% of the sunni population? Feed and provide sanitation for half a million people for the duration, would that slow down the insurtents more than it slowed us down? That just isn't a workable approach for us. If we were more like the Romans we'd kill detainees instead of release them. (Or better yet, enslave them and crucify a few every now and then to warn the others not to try anything.) But we aren't like that.
Yes, I agree we might as well leverage whatever deal we can.
I don't know how the sunnis think. As it is, we destroy one sunni city after another with airstrikes and invasion, and then we claim after we've beaten them up enough we're going to move in the shia army to occupy them. You think they figure they'll be worse off after we're gone? You think?
After we go, will the sunnis get help from syria, jordan, saudi arabia, or kuwait? Would any of those countries want a sunni buffer zone between them and shia-land? They can only give covert aid now because we'd take it real unkindly if they do more than they can deny. When we're gone....
The sunnis might feel like they have a better chance by resisting than by surrender. I'm not clear how they think. A few times I've noticed other people not thinking quite the way I do. Maybe this is one of those times.
J Thomas writes:
Except that neither has ever happened, and no city has even been heavily damaged.
Which may be part of the problem. If Tikrit had disappreeared under about 6-10 MOABs during the invasion, and related sections of Fallujah actually had been flattened right after that incident with the security contractors, I suspect we'd be looking at a very different war.
Joe has a point. There is obviously a pretty big divide in perceptions over how we have handled the Iraqis and Sunnis in particular. By any historical standard, even the takedown of Fallujah was done with absolute kid gloves. You have to remember that 1.We gave civilians weeks to evacuate and 2.The city wasnt exactly Manhattan to begin with, you see a crumbling husk in the pictures post invasion but realize it was a crumbling husk pre-invasion as well. And this was after the first go-round in Fallujah where we backed off and gave the Sunnis the opportunity to run the city with complete autonomy- and were thanked with strung up and torched contractors.
This is a new kind of war mainly because of the deliberate and new aged way we are conducting it. Forget the Nazis, the British 50 years ago wouldnt have put up with 1/10th of what we have without severe reprisals. Sometimes that works, sometimes it backfires. It generally works best when it is done in a smart way- threatening to hand major cities over to Kurdish control for instance would be a very British Imperial type solution. It would certainly have gotten the Sunnis attention in a way that our sypathizing with them and babying them has not. People in general and Iraqis in particular respect power, our coddling simply telegraphed weakness. Contrast that to Sadrs first uprising and the deliberate and thorough (but never brutal) way it was put down. We havent had a peep out of Najaf since.
The path I feared most in this war (and history bears this out) was our being soft in the beginning and then slowly ratcheting up the violence tit for tat. That is always a recipe for appearing weak and provoking challenge. Had we come in strong and made some examples early on, we wouldnt have to do it now, and conversely now its too late because it appears to be nothing more than panicked revenge which makes us look even weaker still.
So what do we do now? The overall game hasnt changed, just the cards we can play. Your question about fellow Sunnis is interesting. The answer is none of them can get involved while the US is present, and none of them will put their feet in the vipers nest if we leave. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has a large Shiia minority that could cause real problems if they were to go adventuring across the border against fellow Shiia. And nobody has the stomach to challenge Iran anyway.
The numbers dont lie- if we leave in a civil war scenario, the Kurds will easily cease all the Sunni oil wealth and the Sunni will be left poor, basically friendless, with a pissed off Shiia 3 times their size and backed to the hilt by Iran coming for revenge. Again, it is our job to make sure the Sunni recognize this.
Joe, I suspect a more personal touch would be more effective. Rather than murdering the entire population of Tikrit from the air, why not round the population up and shoot each man, woman, and child in the back of the head? The military could video tape the whole thing and send it to the press.
Then the world would REALLY know how serious the USG was about terrorism. Surely then the surviving Iraqis would peacefully submit to our liberal democratic traditions.
What this proposal really does is lay down new rules of warfare and apply them retroactively.
Under such rules, it was all right to attack Americans as invaders, because... well.. we were invaders. I still think taking Saddam out was a good idea but we were invaders. There is no getting around that. We conquered Iraq. That we did so on behalf of the entire world, including the Iraqi people, is of no account; the Iraqi people weren't consulted (never mind that such was impossible) and so we were invaders. No matter what good we do, there is a base level at which we are and should be unwelcome.
But there are many things that Iraqis have decided are intolerable in war, and the Iraqi government is going to make those things clear. One, of course, is no indifference or desire for civilian casualties. That eliminates nearly all al-Qaeda and most of those who think their way. It also eliminates nearly all the kidnapping gangs and revenge squads. Any future pardon will have to pay blood money aka reparations. It seems clear to me that reparations for kidnappers will have to be at least as high as their ransom demands... there must be no profit in kidnapping such as we have seen and are still seeing in Baghdad.
It pains the base instincts of mankind to see an enemy walk away without utter defeat. But such a plan as is proposed here is a return to the existence of laws of war. They may not match ours right now but such things can be worked on later. Far more important is the principle that there are such things as honorable and dishonorable combat. The Iraqi government should be supported de facto in such an endeavour even if overtly we must protest.
We are going to leave. Everyone remember this. We are going to leave. The only question is when; and when is whenever Iraq is stable and free. Anything that achieves the objectives of the war and brings the troops home faster can, should, and in fact must be done.
This happens at the end of most internal wars. Yes, some people will claim this is a horrible betrayal so they can use it as a political club against Bush, but the reality is that these things generally end one of two ways: amnesty or genocide.
The ISF continue to progress, Maliki's gov't has said over and over that they expect to more or less fully take the reins next year, meaning by 2008 our presence will be largely advisory, with some logistical and air support. At that point, fogiving Sunnis who opposed the U.S. shouldn't be a big deal.
Iraq will probably continue as it has the past few years, slowly building liberal democratic institutions amid violence and corruption. It's already one of the freest countries in the Mideast. The violence may not end for a long time, perhaps even a decade or longer, but the insurgency will slowly be ground down; their position gets weaker and weaker relative to the elected gov't and that's only going to continue.
"As it is, we destroy one sunni city after another with airstrikes and invasion,"
Except that neither has ever happened, and no city has even been heavily damaged.
Revisionist history? I saw the satellite shots of Fallujah after we liberated it. Did you?
Here's a photo from 2002.
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Image:Al_fallujah_sep15_2002_dg.jpg
Unfortunately my quick websearch didn't turned up an after photo today. I found a couple of sites that no longer have them,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1638785,00.html
Falluja's compensation commissioner has reported that 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines.
I suppose we could go there and check it ourselves. No, that would not be a good idea.
In Tal Afar, official sources claim that there was minimal damage. There are various reasons for this including new rockets that are much better at destroying their targets while leaving surrounding areas unharmed, but probably the major reason is that there was almost no fighting. The mayor resigned to protest the attack, but the new mayor wrote a beautiful letter praising the soldiers and claiming they did essentially no damage at all.
Was that right?
http://www.emilitary.org/article.php?aid=4602
To help build those relationships means making repairs and cleaning up the city, work that the paratroopers are already assisting with. “There is a lot of damage to the city and their homes. Now we have to help rebuild it,” Taylor said.
Not very quantitative.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13655532.htm
Al Jibouri said the American cavalrymen in Tal Afar had conducted "the best operation in Iraq, with none of the big destruction like in Fallujah."
Same mayor. It could easily be true. No verification.
Qaim
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/AR2005122301471.html
Doing airstrikes and killing some civilians. Looks pretty low-level, averaging well under 40 civilians a day.
Ramadi
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=10433
The media blackout on Ramadi is already rivaling the blackout on the draconian measures employed by the military during the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, if not surpassing it. Thus far, the military have remained reluctant to allow even embedded reporters to travel with them in Ramadi.
Hard to say what's happening there. Airstrikes, snipers, etc. How much damage will it amount to? Presumably, the less resistance the fewer buildings destroyed. But we're letting a lot of civilians leave, provided they don't go to Baghdad or ask for assistance.
My websearch isn't turning up much information about damage to iraqi cities after Fallujah, except a little provided by the US military. No reliable information one way or another.
Catfish, a whole lot of iraqis welcomed us as liberators. Or at least appeared to hold no strong resentment.
But we didn't run a very good occupation. Particularly, we didn't have the strength (or the lasnguage skills) to maintain much -- well, any -- security for iraqis. And yet we were strong enough to keep them from developing local security for themselves.
We started out announcing democracy. But then Bremer did doubletalk and evasion and didn't even start a delaying action against democracy until Sistani got real insistent. And that wasn't Bremer's policy, that was Bush's policy. (I guess somebody might argue that Bush didn't know what Bremer would do when he appointed him, and never checked up on him. OK, it could be claimed that Bush really wanted democracy and Bremer thwarted him.)
I think the more iraqis saw that happening the more they saw us as invaders. At this point it's a pretty clear consensus. Sunnis, shias, turkmen, christians, pretty much everybody but the kurds want us gone. But some of them would be pleased if we kill some of the folks they don't like beforewe go.
According to MSNBC 9000 homes were destroyed. The author you cite (in the Guardian i might add) Mike Marqusee is an anti-war activist with the group Iraq Occupation Focus. I dont know who Fallujah's compensation commissioner is or what source he is drawing from. Schools and mosques were destroyed because they were consistantly used by insurgents as fire bases, it is disengenuous to throw out stats about their destruction as though they were just carpet bombed indesciminately.
Again, we are at an impass in expectations. I think when Joe and I think of a city being 'destroyed', images of Dresden, Tokyo, or Grozny, or Sarajevo come to mind. And those are cities where the populations were present. It is simply unfair to put Fallujah or anyplace else in Iraq on any kind of an equivalency with a standard modern siege with basically consists of pounding each block to dust with artillery or firebombing. To claim we 'destroyed' Fallujah is absurd in that sense.
Mark, I notice the MSNBC article also doesn't give a source for its claim of 9000 houses destroyed. It lists 32000 claims for compensation, which might include some houses only damaged, but notes that there are still lines of people filing claims. With an estimated half the people still away, no telling how many are simply not there to line up for additional compensation claims.
It looks to me like the number of houses totalled is something we could know by now. But we don't, unless you're willing to take the word of the Fallujah compensation commissioner. It appears we don't have anybody in Fallujah who can determine that number and get it published.
OK, let's make ballpark estimates. With a population of 250,000 to 350,000, that ought to be 25,000 to 50,000 houses. (Assuming 6-10 people per house.) If they were 60% destroyed that's 15,000 to 30,000 destroyed, compared to the sourceless estimate of 9,000. 9000 houses destroyed would be 18% to 36%, as opposed to 60%.
So we're talking somewhere in the range around 20% (our best case guess) to 72% (The Fallujah compensation commissioner's percentage).
If you want to say Dresden was 100% totally destroyed and this was only one fifth totally destroyed (with a lot of damage short of total destruction) then I guess you have a case that it wasn't so bad. If it's 2/3 totally destroyed, that isn't so very different from 100%, and 72% comes even closer.
So how come we're arguing the facts, when there's been plenty of time to find out the facts? How come nobody trustworthy has reported them?
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=46441
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1471011,00.html
Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.
So there's a name for the man, you don't have to smear the source as an antiwar activist. Instead you can smear the source as an iraqi, and the info transmitted through a non-pro-war journal. Or from the UN, we can figure the UN would lie to smear us, huh. The UN says al Dulaimi works for the iraqi government. But of course that doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
Just suppose that 70% or so of the buildings in Fallujah were actually destroyed. Who would be a credible witness to that?
"So how come we're arguing the facts, when there's been plenty of time to find out the facts? How come nobody trustworthy has reported them?"
Can't see Fallujah from your hotel balcony in the Green Zone.
"So there's a name for the man, you don't have to smear the source as an antiwar activist."
I dont think its a smear to announce the reporters affiliation. If the MSNBC reporter was on assignment from the Rand Corp I think that would be relevant.
"Instead you can smear the source as an iraqi, and the info transmitted through a non-pro-war journal. Or from the UN, we can figure the UN would lie to smear us, huh. The UN says al Dulaimi works for the iraqi government. But of course that doesn't mean he's telling the truth."
In this report, ad-Dulaymi says 7000 houses totally or partially destroyed. Odd that considering the fighting was in November and this report came out in March while your reports came out in April, apparently an additional 29,000 homes were found destroyed 4 months after the fighting ended. Im not saying this guy is a liar, im saying we dont know anything about him, his background, his motivation, or his methodology.
We do know in the same article he claimed: "More than 100,000 domesticated animals were killed in the city as a result of the Americans' use of poisoned gas and other chemical substances." which is absurd.
"Just suppose that 70% or so of the buildings in Fallujah were actually destroyed. Who would be a credible witness to that?"
How bout a satellite photo? How bout any pictures at all we can compare to Grozny or even Atlanta circa 1864.
Look, what you are suggesting just makes no sense. Why would the military bother to fight street to street and blow up one house at a time when they could far more easily put their poor underused artillery units to work and just pound the city to dust? If they intended to go blow up 3/4ers of the city, that could be done from artillery and the air with no risk to Americans at all. Thats the whole point. The military fought it out in the streets of Fallujah and targetted the enemy with eyeballs. They did not just haphazardly launch ordinance into the city like the Russians did to Grozny or a million other examples. It is flat out wrong to put the two on the same plane.
Mark, he listed 8400 shops both times, 65 mosques both times, and the number of schools went from 59 to 60. Perhaps he said 37,000 houses and somewhere along the line somebody dropped the 3.
A satellite photo would be fine. I found a 2002 satellite photo to compare against, but I haven't yet found an "after" photo. There's no possible way to get a satellite photo of Atlanta 1864 to compare against, I doubt we could even get Atlanta 1964.
At least some of our artillery wasn't under-used at Fallujah, the logistics guys could barely keep up.
I believe you're thinking about a technological difference. Guys who only have artillery and infantry can stand off and just blast everything with artillery until it's all rubble, and then when they move in the defenders are sniping at them from the rubble. We didn't do that. We moved in and didn't tear the place up until we got to spots where they shot back. Theoretically I'd expect big parts of the city to be intact from that, any place there was no resistance shouldn't have been damaged much. That could amount to half or 3/4 of the city. Similarly, Fallujah had over 200 mosques that I'd have expected to be targets, and only about a third of them were destroyed. Why would we destroy 2/3 of the houses (little targets) and only 1/3 of the mosques (big targets)? It's plausible that only 1/3 of the city would have been destroyed. But why is it so hard to get a reliable source?
If you have an after photo I'd like to see it. Lots and lots of little tiny houses, I'm not sure I could tell a destroyed house from an intact one, but it would be interesting to try.
Anybody know how to tell the age of images in Google Earth? Ive got a build date of 11/17/05 but the images must be older. Most likely pre-battle im guessing.
Satellite shot from November 14, 2004. Fighting started in ernest on the 7th and by the 16th was said to be mop up, so the majority of the damage should have been done by this time. There are clearly some damaged and wrecked buildings (particularly the bigger ones). Hard to see if anything is wrong with the houses, but they dont seem to be flattened.
Here are before and after shots of Grozny. The building are just gone.
The Fallujah compensation commissioner's job is to funnel American money to rebuilding efforts in Fallugah. He's sort of the anti-insurance adjuster.
I'm sure the discrepancy is that there 9,000 homes destroyed and many more that were damaged sufficiently that they might need to be rebuilt. Its not pictures you would need at that point, but a structural engineer to go house to house.
But the U.S. isn't the insurance adjuster. They've thrown at least a hundred million at the compensation fund and are leaving it to the Iraqis to distribute. The U.S. isn't going to make individual assessments or argue about whether the homes need a complete rebuild or whether the damage was caused by the U.S., by Saddam, by Baathist thugs or the Fallugah police force that took over after the marines left.
Another non-trivial point- you can blow up empty houses all day long so long considering the number of torture chambers and their management are being demolished along the way. I mean seriously, would the Fallujans have been better off living in a mini-Taliban state with Syrians and Saudis cutting people heads off left and right? Aside from being 6 months too late, Fallujah was a rousing success. Only a small number of civilians were harmed, but over 2000 of the absolute worst terrorist scum got themselves martyred while displaying just how ineffectual their fighting skills were before the world. Considering the alternative was to let them run amuck, I dont know how things could have gone much better.
Mark, the strategic question about Fallujah is interesting. They started out surprisingly pro-american, and we antagonised them. If we'd backed off at the beginning, would they have been so upen to letting the bad guys in? Well, maybe they would. They needed an armed force their people supported if they were going to keep them out, and whatever militia they developed to do that would look to us like insurgents unless they made a big point of being on our side. We weren't ready to accept militias on our side, unless they were kurds.
If we had run local elections early, and made the police chief an elected office, and funded local police departments, it might have helped more places than it hurt.
Omce we were the enemy so much that they thought of headchoppers as the lesser evil, it was probably easier to attack them than cordon them off. For the attack our estimates of their numbers d o not make sense. We estimared that 2/3 of the population fled. That would be 80,000 to 100,000 civilians left behind. And for the ones who didn't leave early enough, we separated out the men age 15-55 and didn't let them leave. We made them into honorary insurgents.
Then during the fighting we estimated there were 5,000 insurgents in Fallujah and 50,000 civilians. But the tactical orders said to treat them all as insurgents.
After the smoke cleared we announced we'd killed about 1000 of them and captured about 1000 and none got away. Presumably most of the 50,000 civilians had left after all, and our estimates of the number of insurgents were off by 150% -- which is fine, better to overestimate the enemy than the other way around. But how many of those 2000 were men who were simply late leaving the city? If they took up weapons at the last minute because we wouldn't let them surrender earlier, no wonder they weren't very good fighters. Why couldn't we detain all the military-age men who wanted to leave (and maybe their families, if their families couldn't get by without them) and sort them out at leisure? I hate to be arguing in favor of lots of detention, but when the alternative is hunting them down in the ruins and killing them unless they can manage a surrender then.... That policy does not make sense to me, except that if you're going to have a turkey shoot you need to make sure there are some turkeys. So anyway, 2000 insurgents, 9000-35000 destroyed houses, 8000 destroyed businesses, etc. Something about this doesn't add up very well.
Since then our approach has changed some. When we attack a city we allow plenty of time for the civilians and the insurgents to leave. Then we attack and kill just the people who stay behind, or maybe just the ones who shoot at us. We either occupy the place and promise to help fix it up, or we just leave. Some of the civilian insurgents come back. Most of the dedicated insurgents go somewhere else, and we follow them and attack that place.
This is not traditional counterinsurgency. But it might be the best we can do at this point.