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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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August 13th, 2006 - Atrocities are
a Fact of All Wars, Even Ours |
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Atrocities are a Fact of All
Wars, Even Ours - It's not just evil empires whose soldiers go amok By Anna Badkhen San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, August 13, 2006 The allegations sound like
reports of war crimes committed by someone else's soldiers: men in black ski
masks enter a house, where three of them take turns raping a 14-year-old
girl. They then kill her, her parents, and her 5-year-old sister. It is the kind of atrocity
Americans associate with the Nazis, Serbian paramilitary commandos in Kosovo,
perhaps Russian troops in Chechnya - not U.S. soldiers. "One doesn't expect the
American troops to behave the same way, because there are notions that higher
morals prevail in the U.S. armed forces," said Robert Rotberg, an expert
on conflict and conflict resolution at Harvard University. But as a military tribunal
in Baghdad is deciding whether five American soldiers must stand trial in
connection with the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her
parents and sister in March, military experts and historians warn that it
will become increasingly difficult for American troops fighting against an
elusive enemy in Iraq to maintain military discipline under the intense
pressures of war. Wartime atrocities, they say, occur in most wars and are
committed by most, if not all, occupying troops - even by such a high-tech,
well-trained military as the United States'. "Combat is about
stress, and criminal behavior toward civilians is a classic combat stress
symptom," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington
military think tank. "If you get enough soldiers into enough combat,
some of them are going to murder civilians." Recent allegations of
atrocities by American troops - which include the investigations into whether
U.S. servicemen shot in cold blood 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha in
November, shot an unarmed Iraqi man in February, executed a civilian in April
and three prisoners in May - "aren't surprising at all," said
Andrew Wiest, professor of military history at the University of Southern
Mississippi. "The fact that we maybe weren't expecting them is
surprising." In fact, historical accounts
of past wars spell out a grisly pattern of atrocities against civilians.
British troops executed and raped civilians during the Revolutionary War,
according to U.S. historian David Hackett Fischer's Pulitzer Prize-winning
book "Washington Crossing"; Red Army soldiers raped an estimated
100,000 Berlin women between 1945 and 1948, as described by the British
historian Antony Beevor's "Berlin: The Downfall 1945." During the
Korean War, U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered their troops to kill Korean
refugees caught on the battlefield. And last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times
published details of a once-secret Pentagon archive that describes 320
alleged incidents of American atrocities against Vietnamese and Cambodian
civilians - not including the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops
killed more than 300 Vietnamese civilians in the course of three hours, and
which became a turning point in Americans' perception of the Vietnam War. Since the war in Vietnam,
the U.S. military has abandoned the draft, raised its recruiting standards,
tightened its rules of conduct in war zones - outlawing, for example, alcohol
consumption or sex during deployments - and introduced mandatory courses on
warrior ethics in Army and Navy colleges. Even so, "It's
difficult to get through to cadets, officers and (enlisted) men the
importance of targeting only enemy combatants, taking prisoners and not just
shooting anybody," said Mark Grimsley, professor of American military
history at the Ohio State University who has spoken at the U.S. Military
Academy in West Point and who runs the blog WarHistorian.org. "Some
officers are very concerned about these things, and do a good job of training
their men. Others are more slipshod about it." U.S. servicemen allegedly
involved in the deaths of Iraqis include a major, three captains, a first
lieutenant, and several noncommissioned officers. Soldiers who are alleged to
have executed three Iraqi prisoners in May say a U.S. Army colonel had
instructed them to kill all fighting-age men. Since the war began in 2003,
at least 14 U.S. servicemen have been convicted in criminal cases stemming
from deaths of Iraqis, and at least six other cases, involving 27 servicemen,
are pending investigation. Compared with other counterinsurgencies,
"there might be fewer (such incidents) than I might expect," said
Wiest. But the longer the U.S.
forces remain in the country, the higher the likelihood of new crimes against
civilians, warned Raymond Scurfield, a sociologist who served as an Army
social worker in Vietnam and who has written about the psychological effects
of war on veterans. "Anybody can maintain
discipline for a short period of time," he said. "It's the
protracted, repeated stuff that becomes very difficult. As the war is
prolonged and becomes nastier, as (American servicemen) are put into very
difficult situations, as the civilian populace doesn't come out friendly and
aid Americans - all those dynamics are going to make such incidents happen
more frequently." Winslow Wheeler, an expert
at the Center for Defense Information, said atrocities stem from the abusive
attitude of most American servicemen toward Iraqis, which was evident from
the beginning of the war, when Lt. Peter Katzfrey of the 299 Engineer
Battalion, 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit summed up the rules of engagement
in an interview with the Chronicle as "shoot to kill. No questions
asked." The difference between
"trigger-happy American soldiers who would shoot at vehicles from
checkpoints" and the deliberate rape and murder of the Iraqi family
"is in degree, but not in nature," Wheeler argued. "Both
actions reflect contempt both toward a country and the civilians in it." The nature of the conflict,
in which elusive insurgents in civilian clothes kill Americans and Iraqis by
roadside bombs, makes it harder for American troops to discern civilians from
enemy combatants. The stress of an incessantly increasing threat amid an
escalating sectarian conflict is taking a psychological toll on U.S. forces,
some of whom are now completing their third deployment in Iraq in three
years. "It's a very
frustrating form of warfare, you always have to be on your guard, you don't
know where the attack will come from," said Anthony Dworkin, director of
the Crimes of War Project in Washington. The war's increasing toll on
the troops' psyche coincides with the military's need to fill the ranks,
which has pushed the Army to lower recruiting standards in autumn that had
been set to ensure the quality of the force. "When you look at the
circumstances of whom we send and what we expect them to do, it's surprising
we don't have more of those cases," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst
at Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. Former Pfc. Steven Green, who
allegedly organized the rape and murder of the Iraqi girl and the killing of
her family, was discharged from the Army because he suffered from anti-social
personality disorder. Of about 40,000 soldiers
discharged from the Army in 2005, 1,038 were dismissed because of personality
disorders, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, spokesman for the Army's personnel
department. The only way to keep future
atrocities to the minimum is by "constant reinforcement that the moral
universe still applies in war," said Grimsley. "If soldiers aren't
diligently trained to understand the kinds of frustrations and stresses that
tend to generate atrocities and aren't conditioned to avoid them ... the
frustrations can take hold and you can wind up going off and doing something
like what occurred in Haditha." External link:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/13/ING60KDD951.DTL |