Category: Iraq

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Making Up for Good Intentions

I, and many other bloggers, wrote earlier this year about an incident in which a U.S. Army patrol fired on a car in Iraq that carried a mother, father, and six children. The parents were killed and one of the kids was badly wounded. What made this incident different from many other accidental (or reckless) shootings during the course of the war was the presence of a press photographer, Chris Hondros of Getty Images, who recorded the horror of the scene. Newsweek has a story in its current issue on the shooting’s extraordinarily unhappy aftermath.

I see this evening, by way of Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing, that a group of people in the Seattle area has set up a relief fund for the family, the Hassans (the parents left nine children behind; the boy wounded in the attack suffered spinal injuries and could be permanently paralyzed unless he gets access to expensive medical treatment unavailable in Iraq). The fund has been organized under the auspices of an Anglican church group and a tech consulting firm, and is taking donations by mail or via PayPal. Check out the relief fund page for yourself.

Perhaps the fund is just our typical Yank gesture: We’re so sorry we killed your parents; let us give you some cash. On the other hand, it’s a small way of trying to set right the damage wrought by all our highly principled, well-intentioned violence.

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Making Friends, Influencing People: Iraq Edition

A friend and fellow Land of Lincoln native, Ayla Jean Yackley (she hails from Ottawa, on the banks of the mighty Illinois River), has been working as a correspondent for Reuters in Turkey (her mom’s family is Turkish, I think, and Ayla speaks the language) for several years. She passed on a press release yesterday from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists about an ugly incident involving U.S. soldiers, three Reuters employees, and an NBC photographer near Fallujah last year. According to the release (and Reuters offers a similar account, too):

“The three Reuters employees, along with Ali Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani, a cameraman working for NBC, were covering the aftermath of the downing of a U.S. helicopter when they were detained by U.S. troops on Jan. 2, 2004. The four were taken to a U.S. base near Fallujah and released three days later without charge.

“The Reuters employees allege that while detained, they were beaten and deprived of sleep. They said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them, and took photographs, Reuters has reported. Two alleged they were forced to put shoes in their mouths, and to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it.”

The news from both Reuters and the CPJ release was that the Pentagon, which never interviewed the men who made the allegations, has decided that it’s satisfied with its investigation and is dropping the matter.

Now, in a place where so many have died such awful deaths, this is not an example of the worst savagery of the Iraq war. But what’s just as disturbing as the original allegations is the Pentagon’s apparent complacency about this kind of behavior in the ranks.

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Anniversary

Happy anniversary, Shock and Awe. What I remember about the first day of the Iraq War — it was early the morning of the 20th in Baghdad, really — is the attempt to kill Saddam Hussein with a massive opening strike. In a way, it’s an episode that’s emblematic of the whole course of the war: The CIA reported it had good inside information about Saddam’s whereabouts, and President Bush decided to try to “decapitate” Iraq’s government and perhaps abbreviate the war. Initially, rumors flew that the strike had narrowly missed Hussein — reports circulated that a grievously injured Saddam had been pulled from the rubble of a bunker. But that, like so much that was perhaps wishfully reported about the war, turned out to be untrue. Three weeks later, a U.S. air strike flattened a Baghdad apartment block that housed a restaurant where Saddam was supposed to be. After an intensive effort to identify the remains of the score or so of people killed in the attack, the conclusion was that if Saddam had been there, he was gone by the time the bombs struck.

Maybe we’re past all the illusions we had about Iraq at the beginning, all the shaky information about the threat Saddam and his henchmen posed, the premature projections of victory, the shortsighted decisions about how to handle the occupation. Maybe we have given an elected government a precious opportunity to take root, and maybe Iraq will flourish even after U.S. troops are no longer there to maintain a semblance of order. All I can be sure of is that, after spending two years, tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, Iraq and the United States are different from what they were when we launched that first strike, and it’s far too early to tell what all the consequences will be.

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Numbers

Not that numbers ever tell the whole story, one view of the U.S. killed and wounded in Iraq:

Killed

Year 1 (March 20, 2003-March 19, 2004): 583

Year 2: (March 20, 2004-March 19, 2005): 938

Wounded

Year 1: (March 19, 2003-April 2, 2004): 2,988

Year 2: (April 3, 2004-March 14, 2005): 8,256

(Source: Iraq Coalition Casualties)

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Benefit of the Doubt

Today’s New York Times is running a John Burns story on shootings at U.S. security checkpoints in Iraq, like the one late last week that nearly turned a freed Italian captive into a freed dead Italian captive. So, while the dust settles on that incident — our troops say they followed all the rules before firing on a car they regarded as suspicious; survivors from the car deny anything happened to arouse suspicion — the Times takes a look at other episodes in which apparently innocent people have wound up dead, wounded, or scared witless.

The article ends with a discussion of a widely reported January incident in which an American patrol accompanied by a press photographer opened fire on a car carrying a father, mother, four of their children, and two other kids. The parents were killed; except for seeing their dad’s head blown off and their mom riddled with bullets, the children were unharmed. Burns’s story concludes with an account from the photographer, Getty Images’ Chris Hondros:

“Back at a base in Tal Afar, the soldiers and Mr. Hondros filled out forms with their observations on the incident. The company commander told the soldiers that there would be an investigation, but that they had followed the rules of engagement and that they should tell the truth, Mr. Hondros said. ‘I’ll stick up for you,’ the captain told the soldiers, Mr. Hondros recalled. He said the platoon involved in the incident had been engaged in an intense firefight with insurgents in Tal Afar two days before the incident. ‘It was a jangling experience,’ he said.”

What gets me about these incidents, besides the wanton waste of life, is our forces’ attitude toward what I guess I’d call consequences. It’s great that these soldiers’ captain said he’d stick up for them. But where in this situation is the one who’s sticking up for this family, who’s up front acknowledging responsibility and acknowledging that we have a double-homicide on our hands? (No — the usual canned statement of regret doesn’t work. Neither does patting the kids on the head and saying we’re sorry.)

Yes, the people who concocted this war for us have sent our troops into a situation that is a) next to impossible to handle cleanly and b) one for which they appear to be ill trained to handle with anything other than force. But even given that, how is it that whatever happens, whoever dies, our troops get the benefit of the doubt nearly every time while the hapless Iraqis and others who wander into their gunsights almost never do? How do we think this looks to the people who know they’re going to be shot at if they make the wrong move; who know that if they’re killed, well, that’s just the breaks and at least Saddam Hussein didn’t do it?

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1,500

Today in Iraq:

“BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) The number of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq campaign rose to 1,500 on Thursday, an Associated Press count showed, as the military announced the latest death of one of its troops.

The soldier was killed Wednesday in Babil province, just south of Baghdad, part of an area known as the ‘Triangle of Death’ because of the frequency of insurgent attacks on U.S.- and Iraqi-led forces there. …”

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Yesterday’s News

Remember during November’s big fight in Fallujah when NBC videojournalist/independent blogger Kevin Sites filmed a Marine shooting a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi insurgent? Some denounced the shooting as little more than murder, many more denounced Sites as little more than a traitor, and the military announced … it would investigate. Big controversy.

That was all of three and a half months ago, and the incident has been mostly forgotten. The Marine is reportedly at Camp Pendleton. Kevin Sites left Iraq and covered the tsunami aftermath in Southeast Asia (and won an award earlier this week for his blog). And the military either has or has not come to a conclusion about whether the shooting was justified.

Two days ago, CBS News reported that Navy investigators “believe the situation is ambiguous enough that no prosecutor could get a conviction.” Thus, CBS said, he wouldn’t be charged in the shooting. Thursday, the Marines rushed to deny the report and issued statements that the investigation hasn’t been completed and no decision on charges has been made one way or the other. But the denials aren’t directly contradicting the CBS report if you read them carefully: They emphasize that the inquiry isn’t finished, which the CBS story also acknowledges. And the CBS story adds that regardless of the decision on a homicide or war-crimes prosecution, the Marine could still face some sort of internal sanctions from the Corps.

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Dead, Dead Hero

BoingBoing points to the story of a Colorado woman who concocted a fabulous whopper about her husband’s heroism in Iraq: Over a half-year or so, “Amber” made regular calls to a local radio talk show, first talking about how she was in basic training, then disclosing that her husband “Jonathan” had been deployed to Iraq. Finally, Amber announced that her husband had been killed in action. She was left all alone, a military widow with one young child and, she said, another on the way. Tragic.

But the heroic nature of her husband’s death didn’t come out until Amber talked to a group set up to help military families in western Colorado. Jonathan had been killed trying to save the life of a little Iraqi girl. The story was full of other details, too, about the couple’s life and military service and everything. Media throughout the state, including the hometown paper, lapped up the story, which quickly unraveled. No Amber. No Jonathan. No dead hero. No one ever checked before issuing press releases or printing stories.

Wow.

Now, everyone, including Oprah, wants to know why “Amber” pulled the hoax. The consensus: Something is wrong with her. “Sometimes people have such a deep emptiness inside that when they get attention, they’re the recipients of well-wishers, the center of attention, they get a sense of importance and comfort,” one expert is quoted as saying.

Focusing all the attention on “Amber” and her obvious lack of balance (or incredibly well-developed, gutsy ability to pull pranks) leaves out the other side of the equation in this hoax and others: What is it about the rest of us — the emptiness in our own lives? — that we’re so ready to believe stories like this?

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Back to Business as Usual

Thank [your deity here], we’re done with the Iraq vote. Now we can back to the really important stuff: The 9 a.m. (Pacific) CBS radio news led with Michael Jackson arriving at the courthouse as jury selection began for his trial on child-molestation charges. In the correspondent’s breathless report, you could hear the throngs screaming in the background.

In San Francisco, meantime, people actually protested the Iraq vote and, I guess, the way it’s being portrayed. It’s all well and good to point out all the conditions that made the event less than the dawn of full-fledged democracy in Iraq: martial law, the heavy military presence, the polling places that didn’t open, et cetera. But it’s a losing proposition, in PR and human terms, to demonstrate against the vote. Regardless of all the flaws, regardless of the long-term meaning, regardless of our government’s untruths in leading us into the war and its calamitously misguided actions in conducting it, when given the opportunity, a group of people who have suffered a degree of oppression we glimpse only in nightmares got a chance to change their future and jumped at it (one view of the event from The New York Times’s John Burns; and another from Salon, hardly a friend of the Iraq project). In my mind, that’s something to be celebrated, no matter how angry I happen to be about what has led us to this point and how much doubt I entertain about the future course of events there.

And in Iraq today, things are going back to business as usual, too. The insurgency is still on. Several U.S. troops have been killed in combat. I’m sure that soon it will be apparent that, in terms of creating a new government and new political reality in Iraq, yesterday was the easy part.