Bombing the prize

National Public Radio's Morning Edition presented an interesting report today on the U.S. Army's internal debate: "Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within." NPR's Guy Raz interviewed a series of leading military strategists to provide a useful description of this focus on counterinsurgency:

The counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the use of minimal force, with the intent of winning the hearts and minds of a civilian population. ...

"I would say that Gen. Petraeus' promotion is an affirmation of the fact that the counterinsurgency doctrine he wrote and the counterinsurgency strategy that he implemented in Iraq was successful," says Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the Army's top experts on counterinsurgency doctrine.

... Nagl was based in Anbar province during a 2003-04 tour in Iraq, and he says it was there that he realized the U.S. Army had gotten itself tangled up in an insurgency.

...He began helping write the Army's counterinsurgency handbook, better known as Field Manual 3-24. The manual is like a roadmap for officers: It emphasizes the use of minimal force. The idea in a counterinsurgency campaign, Nagl says, is to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

... Col. Peter Mansoor, a top aide to Gen. Petraeus, also helped write the manual. Mansoor, who spoke from Baghdad, is part of Gen. Petraeus' famed brain trust of advisers, a group of officers and civilians who live and breathe counterinsurgency doctrine. "The people are the prize in a counterinsurgency operation. They are the key terrain, if you will, on which victory or defeat rests."

I appreciate this "the people are the prize" approach. It makes sense to me.

The problem for Mansoor and Nagl, however, is that this report aired on NPR following the morning's main headlines. That included a report, also from Baghdad, on the fighting in that city's largest slum, Sadr City.

That district is sometimes referred to as a "neighborhood," which is misleading. The population of Sadr City is about the same as that of Brooklyn, jammed into an area less than a quarter as large. It's home to 2.5 million people, including thousands of Shiite militiamen from a Shiite faction that U.S. forces have alternated between wooing and trying to crush (at the moment, they're in trying-to-crush mode).

For the last nine days, NPR reported, the U.S. has been hitting Sadr City with airstrikes. "Airstrikes" implies a more targeted, more intentionally discriminate approach than crude carpet bombing, but how precisely discriminate can such strikes really be when directed at a densely populated slum that's home to almost 1 of every 10 Iraqi civilians?

If "the people are the prize," then we're bombing the hell out of the prize. That seems unlikely to be an effective way to win hearts and minds or to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

Imagine if the FBI announced a new strategy to combat the Brighton Beach-based Russian mafia. For the next nine days, they say, Brooklyn will be the focus of military airstrikes. Don't worry about all the innocent New Yorkers, the FBI says, our missiles are really quite precise, the maps and intel guiding them are flawless, and compared to Sadr City, Brooklyn is sparsely populated. The off-chance of a bit of collateral damage couldn't possibly outweigh Brooklynites' gratitude for the attempt to liberate them from the lethal criminals living in their midst. Right?

The U.S. Army's internal "debate" that NPR reports presents two competing philosophies. In old-fashioned, conventional war, the military conducts all-out conflict to destroy an enemy nation. To that end, it conducts airstrikes against popultion centers. In 21st-century counterinsurgencies, the military conducts wars of liberation to free oppressed people. To that end, it conducts airstrikes against popultion centers.

I suppose what we need to do now is to sit down with the 2.5 million residents of Baghdad's most crowded district and explain to them this important philosophical distinction.

Comments

[Reynard]

This is the same "Win-their-hearts-and-minds"-degenerating-to-"We-had-to-destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it" mentality that screwed us up in Vietnam. And, sadly, it'll probably produce the same pathetic result. Santayana was indeed correct.

[Ryan]

Either way, it's all about the popultion centers!

[M Groesbeck]

I just want to know when bombing population centers became the uncontroversial mainstream way to conduct a war.

[Lurker]

M Groesbeck,

I believe it happened in 1940. It seems that the first bombing of London by Germans happened more or less by accident. They were aiming at an oil depot. The British retaliated (no way to know it was an accident) by bombing Germans, and after that, Hitler gave the order to bomb civilians without discrimination. So, the inevitable logic of escalation.

Of course, bombing civilians was nothing new. In Spanish civil war, the Germans had bombed several civilian centers (anyone remember Guernica?), and in colonial wars, all major powers had the practice of bombing local civilians, sometimes with chemical weapons. (In Iraq, the British, in Abessinia, the Italians, in Algeria, the French.) Of course, those instances didn't count as "violence against civilians" to the contemporaries. Bombing a Spanish, a German or a British city was violence against civilians. Bombing Iraqis was pacification of native tribes. Nihil novi sub soli.

[Reynard]

Lurker

You're forgetting the bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans. It was more or less a prelude to what was in store for the British.

[Praline]

After the Vietnam debacle, how is anyone still using a phrase as discredited as 'hearts and minds'?

[ajay]

Lurker: I really hate to interrupt someone when they're getting their rant on, but well before that, during the First World War, the Germans were bombing London from Zeppelin airships and (later) Gotha biplane bombers, and shelling East Coast towns from warships offshore.

The German bombing of England in the Second World War started as a response to the bombing of the German town of Freiburg in May 1940. Ironically, it transpired some years later that Freiburg had in fact been bombed accidentally by the Luftwaffe.

Fred, if you're getting interested in this, abumuquwama.blogspot.com is the place to look.

[Lurker]

ajay,

Thanks for setting the record straight. I was sure I made a mistake somewhere.

[cjmr]

Twenty-two years ago I wrote a paper in American History class in high school about this kind of attitude in the Vietnam war. I never ever would have guessed at the time that we'd be re-enacting a similar scenario in my lifetime.

(Mind you, at 17 I was pretty much convinced that the world as we knew it would end in a nuclear conflagration before I was 30...)

[Ursula L]

Sigh. We never had a chance to win "hearts and minds." It just doesn't happen, when you've put a people under a decade of sanctions, bombed, invaded and occupied.

The main problem, for the US, is that there really isn't anyone to surrender to, so we're stuck in a war that we can neither win nor loose, and which therefore won't end on its own. Whatever happens, in the end it will be the US quitting, and the Iraqis having to sort out (or fight out) the mess we leave behind.

[Ursula L]

Forgot to finish before hitting "post" - the only way I see to resolve this faster is to have a strategy that maximizes US losses, while minimizing Iraqi losses - hastening the point where the US looses its resolve, and quits, while minimizing the damage to civilans and innocents.

[cjmr's husband]

I suppose what we need to do now is to sit down with...

What we need to do now is replace leadership that starts from "I want to bomb population centers" and works backwards from that.

[Hawker Hurricane]

Historians tell you that history repeats itself.
What they don't tell you is the first time it's a tragedy, the second time it's a farce. - Karl Marx (paraphrase)

Bombing population centers became popular at about the same time it became possible. As soon as a aircraft became capable of carrying enough explosives to cause damage far enough to hit a enemy city, they began doing it.

I'm afraid that the only way to 'win' the War in Iraq would be to pull out, wait 20 years for memories to fade, and then try again from scratch. Maybe we could do it right the third time...

[Tonio]

It's a shame that the Philippine-American War is almost unknown today, since that war has many parallels with Iraq. I keep wondering if a permanent American presence in Iraq was the goal all along.

[Tonio]

Maybe we could do it right the third time...

On Bush's first day as President, Dick Chaney opened the center drawer in the Oval Office desk and found a yellowed handwritten note taped to the bottom. It read simply, "No land wars in Asia - LBJ." Chaney gave a dismissive "Pfffh!" Then he tore the note from the drawer and tossed it in the trash.

[Keith]

I just want to know when bombing population centers became the uncontroversial mainstream way to conduct a war.

Posted by: M Groesbec

That would be when the Allies firebombed Dresden. It was acceptable because we (the Good Guys) did it to the Nazis (evil, evil Nazis!). Nevermind the complete lack of Nazis in Dresden, a city known for it's pottery and porcelain dolls before the war and fireproof slaughterhouses after the war.

[Jim]

It's even better when the airstrikes are surgical. That sounds ameliorative, like they're practicing medicine, right?

[Lauren]

Fred, if you're getting interested in this, abumuquwama.blogspot.com is the place to look.

It says, "blog not found."

[Jeff]

leading military strategists

Would those be the same "leading military strategists" who have been profiteering from the Iraq War while giving Pentagon-approved "analysis" to the media? As one blogger put it, not only was the press embedded with the military, the military was embedded with the press.

[Tonio]

OT: Amazon's ad at right shows one of the "Tribulation Force" comics. I don't know who the bearded man is on the cover, but he looks like the aged Superman from "At Earth's End." Appropriate since both books deal with apocalypses.

[Hawker Hurricane]

Except the Superman comic was more realistic.
(And probably closer to Biblical prophecy, too.)

[mierardi]

What struck me about the NPR piece was not that the military can be cavalier about killing people--that, for better or worse, is what armies do. Much sadder was the realization that within the military, at least, we can have a vigorous debate about whether our armed forces should be trained and shaped to perform basically imperialist activities, as the counter-insurgency crowd of Petraeus, Mansoor, and Nagl want, or whether the military will configure itself for a different mission (reflecting a potentially different American role in the world). Within our political establishment, however, there is no room for an anti-imperialist discourse. We are in the midst of our quadrennial pageant of allegedly responsible self-government, during an illegal war disapproved by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and yet woe betide the politician who dares suggest that perhaps the United States ought not to be the kind of country that is always burning little countries down. It is an irony long noted that there is a broader spectrum of "acceptable" opinion on diplomatic and military affairs in Israel than there is in the United States; NPR now brings us the unsurprising news that there is a broader spectrum of acceptable opinion within the US military than there is among the civilians who nominally control it.

[LL]

One problem (one of many) is that the U.S. govt and many people who support it still wanna ride that WWII train. We helped kick Hitler's ass and those of the Japanese, so we think we should get a pass on military intervention because we mean well. Our intentions (supposedly) are good, so anything that happens in pursuit of whatever goal is by association good. So we vaporize a few (hundred, or thousand or hundreds of thousands) of civilians. They should be honored to die in the WAR ON TERROR. Their grandchildren will thank us one day, just like the grandchildren of all those Germans we killed are today.

Arguing with these "America is a beacon of freedom" people is like arguing with RTC about, well, anything. Any criticism of any American policy or action is seen as coming from the "blame America first crowd," and thus summarily dismissed. As long as they're not the ones being "surgically" bombed, they don't care. I suspect they've never cared what happened to anyone in Iraq. It's just a shape on a map to them. Anytime a Middle Eastern country gets uppity, these are the people you can depend on to fill comment threads with crap like "Glass parking lot!" and "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out."

[rp]

Lauren:
The link looks like it should work, but try this: http://abumuqawama.blogspot.com/ . It works for me anyhow.

[Andrew R.]

The thing is, the two stories of the Sadr city goatf**k and the top brass at MNF-I talking about not alienating civilians is that they don't really contradict each other, a point that Fred hinted at in his post. The folks in the Green Zone did not want this latest round of fighting, and had spent the last two years trying to make nice with Sadr--the reason that there are rocket strikes and air strikes going on right now is that someone (Cheney, Hakim, or Maliki, we'll probably know for sure in 50 years) decided to send in the tanks to Basra, which re-ignited the Mahdi Army uprising. As a result, the Green Zone was coming under regular rocket attack and the people coming under attack needed to return fire.

This business in eastern Baghdad is not an instance of "Ignorant military foolishly trying to beat Sadr's Freedom Fighters." It's the commanders doing the best they can with a flaming sack of dog s**t left on the front porch.

[Matt]

If "the people are the prize," then we're bombing the hell out of the prize.

Actually, it doesn't follow at all. In urban warfare "airstrike" is definitely not a synonym for "bombing". Sometimes it involves bombs, but in cases like this it's more likely to be things like helicopter gunships firing regular old bullets. While there's always the possibility of civilian deaths in such a built up area, the military is definitely aware of the fragility of their gains in civilian trust. Accuracy is one of the main concerns.

In fact, in some cases the US military actually drops bombs made of concrete. Literally just a big rock, in order to destroy just a very small precise area.

[Craig]

In fact, in some cases the US military actually drops bombs made of concrete.

Sounds kind of embarrassing for the pilots.

"What did you do in the war, Dad?"
"I dropped rocks on the enemy, son. See this patch? 34th Air Catapults."
"..."

[JPL]

Embarrassing? I'd wear it as a mark of *pride*.

[Ian]

Matt, Andrew,

Right, the USAF is better than anyone at bombing/strafing selected targets while killing relatively few random civilian bystanders.

One problem is that even the best Air Force in the world ends up killing a heck of a lot of innocent people when it drops bombs on densely populated residential areas. Worse, under current circumstances (incl. very few translators, the unpopularity of the occupation among Iraqis, carrying an assault rifle does not demonstrate militia membership, etc.) it's extremely hard for your military to identify people as being members of one of the factions the US is attacking this month. Worse still, there are problems which bombs can't solve even if they are dropped with precision on the right people. Sadr seems to have a broad base of passionate support, and I doubt that even killing Sadr himself would disperse the Mahdi army.

In general, bad things happen when you give good people impossible missions. You just can't destroy a decentralized popular movement with precision bombing. Trying to do that results only in dead innocents and angry relatives.

[Andrew R.]

Ian, did you actually read my post? The U.S. commanders in Baghdad tried like nobody's business to *avoid* the fighting in Sadr city for exactly the reasons you cite. That the Maliki government decided to poke the Mahdi Army with a great big stick means that they're now committed to urban fighting, but it's fighting they'd been trying to avoid for most of the last two years.

[Ursula L]

Andrew R wrote: Ian, did you actually read my post? The U.S. commanders in Baghdad tried like nobody's business to *avoid* the fighting in Sadr city for exactly the reasons you cite. That the Maliki government decided to poke the Mahdi Army with a great big stick means that they're now committed to urban fighting, but it's fighting they'd been trying to avoid for most of the last two years

It doesn't matter how hard they tried to avoid fighting there.

They're still there, and they are still fighting.

As long as we're going to have a puppet government in Iraq to prop up, we'll be responsible for their bad decisions - because they would not be there, but for our idiotic invasion. You invade a nation, and the gov't you set up will be seen as puppets, by everyone who didn't like the idea of being invaded in the first place. And there will inevitably be resistance to both the invaders and the puppets.

If we choose puppets we can't control, it's our own stupidity - for choosing bad puppets, and for thinking invasions and puppets are appropriate.

Discussions in the Pentagon about how to handle the mess in Sadir city will fail, unless they address the question not just of the short-term problem in Sadir city, but also the larger problem of the fact that we're there at all, and in a position where any action we take, good or bad, only serves to inflame outrage that we're there as invaders and occupiers at all.

[ajay]

"abu muqawama" is the correct spelling. Sorry about that.

Further reading: Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" has a good deal of material on the development (moral and technical) of strategic bombing. It's also one of the best history books ever written. And everyone interested in air power and counter-insurgency fighting should have read "A Bright Shining Lie" by now...

[Doctor Science]

Tonio:

I keep wondering if a permanent American presence in Iraq was the goal all along.

Seriously, did you ever doubt it? I never did. I thought it was quite obvious from the start (or earlier) that the goal was "American military presence in Iraq (where Iraq is defined as "areas of Iraq giving access to the oil fields") until the oil runs out".

[Ian]

Andrew,

Yes, I did read your post. I agree that the American armed forces had/have no desire to fight things out in Sadr city. However, as you mentioned, it does seem that someone in the American government allowed/ordered the start of this latest round of fighting, apparently thinking that US/Iraqi forces would be greeted as liberators in Sadr city. The ignorant, apathetic and/or bloodthirsty people who make up the inner circle at the White House are the main problem; good Generals who are given impossible missions do not deserve the biggest share of the blame for bad results. (where by "bad results" I mean the deaths of large numbers of innocents)

Ultimately, if your country doesn't want to fight urban guerrillas in Iraq, the only thing to do is leave.

[Barry]

I strongly second the recommendation of 'A Bright Shining Lie'.
It's more relevant now than when it was written.

[Tonio]

Seriously, did you ever doubt it? I never did. I thought it was quite obvious from the start (or earlier) that the goal was "American military presence in Iraq (where Iraq is defined as "areas of Iraq giving access to the oil fields") until the oil runs out".

The war-for-oil theory sounded tempting at first. But to my knowledge, the Americans never seized and retained possession of the oil facilities. Is this correct? My own theories about the invasion's motive include: 1) create instability to drive up oil prices; 2) create a reverse-domino effect to spread democracy in the Middle East (the neocon idea); 3) enrich Bush/Chaney cronies among military contractors; and 4) jump-start the events in Revelation.

[Ursula L]

The US didn't seize production of the oil directly. But it did set things up so that the oil fields are run/controlled by the big oil companies directly, instead of the government running the oil fields, selling the oil to the oil companies, and using the oil for social and governmental programs, as is common in most of the major oil producing nations, and was the practice under Saddam. This, in turn is part of the reason why the social services such as medical facilities are so underfunded.

It's war for oil, but for the benefit of big oil, not the average person in the US.

[Doctor Science]

Yes, exactly what Ursula said, with bonus military contractor kickbacks.

[SmithWigglesworth]

And when we sit these Iraqis down to explain it all to them, somebody needs to make sure we tell them Sunnis and Shiites to "cut this shit out!"

"Everybody just needs to COOO-OOO-OOOOL OUT!"

[Jeff]

This business in eastern Baghdad is not an instance of "Ignorant military foolishly trying to beat Sadr's Freedom Fighters." It's the commanders doing the best they can with a flaming sack of dog s**t left on the front porch.

This is fun, revisionist BS. We've been poking at Sadr and Sadr City since we lost the origianl bogey-man, Hussein. Pinning this on the Iraqis is like henry getting upset because the knights took "who will rid me of this man" at his word.

In fact, in some cases the US military actually drops bombs made of concrete. Literally just a big rock, in order to destroy just a very small precise area.

Wonderful. You just dropped a fragment bomb on a civilian population. You win the No Bell Prize.

[Donald Johnson]

This is a fairly good book on the history of bombing civilians--

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=2935855&matches=25&author=Lindqvist%2C+Sven&browse=1&cm_sp=works*listing*title

The one really annoying thing about it is that the pages aren't in order. Or rather, IIRC, they're in chronological order, but if you want to read the pages in, um, thematic order then you jump from page 1 to page 24 to page 3 to page 48, etc... It's extremely annoying and I wanted to strangle the author. If you can get past that, though, it's very interesting.

[Donald Johnson]

Sorry. I thought this was one of those blogs where you just paste and the link appears. But you can cut and paste, or just google "Sven Lindquist". He also wrote "Exterminate all the Brutes", which as you could guess from the title is a history of the more murderous aspects of European colonialism.

[Jeff]

Bombing Civilians

HTH

[Jeff]

Oddly enough, the above comment triggered the CAPTCHA. I haven't had one sprung on my in ages.

[Dahne]

I suppose what we need to do now is to sit down with the 2.5 million residents of Baghdad's most crowded district and explain to them this important philosophical distinction.

Can't. Fired all the translators for boy-kissing.

[Hawker Hurricane]

Dahne: shouldn't be a problem, the kissy-boy translators the Army fired were all hired by Blackwater who pays much better than the Army does and is glad to hire graduates of the Army language institute...

[Tonio]

But it did set things up so that the oil fields are run/controlled by the big oil companies directly, instead of the government running the oil fields, selling the oil to the oil companies...

It is certainly plausible that this was the motive all along, but is there any evidence to back it up? Was the nationalization of the oil industry a recent development, with American oil companies complaining about being evicted? There's a history of American intervention in other nations where leaders sought to nationalize key industries, but this usually involved the CIA or other covert operations instead of outright military invasions.

In the months before the invasion, I don't remember anyone in Congress questioning the motive in oil terms - I only remember questioning about the wisdom of the invasion. Did they simply not consider the possibility of an oil motive, or did they worry about being slammed as Marxists?

[Jeff]

did they worry about being slammed as Marxists

Yes. Remenber when Murtha was slammed as a "coward"? Fun days, those. (NOT!)

[Andrew R.]

Jeff,

Have you followed *any* of what was going on between 2005 and March of 2008?

[Doctor Science]

I don't remember anyone in Congress questioning the motive in oil terms - I only remember questioning about the wisdom of the invasion. Did they simply not consider the possibility of an oil motive, or did they worry about being slammed as Marxists?

Congressmen are permitted -- barely -- to debate the wisdom of a particular war. They are not permitted to debate the wisdom of any US corporation getting as much money as possible by any means possible. They may, occasionally, propose to tax "windfall" profits, but they may not criticize "consistent and ongoing bloodsucking" profits.

And oil companies don't have to do anything as crass as *complain* to the Cheney/Bush administration. All they have to do is mumble, "will no one rid me of this troublesome regime?" Bush and Cheney didn't have to be convinced to think about things from the oil companies' POV, they were there already.