Unqualified Offerings

Apparently recently-freed hostage and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena thinks it possible that the American troops who fired on her vehicle, killing an Italian intelligence officer who shielded his charge with his body, that “it was possible she was targeted because the United States objected to methods used to secure her release.”

Well it’s not, really, for reasons that Andrew Olmsted provides. But Andrew, who has trained American troops how to run the traffic control points in Iraq, jumps from there to an assignment of carelessness to the Italians themselves:

The U.S. account would require that the Italian agents were in a hurry to get Ms. Sgrena to safety, and that they failed to slow for a U.S. checkpoint possibly because they knew that the Italian car did not present a threat to the Americans and that the Italians and Americans are working together in Iraq. Forgetting that the Americans at the TCP could not know that, they failed to slow down in a timely fashion and were engaged, resulting in the tragic death of Mr. Calipari.

Which sounds more likely? A U.S. death squad is able to ambush precisely the right car, but fails to finish off its target? Or a tragic misunderstanding possibly predicated by the driver of the Italian vehicle forgetting that the American soldiers at the TCP weren’t privy to the same knowledge he was about the threat presented by the car?

The problem with this version of events is that it assumes the Italian secret servicemen are Total Iraq N00bs and that neither they nor their drivers appreciate just how hair-trigger American checkpoint responses have been for the last two years. It’s possible. But it’s also possible that between the excellent training of Andrew’s colleagues and the performance of units in the field there is slippage – signs that aren’t placed far enough forward or fall down, individual soldiers whose sense of what constitutes “too fast” an approach has gone haywire, any number of other manifestations of misjudgment or overreaction that lead to, in the Italian account 300-400 rounds being emptied into a vehicle.

The US military has been trying, with increasing success, to suppress its soldier’s reluctance to kill in action for 60 years now. Charles Dodgson offers an excellent recap of the history. There are many good reasons for the effort. There are also serious costs, as Charles notes:

The point where this logic reaches its end is when the army is deployed for tasks where efficient killing machines are not what is wanted — where the normal hesitation to kill would be useful, and where hair-trigger firing and the “us against them” view of the world which the modern army demands cause far more problems than they solve. To put it bluntly: in combat, that attitude breeds success. In peacekeeping and law enforcement, in a society where any misstep is likely to start a blood feud, it’s a bloody disaster. And that bloody disaster has played out repeatedly, by now, in Iraq.

It’s an article of faith among hawks that the Pentagon’s assertions that the US goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties are true. I think they’re true to an extent – when planning an offensive operation at leisure, I believe the US generally targets its precision-guided munitions carefully. But I don’t think casualty minimization survives as a priority in the heat of ground operations or the stresses of “peacekeeping.” Force protection, the overriding principle of contemporary American military doctrine, trumps casualty minimization. This is, among other things, an implication of Pat Tillman’s death. Imagine how many Afghan Pat Tillmans are fertilizing the soil of the Panjshir Valley and elsewhere after alarming US troops into unloading all the ordnance they had into some shadowed gorge or twilit crossroad.

And how many Iraqis, as opposed to Italian spies or American rangers. Which brings me to the neo-imperialism part. When the car carrying Sgrena and her bodyguards approached that checkpoint, the soldiers were not thinking, Hey, those coalition partners are traveling too fast and ignoring directions. (Whether or not that was in fact happening.) What they were thinking is, Hey, those Iraqis are traveling too fast and ignoring directions. Or maybe, Hey, Haji is travelling too fast and ignoring directions.

The soldiers want to live. I not only don’t blame them, I want them to live too. That’s why I wouldn’t have sent them there in the first place. It’s natural that the soldiers value their own lives over the lives of Iraqis. In general, I value American lives over Iraqi lives myself, to be crudely chauvinist about it. But it’s fundamentally strange that American lives should be valued more highly than Iraqi lives in Iraq.

Here is the Highest Law in Iraq today: Thou shalt not frighten an American soldier. Not “kill,” not “attack.” Put in fear of his (or her) life. This is a capital crime subject to immediate arraignment, instantaneous investigation and summary execution of sentence. If your most important goal is to safeguard the lives of American troops, this law makes perfect sense. It was not propounded by Iraqis, though, who were not even consulted about it and have, still, no veto power over it. It was not adopted with the consent of the governed. How did that come about? We decided. No country where such a law obtains is “free” in the sense that the US is free, or, well, Italy is free. No Iraqi jury, nor even Iraqi bureaucrat will pass judgment on the actions of the soldiers at that checkpoint. Americans will.

It is dangerous for a people to arrogate that much power to themselves, even, or especially, when they see themselves as Doing Good. When we still had conservatives in this country, they knew that.