Fog of War
Fascinating and troubling report of an attempt by marines to raid an area north of the Euphrates in the largest US offensive operation in weeks. Tex at Antiwar.com blog offers a skeptical take on the intelligence behind the planning. Two things jump out at me:
But the routine safety practice apparently alerted area residents to the convoy’s presence. An entire town along the route switched off its lights all at once, a move Marines believe is used to send signals from one river town to the next.
If true, this is strongly reminiscent of examples of civil support given by Belfast residents to the IRA in Gerald Seymour’s classic, Harry’s Game. Then there’s this:
“There’s been a firefight here all morning. Anyone still in that neighborhood has signalled their hostile intention by remaining,” Capt. Chris Ieva said as he prepared to lead the 3/2’s Kilo Company into the southwest corner of town. Most of the morning’s mortars and gunfire had come from the area.
Which is, notwithstanding the alleged behavior with the light switches, troubling. It seems like an easy way to grant yourself permission to shoot anything that moves and to flatten buildings before you really know what’s in them. One way to “minimize civilian casualties” is to selectively redefine people as combatants based on geography. Clearly some people could be trapped with no way out, others could be too scared to move and yet more seized with the stubbornness that leads people to spurn evactuation from flood zones. All of those people are now declared to have “signalled their hostile intention” by their crime of suboptimal reactions to stress.
Comment by Grant —
May 9, 2005 @ 7:47 am
I can’t quite place it, but I remember reading somewhere about strage wartime lighting behavior somewhere. Ah, well.
Comment by Nell —
May 9, 2005 @ 10:41 am
Well, it seems as if we’re pretty much most of the way to ‘free fire zones’. Richard Dreyfuss’s ‘Quagmire’ article in Rolling Stone (also at the Iraq Veterans Against the War site) paints a picture of resistance intelligence (pinging GPS devices, figuring out satellite schedules) that makes any ‘progress’ implausible for U.S. troops. Out now.
Comment by Nell —
May 9, 2005 @ 10:47 am
Also hard to square big offensive operations of the kind in the linked story with today’s Washington Post piece, where the top brass seem to want to put out the idea that they’re going to refocus on the carbomb squads, which they say are foreign jihadists. Maybe. It’s a Bradley Graham story, which always raises my eyebrows a bit.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2005 @ 10:55 am
Nell, Joyner picked up that POST story. I had the same thought as you – the two reports make a poor fit. FWIW, my interpretation is that the POST story is a propaganda vector – it’s the Pentagon playing nice rhetorically so long as the Jafaari team still hopes to draw some Sunni leaders into a functioning government. I don’t necessarily blame the poobahs for undertaking this particular spin. I just don’t see it working.