Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article acknowledging that the brutal assault on Fallujah was deliberately aimed at civilians to demonstrate the cost to them of supporting and harbouring guerrillas. Of course, the article is not framed in this way...
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As in Vietnam and in any counter-insurgency, the massive and indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian areas is designed to produce mass terror and population flight, and to force the beleaguered population to abandon its support for armed resistance.
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Yes, it seems clear this is the Americans' theory of action.
Although wicked beyond my powers of description it's not, from an operational point of view, an entirely delusional plan since force is perhaps the ultimate tool for causing people to submit.
But there are other reactions to this action which the Americans, deeply in love with force (the one area where they, as Chomsky says, "remain supreme"), are often unable to understand.
It's possible to be driven by force to lose all fear - to come out on the other side of our natural instincts for self and loved one preservation with a ferocious desire for revenge. Blood calls out for blood. I've been to that mental space where, even when facing a gun, you boil with such rage you feel as if you could drink fire and slit the devil's own throat were he to step in your way.
And I haven't even been in a city under siege by a foreign force.
...
The October issue of the New Yorker magazine features a story ("The Policy That's Fueling The Insurgency") that illustrates how the other reaction, the, shall we say, "fuck you" response works.
The author, whose name, sadly, escapes me at the moment, describes the experiences of a senior member of the Baath party who was ready to work with the Americans as the invasion unfolded. "If the Baath had wanted to fight" he's quoted as saying (paraphrasing from memory now) "Baghdad would not have been taken so easily."
And so he was hopeful, this Baath official, as the M1s rolled into his capital city, that the Americans - surely the world's most advanced people and, therefore, sublimely competent - would preserve the prevailing order only tuned to their purposes. He was ready to, as the old saying goes, 'play ball'.
It came as a shock when he found himself rudely arrested by US troops - dragged from his home in bedclothes in front of family and neighbors - and held within a filthy cell for many days. He was beaten, verbally abused and denied basic amenities. His family's outcry to learn his whereabouts and fate fell on deaf American ears.
Many other party officials were also abused. The result of all this bad old American fashioned, Jim Crow style fun is the participation of a good portion of the professional Iraqi military corps in the overall guerrilla effort. One of the contributing factors no doubt to the mounting American death toll.
The pros, having sampled American force at close range, force intended no doubt to convince them of their defeat, decided to throw in their lot with the amateurs. This is, as the war geeks say, a force multiplier.
Now men with armor piercing shoulder launched rockets, Russian made thermal imagers and the ability to read maps and compasses have joined the death game.
And all this because the Americans decided to employ maximum force to persuade the conquered to cooperate.
Undoubtedly some received the message and behaved as hoped. These are the "good Iraqis" so often featured in certain sorts of reliably stupid corporate news stories.
But what no one in Washington counted on (at least, no one in a decision making capacity) was that others would decide that cluster bombs, dead relatives and destroyed homes were a poor form of argument and that the people responsible for bringing these things into their lives needed to hear an answer via Kalashinakov, to start.
Or, to put it even more simply: yes, you can convince people to obey via force but you can also convince them of the urgent need to kill you.
Americans, it seems, always remember the first part of that sentence but happily forget the second and thus tumble in a state of eternally lost innocence as the body bags keep coming home.
.d.