[There's some question whether the Marines are controllable at all. Even the US Army -- hardly a hotbed of Jainism -- views the Marines as homicidal maniacs.]
June 4, 2006
Getting Used to War as Hell
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The story, as told by Iraqi survivors, is as bleak as any to emerge from the American war in Iraq.
If the survivors' accounts are borne out by American military inquiries now under way and, in time, by courts-martial, then what happened in the early morning of Nov. 19, 2005, in the desert city of Haditha could prove, like the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, a baleful marker in the long and painful American story here.
... [T]he hard cost to military intentions of killing innocent bystanders in a counterinsurgency ... is a lesson the Marines know well and accept as an institution. But in recent months in Iraq it has been recited largely by Army generals, and the distinction has begun to cause resentments between the two services as the Haditha investigations begin.
Privately, some marines say the killings at Haditha may have grown out of pressures that bore down from the moment in March 2004 when a Marine expeditionary force assumed responsibility for Anbar province, with Haditha and its 90,000 residents emerging as one of its most persistent trouble spots. Marine commanders vowed to use a tougher approach than the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, which was responsible for Anbar for the first year after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, by showing "both the palm frond and the hammer."
They soon proved it with the crushing tactics they used, in an aborted offensive in April and then decisively in November, when they regained control of Falluja, an insurgent stronghold. In that eight-day battle, a Marine-led force of about 10,000 Americans destroyed much of the city, including, according to the city's compensation commissioner, about 36,000 of its 50,000 homes.
... [T]he crisis over the Haditha killings .... [in part reflects] the differing cultures of the Army and Marines. It was the Army's second-highest ranking officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, with operational control of all 135,000 American troops here under the overall command of another Army commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who triggered the military's broad investigation into the events at Haditha. This came after an initial probe by an Army colonel revealed discrepancies in Marine accounts of the killings.
Though it seems unlikely to have played any role in General Chiarelli's decision to order the criminal inquiry, given the seriousness of the Haditha allegations and his legal obligations, the general has gained a reputation as an outspoken advocate of what was known in Vietnam as the "hearts and minds" approach to fighting the war. Like other terms that hark back to Vietnam, that has fallen out of favor among American commanders here. They prefer to talk about "kinetic" and "non-kinetic" forms of defeating the insurgency.
In this context, "kinetic" refers to the kill-and-capture warfare that has been the Marines' traditional way of battle, and "non-kinetic" to the efforts that Generals Chiarelli and Casey have stressed — to reach out to local leaders, help build civic institutions, rebuild infrastructure and provide jobs, undermining the insurgency's appeal. ...
Reporters' experiences with the Marines, even more than with the Army, show they resort quickly to using heavy artillery or laser-guided bombs when rooting out insurgents who have taken refuge among civilians, with inevitable results.
Among the Marines, there is a tendency, an eagerness even, to see themselves as the stepchild of the American military effort, sent into much of the hardest fighting, undermanned for the task, equipped with Vietnam-era helicopters and amphibious armored vehicles that make lumbering targets in the desert — then criticized by Army commanders, sometimes severely, for a lack of proportionality in the way they fight.
Something of this sense was suggested when a senior Army commander involved in planning the Falluja offensive — and convinced of its necessity — visited the city afterward alongside Marine commanders. He expressed shock at the destruction, along with concern at the reaction of 200,000 residents whom the Americans had urged to flee beforehand. "My God," the Army commander said, "what are the folks who live here going to say when they see this?"
Carl