4 Ways Falluja Can End

re: http://hnn.us/articles/8498.html

Whistleblowing Limits the Options

There is no need to worry that an Al Jazeera reporter might  sneak into Falluja. The vast majority of the initial evidence for My Lai was produced by American soldiers. There was a certain fraction of dissidents, even in Charley Company. Warrant Officer Thompson's armed confrontation with Lieutenant Calley, and subsequent filing of a report, is sufficiently well-known. However, Private Stanley connived at the escape of Vietnamese villagers from his own comrades. Sergeant Haeberle took pictures, and ultimately delivered them to the press. Something on the order of ten to twenty percent of the troops refused direct orders to commit war crimes. Ron Ridenhour, not present at the massacre, conducted the first sub-rosa investigation. All of these men were hampered by their technological means of recording and communicating information.

They had comparative difficulty in contacting their parents, for example. One Vietnam case involved a soldier who was killed in action shortly after sending his parents a letter containing nonspecific allegations about war crimes carried out by his platoon leader. The dead man's parents jumped to the logical conclusion that their son had been murdered by a United States Army officer in order to prevent him from testifying. They enforced an investigation, and the upshot of this investigation was that while the lieutenant had not murdered the American enlisted man,  he had executed, without trial, an ARVN deserter, and the lieutenant was duly prosecuted for this offense.

    Nowadays, every GI, like any other young man, has a full range of all the neatest electronic toys. That was of course the implication of Abu Graib. The acts charged do not really compare  in seriousness to Col. Anthony Herbert's allegations about the 173 Brigade's Military Intelligence unit in Vietnam. The cameraphones intervened before the troops could work themselves up to that level of brutality. One has to assume that there are ten potential whistleblowers in every company, and that they can do their whistleblowing within minutes of the offense in question. Their films are likely to be good enough to constitute incontrovertible evidence against particular soldiers and officers, to the point that they will turn state's evidence and implicate the chain of command.

I found an interesting episode in J. Glenn Gray's _The Warriors_ (1959, 1970). During the Second World War, Gray, a member of the  Counter-Intelligence Corps, became aware that the French Moroccan soldiers were systematically raping children in Italian villages (p. 67, Harper Colophon Books Edition). When the matter was brought to the attention of the French general, his response was "Cest la Guerre," or words to that effect. The Americans felt obliged to let the matter drop, until, years later, Gray wrote about it in his book. They did not have the means to enforce a public response from Eleanor Roosevelt. Perhaps three quarters of the thirty or so officers citied in the Peers Commission reported were in essence charged with "letting the matter drop," or to be more legalistic, being accessories after the fact. One could  make a case that the prosecution of My Lai was an artifact of better transportation, and the one-year rotation.

The implication of all this is that in order to conduct a draconian policy (either the "Hama Solutions," the "Jenin Scenario," or the "British Solution."), the President  is going to have to specifically endorse all the incidental crimes. Otherwise, the troops will get to thinking about the Portsmouth Naval Brig and  Fort Leavenworth, etc. The Israelis have managed to get themselves into some remarkably awkward situations because they felt obliged to protect soldiers who had killed American or English peace activists. In fact, of course, the administration is frantically trying to disassociate itself from people such as Lynndie England.
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Joseph Goldstein, Burke Marshall, and Jack Schwartz, The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up, 1976. (This is the Peers Commission Report with additional commentary and related matter).

Michael Hilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 1992.

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/8498.html
       http://hnn.us/comments/46677.html

Do Not Forget Water

Kurdistan is the only part of Iraq which is remotely viable from a hydrological standpoint. Furthermore, though Turkey doesn't know it yet, it is going to become a lot more conciliatory in its dealings with Kurdistan and the Kurds.  Shakespeare understood, of course. In King John, he has Eleanor of Aquitaine say to her illegitimate grandson.

Whether hadst thou rather be a Falconbridge,
And like thy brother, to enjoy thy land,
Or the reputed son of Cour-de-Lion,
Lord of thy presence, and no land besides?
...
I like thee well; wilt thou forsake thy fortune,
Bequeath thy land to him, and follow me?
I am a soldier, and  now bound to France.

As the son of Mother Europe's old age, Turkey is going to be told more or less the same thing. Of  course Eleanor was not the ur-vamp for nothing.  The Bastard replies:

Brother, take  you my land, I'll take my chance;
Your face hath got five hundred pounds a-year;
Yet sell your face for fivepence, and tis dear--
Madam, I'll follow you to the death.

King John, Act 1, Scene 1.

The implication is that Iraqi Kurdistan will be incorporated into a Greater Kurdistan, stretching to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, incorporating the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates; a buffer state separating Turkey from Asia, and itself a candidate for eventual EU membership. The Kurds are the only population in Iraq well disposed to the United States, and presumably  Greater Kurdistan would inherit the Turkish NATO tie with the  United States.

That  leaves the Sunni Triangle, the Shiite area (including Baghdad), and the substantially unpopulated Syrian desert (containing the southern oilfields). The United States is under no military necessity to retreat from the Syrian desert, and, assuming that Bush does not succumb to panic, it can easily be annexed in the name of Kuwait. Presumably, Iran would absorb the Shiite area, and Syria the Sunni triangle. My estimate is that the ecologically sustainable population of Mesopotamia is probably not more than three to five millions, especially if the Kurds continue to develop the more ambitious Turkish  irrigation schemes. Oil subsidies have carried the population to an  artificial height.  As water shortages develop, the tendency is going to be for people to retreat in the direction of their respective mountains. Over a period of years, people  would move away to Tehran or   Damascus. The Shiites, being furthest downriver, will be the first to be affected. Once everyone in the Middle East begins grabbing rain more or less as soon as it hits the ground, an independent state in  Mesopotamia becomes ecologically untenable.

If Bush panics, the scenario is basically the same, except that Iran also occupies Kuwait, Quatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Eastern Saudi  Arabia.

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(11/14/2004 03:06 PM)