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Death
from a Distance
by
Alan Shapiro
To
the Teacher:
The
media devotes little attention to U.S. air attacks in Iraq and
Afghanistan and their impact on civilians. The student readings
below explore conflicting accounts of air attacks by the U.S.
military and by survivors; media coverage of the attacks; and
a brief overview of the growing lethality of air assaults since
World War I and the devastating effect on civilians.
Student
Reading 1:
American attack helicopters at al-Khalis, Iraq
" U.S. and Iraqi forces continued a new offensive against the
Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq in and around the city
of Baqubah on Friday, killing 17 insurgents in a helicopter attack."
--Washington Post, 6/22/07
"Air
Strikes Kill 17 Iraqi Al Qaeda Fighters"
--CBS News, 6/22/07
"Al-Qaeda
gunmen killed in Iraq"
BBC, 6/22/07
These
reports and others like them in the U.S. and British media last
June accepted as fact a U.S. military release from the Public Affairs
Office of Camp Victory in Iraq. It declared: "Coalition forces
attack helicopters engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen and destroyed
the vehicle they were using." It offered no supporting evidence
for its claim that the 17 people killed were "al-Qaeda gunmen."
Only
BBC sent investigators to the scene. BBC's interviews with villagers
produced a very different story: "A group of villagers in
Iraq is bitterly disputing the U.S. account of a deadly attack on
22 June, in the latest example of the confusion surrounding the
reporting of combat incidents there…. [The villagers] say
that those who died had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. They say
they were local village guards trying to protect the township
from exactly the kind of attack by insurgents the U.S. military
says it foiled."
"If
the villagers' account is true, the incident would raise many
questions, including: On what basis did the U.S. helicopters launch
their attack that night? How many other coalition reports of successes
against 'al-Qaeda fighters' are based on similar mistakes, especially
when powerful remote weaponry is used?
"The
incident also highlights the problems the news media face in verifying
such combat incidents in remote areas where communications are
disrupted, where direct independent access is impossible because
of the many lethal dangers they would face, and where only the
official military version of events is available." (www.bbc.co.uk,
6/26/07)
The
June assault by American attack helicopters was on the village
of al-Khalis near Baqubah, whose residents are almost all Shi'a
Muslims. Al-Qaeda forces are Sunni Muslims--which makes it unlikely
that that the villagers would cover up for al-Qaeda. U.S. military
officials have not denied the results of the BBC investigation.
Helicopter
attacks in Iraq are commonplace. One occurred on October 23, 2007,
near Djila, a village north of Samarra. The U.S. military claimed
that the attack killed 11 among "a group of men planting
a roadside bomb." Later, it revised the report, declaring
that 6 civilians had mistakenly been killed and sending "condolences
to the families. We regret any loss of life."
But
villagers denied the military's account of the October 23 attack.
A relative of some in the "group of men" said three
farmers had left their homes at 4:30 a.m. to irrigate their fields.
Two were killed in an initial attack. The survivor ran home, where,
according to a local Iraqi policeman, 16 were killed-7 men, 6
women and 3 children. The U.S. military said, as it usually does
after such events, "An investigation is underway." (www.tomdispatch.com,
11/16/07)
Public reports of the results of such investigations are rare.
For
discussion
1.
What questions do students have about the reading? How might they
be answered?
2.
What difficulties do reporters have in reporting on bombings like
the ones at al-Khalis and Djila?
3.
What difficulties do you think there would be in answering the
questions raised by the BBC investigators?
4.
Which report of the al-Khalis or Djila bombings--that of the U.S.
military or of the villagers--seems more accurate to you? Why?
Student Reading 2:
Inevitable civilian deaths, with regrets, in Iraq
and Afghanistan
Reporting on air attacks seems to pose a challenge for the news
media. "The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps
the most significant--and underreported--aspect of the fight against
the insurgency," the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh
wrote more than two years ago. "The military authorities
in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily
accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units
fly or of the tonnage they drop."
A fall
2004 Marine press release offered insight into the scope of bombing
in Iraq. It said that since the beginning of the war in March
2003 "the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more
than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance …U.S. officials
did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports…told
of women and children killed in the bombardments." (The
New Yorker, 12/5/05)
We
also know that between April 2003 and June 2007, the U.S."dropped
at least 59,787 pounds of cluster bombs in Iraq" (Nick Turse,
"The Secret Air War in Iraq," The Nation, 6/11/07).
Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch,
called cluster bombs "the single greatest risk civilians
face with regard to a current weapon that is in use." Cluster
bombs burst above the ground, releasing hundreds of "bomblets."
The weapon, says Garlasco, "cannot distinguish between a
civilian and a soldier when employed because of its wide coverage
area. If you're dropping the weapon and you blow your target up,
you're also hitting everything within a football field. So to
use it in proximity to civilians is inviting a violation of the
laws of armed conflict."
Few
reports supply specific information about U.S. air attacks on Iraq.
The Associated Press supplied one story headlined "U.S. Attack
Kills 34, Including 15 Civilians" and datelined Baghdad,
October 11, 2007:
"An
attack by American forces killed 19 insurgents and 15 civilians,
including 9 children, northwest of the capital on Thursday, the
United States military reported.
"The
military said its targets were senior leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia,
the home-grown Sunni militant group that American intelligence
believes has foreign leadership. 'We regret the civilians are
hurt or killed while coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism,'
said Maj. Brad Leighton, a spokesman for American forces in Iraq,
in reference to the deadly airstrike on Thursday."
The
Center for Strategic and International Studies released a report
on December 13, 2007, entitled "U.S. Airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan
2004-2007" (www.csis.org),
using information from the U.S. Combined Air and Space Operations
Center. The report said there had been "sharp increases"
in "the levels of delivery of major munitions" in Iraq
and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2007 with "very sharp rises
between 2006 and 2007." For example, during 2007 (as of December
5), the U.S. had dropped bombs and delivered missiles on targets
in Iraq 1,129 times. The largest previous number was 404 times
in 2005. In Afghanistan the increases were even higher. The U.S.
dropped bombs or missiles 2,996 times as of December 5, 2007,
compared with 1,770 times in 2006.
At
the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S.
airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body
Count, a London-based anti-war research group that maintains a
database compiling news media reports on Iraqi civilian deaths.
The count is regarded as conservative, since it doesn't include
deaths missed by the international media.
Reporting
on the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Evan Wright pointed out that
"The fact is the Marines rely much more on artillery bombardment….During
our thirty-six hours outside Nasiriyah they have already lobbed
an estimated 2,000 rounds into the city. The impact of this shelling
on its 400,000 residents must be devastating." Entering the
city later, "we pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred
human remains sitting upright in some windows. There's a man in
the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three
or four, lying on her back. She's wearing a dress and has no legs."
(Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and
the New Face of American War by Evan Wright)
In
an interview Evan Wright said, "The problem with American
society is we don't really understand what war is." The view
Americans get "is too sanitized." (Quoted in Michael
Massing, "Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs," New York
Review, 12/20/07)
A year
ago, Senator Patrick Leahy, now head of the Judiciary Committee,
complained that a Pentagon report on its procedures for recording
civilian casualties was "an embarrassment." He said
the report, which "totals just two pages," shows that
"the Pentagon does very little to determine the cause of
civilian casualties or to keep a record of civilian victims."
The U.S. military has said repeatedly that it doesn't track civilian
casualties.
There
are many conflicting or unclear reports of civilian deaths in
Afghanistan as well as Iraq. For instance, on May 13, 2007, the
New York Times reported that in the western village of
Zerkoh, "American airstrikes left 57 villagers dead, nearly
half of them women and children, on April 27 and 29." According
to the story: "The United States military says it came under
heavy fire from insurgents as it searched for a local tribal commander
and weapons caches and called in airstrikes, killing 136 Taliban
fighters….
"But
the villagers denied that any Taliban were in the area. Instead,
they said, they rose up and fought the Americans themselves, after
the soldiers raided several houses, arrested two men and shot
dead two old men on a village road." U.S. and NATO officials
say air power is essential to compensate for a shortage of troops.
"On
Tuesday, barely 24 hours after American officials apologized publicly
to President Karzai for a previous incident in which 19 civilians
were shot by marines in eastern Afghanistan, reports surfaced
of at least 21 civilians killed in an airstrike in Helmand Province,
though residents reached by phone said the toll could be as high
as 80."
For discussion
1.
What questions do students have about the reading? How might
they be answered?
2.
Why do you suppose that the military do not regularly report
air force missions?
3.
According to a Human Rights Watch spokesperson, "cluster-bombs
are banned by most nations. I don't see how any use of the current
U.S. cluster-bomb arsenal in proximity to civilian objects can be
defended in any way as being legal or legitimate." (Turse,
6/11/07) Based on what you know, do you think this is a reasonable
criticism of U.S. practice? Why or why not? If you wanted to learn
more about cluster-bombs, how might you find out?
4.
Why do you suppose Iraqi and Afghan civilian deaths in bombing
attacks appear to be rising?
5.
Do you think, as Evan Wright charges, that Americans get a
view of war that "is too sanitized"? Why or why not?
6.
Why do you suppose that the U.S. military does not track civilian
casualties? Should it? Why or why not?
7.
Why do you think there are so many civilian deaths in Iraq and
Afghanistan?
Student
Reading 3:
"A peculiar and effective form of communication"
The
potential of the airplane as a weapon of war became clear during
World War I. British planes bombed German U-boat bases and factories.
Recognizing the likely psychological effects of terror bombings,
Germany attacked London and killed hundreds of civilians. This
use of air power was an ominous prelude to what was to come.
In
the 1930s, Japan bombed Chinese cities, killing countless civilians
and leaving millions homeless. During the Spanish civil war, German
planes bombed the defenseless town of Guernica. Early in World
War II German bombers struck such major European cities as Rotterdam
and London. Since these attacks were aimed not at military targets
but at civilians, newspapers condemned them as barbaric.
But
inhibitions about killing civilians eroded. British and American
planes devastated Hamburg. U.S. incendiary bombs spread fires and
incinerated 150,000 people in Dresden and Tokyo. But it took only
a single American bomber to obliterate first Hiroshima and, three
days later, Nagasaki. These two attacks took the lives of some
200,000 people.
Later,
in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, U.S. air attacks inevitably brought
death and destruction to civilians. The more contemporary U.S."precision
bombing" or "surgical strikes" in Iraq are aimed
at specific military targets. But no matter how precise or surgical,
high explosive bombings in such cities as Baghdad, Falluja, and
Ramadi are certain to kill and maim those not targeted.
Today,
aerial bombing is a big business. In 2006, the U.S. Defense Department
awarded contracts totaling more than $100 billion for military
aircraft and their components to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop
Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, L-3 Communications Holdings,
BAE Systems, and United Technologies, according to the Center
for Defense Information ("The Defense Monitor," November/December
2007).
Tom
Engelhardt and others at his website (www.tomdispatch.com)
write repeatedly about U.S. air attacks in Iraq that are neglected
by the media. "The airplane is a weapon of war, but it is
also a weapon of terror….From World War II, through Korea
and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, our air wars have always
visited death and destruction on civilians.
"We
in the United States recognize butchery when we see it--the atrocity
of the car bomb, the chlorine-gas truck bomb, the beheading. These
acts are obviously barbaric in nature. But our favored way of
war--war from a distance--has, for us, been precleansed of barbarism.
Or rather its essential barbarism has been turned into a set of…
'accidents,' of 'mistakes,' repeatedly made over six decades….It
is in our interest not to see air war as a--possibly the--modern
form of barbarism….
"It
is time to be more honest….At the level of policy, civilian
deaths from the air…are not mistakes or they wouldn't happen
so repeatedly. They are the very givens of this kind of warfare."
(www.tomdispatch.com,
7/9/07)
Chris
Hedges, a war correspondent for the New York Times for
15 years, wrote that the 9/11 attackers of the World Trade Center
"illustrate that those who oppose us, rather than coming
from another moral universe, have been well schooled in modern
warfare. The dramatic explosions, the fireballs, the victims plummeting
to their deaths, the collapse of the towers in Manhattan, were
straight out of Hollywood.
"Where
else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers
learn that huge explosions and death about a city skyline are
a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered
the language. They understand that the use of disproportionate
violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave
the same calling cards.
"We
demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We
view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness.
Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own
cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces
the other to objects--eventually in the form of corpses.
"Men
in modern warfare are in service to technology…. To be sure,
soldiers who kill innocents pay a tremendous personal emotional
and spiritual price. But within the universe of total war, equipped
with weapons that can kill hundreds or thousands of people in
seconds, soldiers only have time to reflect later. By then these
soldiers often have been discarded, left as broken men in a civilian
society that does not understand them and does not want to understand
them."(War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris
Hedges)
The
price of this "service to technology" is already being
paid by the 31,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001
who have been diagnosed with what in World War I was called "shellshock,"
became "combat fatigue" in World War II, then "post-Vietnam
syndrome," and is now called "post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD). (This figure is based on an analysis of 3 million
disability-compensation claims by McClatchy newspapers, www.mcclatchydc.com,
12/20/07.)
Terrifying
flashbacks, feelings of shame and guilt, emotional numbness, violent
anger, self-destructiveness, sleep and memory disorders are among
the common symptoms of PTSD. GIs usually receive medical help
and monthly compensation. What happens to the many more Iraqi
and Afghan civilian victims, about whom we learn little or nothing,
can only be imagined.
For discussion
1.
What questions do students have about the reading? How might
they be answered?
2.
If the World War II German attacks on Rotterdam and London were
"barbaric," is that same word applicable to U.S. assaults
on Dresden and Hiroshima? Why or why not?
3.
Are civilian deaths from the air "mistakes"? Why or
why not?
4.
How would you explain why the media report so little about
the results of U.S. air attacks?
5.
Do you agree with Chris Hedges statement that "we demonize
the enemy" and see ourselves "as the embodiment of absolute
goodness"? Why or why not and on the basis of what evidence?
For
inquiry
Students
might explore the effects of such air attacks such as the following:
-
Guernica (also worthwhile might be a study of the Picasso painting)
- Japanese
assaults on Chinese cities in the 1930s
- Rotterdam
and London
- Hamburg
and Dresden
- Atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Bombings
in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia
- Official
U.S. investigations of errant bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan
For reading
W. G. Sebald's article "On the Natural History of Destruction"
in The New Yorker, 11/4/02, includes a powerful account
of the bombing of Hamburg and the reactions of Germans to it.
Kurt
Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five recounts the aftermath
of the firebombing of Dresden.
John
Hersey's book Hiroshima describes the experience of six
Hiroshima survivors and much ore.
Frank
Harvey's book Air War: Vietnam, gives an eyewitness account.
William
Shawcross's book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction
of Cambodia describes the effects of the U.S.'s attacks on
that nation.
For
citizenship
Organize
students to produce a magazine for school distribution on the
uses of air power and their impact on civilians.
This
lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Morningside
Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. We
welcome
your comments. Please email them to: lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org.
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