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Killing civilians to vanquish Isis will only make besieged people hate
us
Trevor Timm
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/01/killing-civilians-isis-make-people-hate-us
The US and its allies have likely killed hundreds of civilians in its
airstrikes already, so pushing for more force won’t be more effective
Kill more civilians? We seem to be killing plenty. Photograph: Yahya
Arhab/EPA
Wednesday 1 July 2015 21.30 AEST
Last modified on Wednesday 1 July 2015 21.33 AEST
Advocates for even more war in the Middle East apparently have a new
strategy for defeating Isis: allow the US military to kill more
civilians. If you think I’m exaggerating, just read their deranged and
pathological arguments for yourself.
It began in late May when the New York Times reported that both Iraqi
and American officials started complaining the US was too worried about
killing civilians, suggesting that the Obama administration shouldn’t be
worried that indiscriminately killing innocent people might turn the
Iraqi population even more against the US than it already is. (Nevermind
that it could be considered a war crime.) As the Times’s Eric Schmitt
wrote: “many Iraqi commanders and some American officers say that
exercising such prudence with airstrikes is a major reason the Islamic
State, also known as Isis or Daesh, has been able to seize vast
territory in recent months in Iraq and Syria.”
US News and World Report’s Paul Shinkman took this to a new extreme this
week in an article entitled “Iraqi Civilians Will Die: US Must Get Used
to It, Experts Say.” Shinkman quoted multiple “experts” who were
apparently upset the US military was investigating one of its own
bombings due to credible reports that civilians were killed. Given the
US government took months to admit that they had killed even one
civilian in Iraq or Syria, the fact they are willing to investigate it
at all should tell you something about its validity. Admitting the US
cares about civilian deaths only “complicate[s] the war effort,” he
writes. Shinkman ended his piece – after claiming that the firebombing
of Dresden and the millions of civilians killed in Vietnam were merely
“part of the cost of waging warfare” – by essentially lamenting that US
military members are attempting to avoiding collateral deaths:
For now, it seems clear to some that no pilots are willing to
venture beyond their strict orders to find and kill the enemy.
“In this environment, nobody wants to get investigated, nobody wants
to be on the wrong side of the rules of engagement,” Harmer says. “The
pilots are only going to want to attack a target that has been clearly
identified by somebody else.”
If only pilots would stop focusing on killing the enemy and start
carpet-bombing entire cities, then we could get somewhere!
Live
Join the discussion... Isis and Radicalisation: A talk with Martin
Chulov
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Islamic State, other jihadi groups, and the broader conflict engulfing
Iraq and Syria.
Click here
While one can dismiss the US News piece as particularly deranged
trolling, the same idea is coming through in news articles about US
strategy. CNN’s most reliable Pentagon stenographer, Barbara Starr,
reported Friday that the US believes that Isis leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi is hiding among civilians in the Syrian city of Raqqa,
“knowing that the US will not target civilians and well aware of the US
‘rules of engagement.’” Members of Congress have also gotten in on the
act, in what amounts to complaining that we shouldn’t worry about
killing civilians since Isis will kill them instead.
Let’s put aside for a moment that the US and its allies are dropping
thousands of bombs per month on Iraq and Syria and have likely killed
hundreds of civilians in its airstrikes on Isis already, as Glenn
Greenwald comprehensively documented in May. The entire premise that the
US won’t attack an enemy in civilian areas is false.
The Pentagon just released a new version of its laws of war manual, and
contrary to the blood-thirsty commentators who are sad the US isn’t
dropping more bombs in civilian-packed areas, the Pentagon actually has
no problem doing so. “The Defense Department apparently thinks that it
may lawfully kill an unlimited number of civilians forced to serve as
involuntary human shields in order to achieve even a trivial military
advantage,” Rutgers law school professor Adil Ahmad Haque wrote in an
analysis of the new rulebook for the indispensable Just Security legal
blog. (Nevermind that what these kill-more-civilian commentators are
arguing for is likely against international law, no matter what the
Pentagon’s manual says.)
If the US is being a little more careful about civilian deaths on its
third go-around in Iraq – and that’s a giant “if” – we should all be
commending that. Perhaps they’ve learned that if our second invasion of
Iraq didn’t lead to the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians, we wouldn’t
be in this Isis mess in the first place. A call for a return to anything
short of only killing enemy soldiers should be called what it is:
sociopathic.
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