Bloodiest Conflict of Our Time

Moonlight Falcon
A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft sits on a trim pad before an engine run up at Joint Base Balad, Iraq, July 16, 2008. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter

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Reality of collateral damage

Jim Molan July 19, 2008
IN counterinsurgency, the term collateral damage can prompt cynicism from the uninformed, who see it as military techno-speak sanitising the impact of war on ordinary people. Nothing could be further from the truth. For those who do not have the luxury of criticising without offering an alternative, the term collateral damage is practical and well understood. The process saves thousands of innocent lives: if the collateral damage estimate was too high, we had the option of not striking the target.

(A CDE brought up the fundamental legal and moral considerations of proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity. The CDE told us the number of people likely to be killed in the strike. Specialists in Qatar and Florida produced a CDE for every target, based on many different factors.)

We did not employ the term to dehumanise what we were doing. In Iraq we were reminded of the consequences of our actions immediately: as we watched bombs hit, the computer screen, showing TV-like pictures brought down from an unmanned drone, would flare silently and the wind would slowly blow away dust clouds to reveal the wreckage.

Within an hour of the strike, some Arab network would broadcast pictures of the scene and assessments by so-called spokesmen in the local hospital, listing the number of women and children who had been "slaughtered by the crusaders". Of course the network commentary and the doctors did not criticise the terrorists or insurgents for holding their meetings in the midst of their own families or neighbours.

We did everything we could to avoid killing innocents. The coalition did not fight just for the sake of fighting. The coalition commander, US general George Casey, and his field commanders did not want to aggravate an already difficult situation, and their first guiding principle was often expressed as the old medical dictum: "First, do no harm."

There was a continual search for any approach that did not involve bombs and bullets. A bullet achieves its effect by transferring kinetic energy to a human body, something that does not go far in winning the heart or mind. In Iraq we searched for the non-kinetic approach: using anything rather than force, but it was not always possible. Examples of the non-kinetic were: buy weapons back from the population rather than conducting searches in homes that disrupt daily life and risk civilian casualties; rather than kill bomb emplacers, create employment to counter the insurgents who offer money to the unemployed to plant roadside bombs; use police rather than heavily armed soldiers to enforce the law; provide essential services to the people so they see some benefit from our occupation.

Nevertheless, when it comes to significant levels of combat, international law accepts that some innocents may be killed. As long as we apply considerations of proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity both legally and morally, the fault for the death of innocents lies with those who choose to wage war from the bosoms of their families. Even if I had a positive identification of a terrorist leader, I still did not have the right to just bomb him. I still had to consider proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity.

If our own morality and our own law are not enough to guide us, there is also self-interest. Every time we kill an innocent, we make more enemies for ourselves. Ironically, in the short term, this logic did not necessarily work against the insurgents, but in the longer term their illegality and brutality has started to earn them their share of enemies among the people of Iraq. The slaughter of innocents in the tens or hundreds of thousands is, to them, a tactic. They solve any resentment that may arise from their actions with more violence. They simply kill anyone that objects.

I do not accept that there is any moral equivalence between what I did and what our enemies did. I was acutely aware of the consequences of our actions. It is not necessarily the process that makes time-sensitive targeting difficult, although that is difficult enough. It is being able to make decisions when you know their consequences.

Once I'd received the CDE, the military necessity of striking the target had to be weighed against the number of innocent people who might die. I used a standard set of criteria. One was the knowledge that a terrorist car bomb might kill hundreds of innocents and one terrorist technician was capable of producing any number of these bombs. Each enemy cell could attack the Iraqi population once or twice a week. A member of the leadership is capable of instigating even greater carnage by co-ordinating subordinates who can then kill and maim.

The decision to strike was never taken lightly but it had to be taken quickly. If a terrorist meeting looked as though it was about to break up before the official CDE was ready, I had to estimate a CDE and recommend a strike (or not). I was accountable for that judgment. In fact, the targeting team would be negligent if it missed an important target by taking the safe route and waiting for the formal process every time. This decision about collateral damage is no different in law from the decision made by a lieutenant platoon commander crouched down on the side of a road calling for an air strike on a position from which the enemy is firing at him and his troops. I just did it in a much more comfortable place.

Once we'd ironed out the early problems, the CDE would usually arrive promptly, comparing the impacts of 227kg and 450kg bombs with other weapons for the target in question. Sometimes the facts did not line up nicely. Intelligence may not have been convincing or the CDE was uncomfortably high at the time the attack was proposed. If a target was in a residential area, then the CDE would be high at night. If possible, we would wait until daytime to strike it. But of course for certain types of transient targets, such as leadership meetings, delay might mean losing the targets for days, weeks, even months.

As a staff officer, my decision was not technically a decision but a recommendation to my boss, Casey. Executive authority remained with commanders. So I would make my recommendation, then ring Casey and put the case to him as I saw it, normally without the detail. He then made his decision, approving the strike or directing his own course of action. If necessary, he went up his chain of command.

Rarely did Casey reject my recommendation, but it did happen. And on occasions I differed with the taskforce commander about whether to strike. There were also threats of bypassing me and going directly to Casey. Once or twice that did happen.

The terrorists and insurgents might have subscribed to the old saying that "There are no rules in a knife fight." But there are rules; they just did not obey them. In fact they institutionalised the transgression of international law. My feeling was that the media did not scrutinise our adversaries' actions as carefully as the coalition's. For any faults we may have had, the US-led coalition represented the rule of law. It was right that we were held accountable. But so should the other side. My quarrel with the media was that, on certain occasions, the insurgents seemed to have been given licence to fight the way they did because they were fighting the US and the coalition or resisting an occupation. But barbarity is barbarity, no matter who perpetrates it.

As October 2004 wore on, our intelligence could see that the terrorists were going to stay to defend their base in Fallujah, a Sunni city 70km west of Baghdad that was an insurgency stronghold. Because of this, it became increasingly important to shape Fallujah by separating the residents from the enemy. From October onwards, we dropped more pointed leaflets, we made broadcasts from aircraft and we filled the media with warnings. We staged nightly attacks against the leadership within Fallujah, which encouraged some residents to leave.

Our greatest allies in this endeavour were, much to our surprise, the insurgents. They went to Fallujah to hide among the people but committed mindless acts of violence against them. They set up local religious courts and Fallujans were tried and punished, even tortured and executed, if they did not commit to extreme fundamentalist Islamic ideology and sharia law.

The Sunnis of Fallujah had no desire for any of this and their exodus gathered pace.

As we noticed what was occurring, we tried to hasten their departure. We increased our leaflet drops and broadcasts, and often told the enemy who we had killed. We stated or strongly implied that the killing was the result of betrayal and, indeed, it often was. Betrayal was a constant and, I was assured, successful theme. There must have been some level of paranoia in the minds of enemy leaders: they moved three times a day, escaping death by seconds and watching others die around them. We played on this fear.

We continually told the people of Fallujah and other cities of the evil of those in their midst, particularly the foreign fighters. Like most people, Iraqis are very parochial. They suspect foreigners and admire strength and success. As we achieved victories and put the pressure on the then head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, we broadcast on Fallujan radio or dropped leaflets saying: "Foreign terrorists will stay until Iraq has burned to the ground - Do not let these criminals destroy your future."

At that time, Zarqawi's network was only getting into its stride but had publicly claimed responsibility for 62 attacks that had killed 26 coalition soldiers and 478 Iraqi security force members, and probably a far greater number of Iraqi civilians.

We also held out carrots, publicising the fact Fallujah was missing out on millions of dollars of development funds; they would only appear once the terrorists were gone.

As the end of October approached, leaflet drops and broadcasts advised Fallujans to leave for their own safety because the Iraqi interim government intended to conduct direct military action to rid the city of terrorists. The world press assisted by going into a paroxysm of uninformed speculation about what the attack, which eventuated, would look like and when it would occur.

Part of the shaping for Fallujah was trying to kill or capture Zarqawi's lieutenants. They had specific target codenames, which I grew to know as we watched them. The permanent leader of the Zarqawi network in Fallujah was Umar Hadid, known as the Emir (leader) of Fallujah. As one of the three most prominent terrorist leaders in Fallujah (Sheik Abdullah Janabi and Zarqawi were the others), Hadid had about 1800 fighters of his own.

Unable to capture him because of a prohibition on entering Fallujah, I made a sustained effort to kill him and launched several strikes as the taskforce delivered the intelligence. One I remember distinctly was on a house belonging to Hadid's brother Abu Walid, himself a propagandist for the terrorists. Hadid was visiting, and when all the information lined up, I hit the house with a guided bomb, a joint direct attack munition. The house exploded around him and his brother was killed, but Hadid walked out of the rubble.

The next time we found him, he was in one of the many houses he owned in Fallujah. I hit the building with another single bomb and again he escaped, but we were fairly certain we'd wounded him. Later we had intelligence that he was in another house and I again authorised a strike.

As the bomb was in the air I received confirming intelligence that he was at the site. The house exploded around him again, and again he walked out.
Finally, he went to a house where I could use several joint direct attack munitions at once. We got a good clean hit and could see no survivors. We were confident that we had killed him.

Almost immediately, we heard chat on the phones saying he had become a martyr. But then, within a few hours, we overheard other chat saying he had only been wounded and was going to Jordan for medical treatment. Which was the truth, which the attempt atdeception?

During the fighting in Fallujah weeks later, the enemy propaganda machine announced that Hadid had been killed heroically leading his men against US soldiers.

This was not our belief based on our special knowledge but some months later a new insurgent brigade was formed south of Baghdad and it was named Shaykh Umar al-Hadid. New brigades tended to memorialise the dead, so we remained convinced that we had killed him in the house. This new brigade claimed responsibility for a particularly murderous action on the Suwayrah Highway near Salman Pak, so his tradition lived on, even if he did not.

This is an edited extract from Running the War in Iraq: An Australian General, 300,000 Troops, the Bloodiest Conflict of Our Time, by major-general Jim Molan (HarperCollins, $32.99).

From:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au