Pineland Journal: Smith, Jones, and War on Iraq
[NOTE: "Pineland" is the Army’s name for Fayetteville and the surrounding area, used in various war games and training exercises. "Pineland" is portrayed as a country oppressed and occupied by a foreign armed force, which the Ft. Bragg trainees are to liberate by stealth and force. The "Pineland Journal" is an occasional, personal report/reflection on the experience of being a resident of this imaginary yet also real territory, while trying to live from a different set of assumptions.]
By Chuck Fager
Fayetteville, NC--It’s February 7, 2003, and out on Fort Bragg the big guns are booming again, part of some new round of war games. And what seemed to echo distantly in their muffled roars this time last year now sounds like the leading edge of a terrible storm, the real thing about to burst over Iraq, and us, with the torrents and thunderbolts of war.
An even more vivid and unsettling harbinger of this war came yesterday, when I sat on a panel about the war with one of its defense intellectual advocates.
It was my second such foray. The first, at Duke almost three months ago now, had me seated next to an academic, pleasant, articulate and dogged; let’s call him Smith. He quietly insisted that the invasion of Iraq was necessary, and would be ultimately beneficial for the Iraqis and the rest of the world.
I challenged the value of the war to the Iraqis, and based this objection above all on the prospect of high civilian casualties. Smith calmly replied that this was no problem, because the US military was the most careful such force in history when it came to minimizing them.
Perhaps so in theory and even intention, I retorted, but two big doubts about that notion linger for me. First, even if US generals get "collateral damage" down to a seemingly tiny percentage of, say, bombs dropped or missiles fired, the overwhelming volleys likely to be loosed by our forces argue for many civilian deaths just by the law of averages; and the record of the first Gulf War shows that many of the ‘smart": bombs were really rather destructively dumb.
Moreover, I argued, in such a calculus, the counting does not end once the jets or the drones fly away. When US bombs destroy electricity and water purification plants–as they did many in Iraq the last time--the names of the children who die months or even years later from lack of safe water also belong on the casualty list, even if the bombing itself was done "cleanly," without hitting civilians at the moment of the attack.
By such reckoning the toll of the first Gulf War and the years of sanctions that ensued must be, has to be huge, and has been reckoned by credible estimates in the hundreds of thousands. Smith still scoffed at this number, but had little concrete to offer in rebuttal beyond repeating that US wars were run in a primly fastidious manner. When I pointed to the million-plus Vietnamese civilian fatalities in our adventure there, a figure widely acknowledged, Smith shrugged, insisting he was talking about current–and impending–wars, not troubled missions bungled by a previous generation, mine..
So much for my first cavil. The second went simply unanswered, and to me is even more damning. It is that the Pentagon has resolutely refused even to discuss the question of civilian casualties in Iraq, either in the first or now the second Gulf war. No estimates, no explanations, no comment. The subject is off the table, and this policy of zipped lips has been decried even by staunchly pro-military analysts. Thus the basis for Smith’s insistence that US war planners take pains to avoid them is strictly secondhand and unofficial. This by definition makes his contention unverifiable at best, and at worst no more than propaganda repeated.
Whatever goes on behind the scenes, this official refusal to engage diverges sharply from the public stance of hyper-morality that suffuses the current pentagon regime. It is no wonder that their reaction is to pass over it silence whenever possible. And this was the response of my second panel colleague, at yesterday’s face-off: let’s call him Jones.