The war and policy blogs have been abuzz for the last few days over the leak of the 2007 classified Apache helicopter video of U.S. military personnel opening fire on a group of armed men, suspecting two video journalists of carrying RPGs (TV cameras), and then opening fire on a civilian vehicle that stopped by to pick up one wounded man.
This is the lead paragraph from The Atlantic’s report on the 2007 incident in a April 6 news report:
“In the Pentagon’s telling of a July 2007 incident long shrouded in mystery, two Reuters staffers were accidentally killed in a firefight between insurgents and U.S. forces including an Apache attack helicopter. Yesterday, leaked video taken from that helicopter tells a very different story. The chilling footage, released by the non-profit website WikiLeaks and reproduced below, shows no one firing on the helicopter, and that the Reuters staffers, far from incidental bystanders, were the intended targets. The Americans apparently believed the Reuters journalist’s shoulder-mounted camera to be a rocket-propelled grenade and considered the nearby armed Iraqi men to be imminent threats, though they showed no threatening behavior.“
On the face of it, there seems to be little that deviates from the history of such military incidents. One of the most famous in the U.S. – and yes, this is a Vietnam War reference – took place in My Lai in 1968. The official report filed by the U.S. military after that incident to the news media also claimed that the U.S. military had engaged and killed several enemy combatants – and that is how The New York Times reported it on March 17, 1968. It wasn’t until Nov. 1969 that a freelance reporter in the U.S. – not in Vietnam but in the U.S. – uncovered and reported the truth about the massacre in My Lai based on his investigative reporting of the military’s secret investigation into the incident.
And so we have it. Secret reports, secret files, secret videos, secret verdicts. And who is all this kept secret from? Not the Vietnamese – they certainly knew what had happened in My Lai, just as Iraqis knew what happened in various incidents in Iraq. The secret, as always, was and is kept from the home audiences. The enemy already knows, it is the domestic blowback that such classified reports are meant to avoid.
Let’s now move on to the main issue here, beyond the need for such secrecy, which is the Rules of Engagement that permit and approve of incidents such as the one disclosed by Wikileaks. We know that journalists with cameras have been targeted and killed in various wars. In 1982, the Israelis claimed they thought a camera crew reporting on their invasion of Lebanon was an anti-tank missile unit. That was the 1980s, the cameras were bigger, the surveillance technology was spotty, and the Arab journalists were disposable. Jump to 2007, and the story remains the same – I should also remind readers here that the U.S. military made similar mistakes earlier, when it destroyed Al Jazeera’s offices in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, and also when U.S. forces fired on a hotel full of journalists on the day that armor rolled in to Baghdad.
So, evidently, new technology and better defensive armor have not provided for any lowering of the threat profile of a ratty faced videographer.
There is also, then, the matter of the shooting of the civilian vehicle in the Wikileaks video, wherein the fault of the unarmed driver, with two children (both girls) in the front seat of the van, was that he decided to stop and help carry an unarmed wounded man. I believe the military personnel in the Apache video communique dismisses the report of the wounded children by insinuating that the driver was at fault for bringing children into a war zone. But, really, he didn’t. It is the Apache and the insurgency that brought the war zone to him.
It might be the presumption in the mind of the military personnel that a civilian should keep driving even when they see their fellow countrymen lying wounded and dying on the road, and not stop to help them, but these are certainly not Rules of War or Rules of Engagement that have been explained to Iraqis, let alone to Americans. And yes, they do violate international conventions regarding the treatment of civilians in general, and the treatment of the wounded, even combatants but especially unarmed wounded, in specific. Of course, as long as no one is willing to bear the political risk of pursuing charges against the U.S.-led coalition, the international conventions are worthless – the law is an ass unless someone is willing to enforce it.
There has been no news of any changes in the Rules of Engagement since 2007, and while the Iraq theater of combat is drawing down for U.S. forces, the political-insurgency problems created by civilian casualties in Afghanistan are intensifying.
There is a lesson that few military, and fewer political, leaders care to learn from wars: Killing civilians is not good for business, especially in such times and places where small arms are abundant, weapons technology is freely available and simple to learn, and the level of motivation for punitive reprisals is high, due to the tribal nature of such societies. Of course, the same would also be true of the Americans fighting the British in, say, 1774 – the important distinction is that both parties in that insurgency spoke the same language and shared similar cultural traits. The U.S. and the Afghans, not so much.
For those who would dismiss the entire Wikileaks incident as an aberration, rather than what it really is – business as usual – I point to the conversation between Glenn Greenwald and Spc. Josh Stieber at Salon.com; Spc. Stieber served in Iraq in 2007. The transcript of Greenwald’s interview with Spc. Stieber is available here.
Of course, there are some who would argue that such criticism of the ROE is based in some type of hatred for the military – on the contrary, the ROE need to be evaluated specifically because civilian casualties and abuse are the most effective recruiting tools for the insurgency and the global terrorist networks. Pretending that these problems don’t exist in America is not going to stop the enemy from exploiting these problems to strengthen their ranks.
