September 15, 2006

How Efforts to Avoid Civilian Casualties During War, can Backfire

As civilians continue to be killed by death squads in Iraq, it is important to reflect, that the reason murderous, anti-Democracy forces in Iraq weren't crushed up until now, was the effort to avoid harm to civilians. From Victor Davis Hanson:

The looting should have been stopped. But by the same token, after the statue fell, had the U.S. military begun immediately to shoot looters on sight - and that was what restoring order would have required - or carpet bombed the Syrian and Iranian borders to stop infiltration, the outcry would have arisen that we were too punitive and gunning down poor and hungry people even in peace. I fear that 400,000 peacekeepers, given the rules of postbellum engagement, would have been no more likely to shoot thieves than would 200,000.

We forget that one of the reasons for the speed of the American advance and then the sudden rush to stop military operations - as was true in the first Gulf War - was the enormous criticism leveled at the Americans for going to war in the first place, and the constant litany cited almost immediately of American abuses involving excessive force. Shooting looters may have restored order, but it also would have now been enshrined as an Abu-Ghraib-like crime - a photo of a poor "hungry" thief broadcast globally as an unarmed victim of American barbarism. We can imagine more "Highway of Death" outrage had we bombed concentrations of Shiites pouring in from Iran or jihadists from Syria going to "weddings" and "festivals" in Iraq.

Throughout this postmodern war, the military has been on the horns of a dilemma: Don't shoot and you are indicted for being lax and allowing lawlessness to spread; shoot and you are gratuitously slandered as a sort of rogue LAPD in camouflage. We hear only of the deliberately inexact rubric "Iraqi civilian losses" - without any explanation that almost all the Iraqi dead are either (1) victims of the terrorists, (2) Iraqi security forces trying to defend the innocent against the terrorists, or (3) the terrorists themselves.

Our efforts to save civilians during the war, left Iraqi civilians today endangered by the death squads. The same thing happened in Vietnam, on a massive scale, because in that case the U.S. didn't merely pull its punches, it pulled its military forces out entirely. Per Larry Elder:

Our withdrawal, however, gave the Vietnamese armies under Ho Chi Minh free rein to overrun South Vietnam - raping, pillaging, plundering, impoverishing, imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people.

The withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam also strengthened the hand of the communist Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. Their leader, Pol Pot, embarked on a bloody ethnic-cleansing campaign. While the exact number of Cambodians slaughtered can never be fully known, most estimate those killed from a low of 1 million to a high of 3 million.

So we find that in war compassion for innocent civilians living in proximity to the enemy, must be balanced with compassion for the innocent civilians who will have to restore order after major military efforts are concluded. Rather than preventing tragedy, fighting a "war lite," that avoids civilian casualties in a way that prevents us from destroying the enemy, often merely postpones the tragedy to the time when major war efforts are over.

Needless to say, if we brought all our troops home, as most of the leadership on the Left advises, there would be a bloodbath in Iraq similar to the one that took place in Vietnam after U.S. troops pulled out there.

Update 1-11-07: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

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Categories: Counter-Terrorism, Iraq, Previous Featured Posts, The Mid East
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