A City Without Men

Military expert Douglas Ross, professor of political science at Simon Fraser University, whom I met in Afghanistan while he was inspecting troops last summer, put it this way: “Canada’s military strategy relies heavily on multitasking its limited resources. The result is extremely well-trained soldiers who have a fuller picture of the complexities of war zones. With the American army, as big as it is, the training of soldiers is extremely specialized — a grunt, for example, is a grunt. He is taught to kill, and that is all he knows.”

Without a broader understanding of the complexities of Iraqi society, American soldiers often can’t tell the enemy from allies, making civilian casualties inevitable. While US soldiers certainly can’t be held entirely to blame for civilian deaths, the United States assumed the moral responsibility for providing security for the vast majority of peaceful Iraqi citizens. The first priority should be to save innocent lives, not American soldiers who freely enlisted in the military, and are well aware of the deadly consequences of entering a war zone.

But the White House is in a public relations war at home. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who served under both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, remembers the hard political lessons of the Vietnam War, when support evaporated as the death toll mounted. Public support for the Iraq war has already fallen to the point where half of all Americans no longer believe it is worth fighting. To maintain what support there is, soldiers are being kept as far out of harm’s way as possible.

The success of that policy is clearly reflected in the fact that by the end of November fewer than 1,700 US soldiers had died directly at the hands of the enemy — a minuscule number in the history of modern warfare. Even factoring in other losses, the Americans lost soldiers at the rate of barely two a day during the first thousand days of the war that began on March 20, 2003. In Vietnam, the number was closer to twenty a day.

Iraqi civilians, 30,000 of whom have died so far, are continuing to perish at the rate of nearly thirty a day, according to Iraqi Body Count, a British organization that has been monitoring civilian casualties since the start of the war. This number may actually be on the low end of the scale: in 2004 the British medical journal Lancet put the number of civilians killed at more than 98,000.

The Pentagon’s own figures, released for the first time in October, state that more than 25,000 Iraqis were killed in fighting between January 1, 2004 and September 16, 2005. The White House has embarked on a strategy to convince the American public that terrorists and so-called Islamo-fascists are primarily responsible for the appalling death rate among Iraqi civilians.

Setting aside civilian deaths caused by air strikes and so-called “collateral” incidents, responsibility for the failure to secure the country for civilians must fall on the occupier. After all, when insurgents in Iraq attack, they often strike out at those working with the occupiers, including contractors, police, army recruits, translators, and government employees. The occupation, that is, has created a low-level civil war.

The attacks against those who cooperate are also linked to the increasing role that the poorly trained and equipped Iraqi security forces have shouldered in the fighting. They are being forced to do more because the Americans, in an effort to keep their own casualty figures down, are stepping aside, arguing that the Iraqis are increasingly capable of defending themselves. But the Iraqi army has virtually no armoured vehicles, limited communications equipment, is riddled with spies, and an abbreviated training program that does little more than show recruits how to salute and fire a gun before sending them out to the front lines.

While in Tal Afar I rode almost exclusively with the Iraqi army, often in the back of a pickup truck converted for military use that offers little protection against roadside bombs and snipers. Many of the vehicles being used by the Iraqis were already riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel scars. But these same Iraqis are expected to guard government buildings, patrol the dangerous streets of cities like Tal Afar, and relentlessly hunt down insurgents, most of whom are well-trained former members of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, who are often tipped off by infiltrators working within the army’s ranks.

It’s no wonder then that many Iraqis are reverting to their tribal pasts for safety and security. Kurds trust Kurds and only Kurds, Shiites trust only their own, and the Sunnis, who are in the minority in most of Iraq, believe they are fighting for their very existence. The civil war, which appears to be well under way, is partially rooted in the failure of the United States to bring these groups together by producing a viable alternative that all Iraqis can support. “The Americans have fallen so far behind their target goals of training Iraqi forces,” says David L. Phillips, visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “that all-out civil war is all but inevitable now.”