In Iraq, lives differ in value — and so do deaths. In this disparity lies an important reason why the United States has botched this war.
Last November in Haditha, a squad of Marines, outraged at the loss of a comrade, is said to have run amok, avenging his death by killing two dozen innocent bystanders. And in March, US soldiers in Mahmudiyah allegedly raped a young Iraqi woman and killed her along with three of her relatives — an apparently premeditated crime for which one former and four active-duty US soldiers have been charged. These incidents are among at least five recent cases of Iraqi civilian deaths that have triggered investigations of US military personnel.
But recall a more recent incident, in Samarra. On May 30, US soldiers manning a checkpoint there opened fire on a speeding vehicle that either did not see or failed to heed their command to stop. Two women in the vehicle were shot dead. One of them, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, 35, was pregnant. The baby was also killed.
The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded US forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: “We don’t do body counts.” It’s not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every US service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count — for internal use only — some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.
In the early days of the insurgency, some US commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. In their book “Cobra II,” Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: “The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.”
Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of “gooks” during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha — and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.
As the war enters its fourth year, how many innocent Iraqis have died at American hands, not as a result of Haditha-like massacres but because of accidents and errors? The number almost certainly runs in the tens of thousands.
Who bears responsibility for these Iraqi deaths? The young soldiers pulling the triggers? The commanders who establish rules of engagement that privilege “force protection” over any obligation to protect innocent life? The policymakers who sent US forces into Iraq in the first place and now see no choice but to press on? The culture that, to put it mildly, has sought neither to understand nor to empathize with people in the Arab or Islamic worlds?
There are no easy answers, but one at least ought to acknowledge that in launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of US idealism, we have waded into a swamp of moral ambiguity.
Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim’s death helped clarify her brother’s perspective on the war. “God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here,” he declared after the incident. “They have no regard for our lives.”
He was being unfair, of course. It’s not that we have no regard for Iraqi lives; it’s just that we have much less regard for them. The current reparations policy — the payment offered in those instances in which US forces do own up to killing an Iraq civilian — makes the point. The insurance payout to the beneficiaries of an American soldier who dies in the line of duty is $400,000, while in the eyes of the US government, a dead Iraqi civilian is reportedly worth up to $2,500 in condolence payments — about the price of a decent plasma-screen TV.
For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon needs to measure in painstaking detail — and publicly — the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation.
To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.
— Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
