The NoImpunity Victory Plan™ for the War on Terror

The latest polls show that Americans are not optimistic about the direction our country is taking. It's no wonder. Every Moslem in the world seems to want to kill me, personally, just for being American, and not just every Moslem, we seem to have pissed off every thinking and feeling person in the world. There doesn't look to be any good way out of the mess in Iraq. Not to mention Bush and his gang of Satan worshipers calling down big hurricanes, and so on.

But we don't have to give in to despair. At the very hour when things look blackest, we have been handed the keys to victory in the War on Terror. We know what the world wants, all we have to do is give it to them.


The situation is bad, sure, but through a cheap and enjoyable symbolic act, we can turn it right around. Turn the Bush Gang over to trial for war crimes, and the world will be eating out of our hands again. Give these creeps up, and the world will think we know more about democracy than they could ever imagine. Wouldn't you enjoy seeing Rumsfeld hanging off a bridge in Fallujah? In fact, let's not stop with the Bush Gang.

What do we have to do to win the war on terror? At No Impunity, we believe that America has to show the world that democracy is more than a smokescreen for empire. We must actually believe in law. We have to make our politicians respect Iraqi lives and property.

The No Impunity Victory Plan for Iraq

In order to secure the respect of Iraqis and the world, and their cooperation and help in preventing attacks on U.S. citizens, the United States will demonstrate democracy in action. Iraqis who have been killed, or injured, or whose property has been damaged, will have their grievances heard before the International Criminal Court. The American government will acknowledge that Americans have no special right to commit mass murder. The Bushes, and Clinton, and other high ranking officials, will be given no impunity for acts of mass murder.

I know, you're thinking this is a utopian dream. Perhaps, but it is the only way we will see an end to terror. If we, the American people, don't stand up for real freedom, who will? Our leaders have got the guns. We don't have to lose in Iraq. We just have to stop sucking up.

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It's not about "peace"

In response to Bush's disaster in Iraq, most of the left is calling for withdrawal and peace. The problem with this is the meaning of "peace".

When Bill Clinton was President we had "peace" with Iraq. Our government pushed the U.N. to have economic sanctions against Iraq. The sanctions resulted in the deaths of about a million Iraqi civilians, half of them children. When Clinton's Secretary of State was asked about this, she didn't deny it or argue, she just said she thought the cost was worth it. Whether America serves them "peace", or "war" or something in between, the number of dead kids is about the same.

For most Americans, Clinton's way (killing them with peace) was a lot more practical. Peace is cheaper. With peace, we didn't have our own soldiers dying, and we weren't giving a billion Moslems all those reasons to make terrorist attacks against us. Military contractor business interests do better with war, and oil interests do better with this war. The rest of us just pay for it. So for America, "peace" is slicker. But aren't we missing something, if the number of dead kids is the same either way?

The mainstream debate on Iraq is focussed on the question of early withdrawal. Bush and his gang argue that withdrawal would be a betrayal of our friends:

And we've got to stay the course, and we will stay the course. The message to the Iraqi citizens is, they don't have to fear that America will turn and run. And that's an important message for them to hear. If they think that we're not sincere about staying the course, many people will not continue to take a risk toward -- take the risk toward freedom and democracy.

Bush's critics argue that the Iraqis resent U.S. occupation, so our troop presence is a cause of the insurgency. For example, Rep. Murtha:

They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.

Middle of the roaders like the High Democrats argue that if our troops pulled out, Iraq could fall into civil war.

The former first lady said an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a "big mistake."
"It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us," she said.

This view is very broadly accepted. For example, last August Juan Cole wrote:

Personally, I think "US out now" as a simple mantra neglects to consider the full range of possible disasters that could ensue. For one thing, there would be an Iraq civil war. Iraq wasn't having a civil war in 2002. And although you could argue that what is going on now is a subterranean, unconventional civil war, it is not characterized by set piece battles and hundreds of people killed in a single battle, as was true in Lebanon in 1975-76, e.g. People often allege that the US military isn't doing any good in Iraq and there is already a civil war. These people have never actually seen a civil war and do not appreciate the lid the US military is keeping on what could be a volcano.

What will U.S. "withdrawal" mean?

In fact, if the U.S. "withdraws" from Iraq now, our air force will be supporting whoever we decide is the legitimate government there. The number of innocent civilians killed by our troops will certainly go up. Seymour Hersh brought this into the public debate:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

This interacts with the drift toward civil war:

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

Unscrewing

I remember a story that when Gorbachev was trying to liberalize the Soviet Union, he went to Poland to meet the Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa. Walesa told him, "I've been an electrician all my working life, and I've never broken a screw putting them in. Screws always break when you're taking them out. Screwing isn't hard - unscrewing is."

In America's see-saw battle between liberals and conservatives, there have been many cases in which oppressive power was suddenly withdrawn. The results have generally been tragic. Let me give two examples:

Detroit

In 1967, police in Detroit raided an after-hours bar and arrested 82 patrons who were holding a party for two returned Vietnam War veterans. A small riot broke out. The police were withdrawn from the immediate area because they were outnumbered and because resentment of the police was in fact the cause of the riot. So after years of police brutality and excessive force, suddenly there was no police force. The result was an explosion of violence. This destroyed much of the city and the liberal coalition running it. Coleman Young wrote later:

"The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could."

Iran

In 1978, Jimmy Carter's administration attempted to push the Shah of Iran to a more democratic government. This resulted in a period of instability, in which reduced government repression resulted in an upwelling of protest, which was met with renewed government brutality. As the Shah's ability to manage government force fell apart, power fell into the hands of the theocracy. Carter's goal was to move Iran toward more democracy. It didn't happen for the Iranians, and the fallout for America and American liberalism was a disaster.

In both of these cases, the political response in America was an orgy of fingerpointing and blame. To this day, right wing bloggers rant about how Carter sold out our ally, the Shah. The race riots cemented the image of black crime and looting in the minds of the fleeing whites. Mayor Cavanaugh's response has formed more than 30 years of Republican campaign ads. Do we want the intervention in Iraq to end this way? Having destroyed their infrastucture and subjected them to this occupation, having drawn the Islamic Jihad to them, unleashed civil war and discredited the idea of democracy, shall we now allow our disfunctional politics to unscrew them blindly, impulsively, on the basis of slogans and election calendars?

All kinds of things can go on under names like "peace" and "withdrawal". A few writers have talked about this, Tom Engelhardt for example:

If you pay attention not to the war of words or the storm of confusing withdrawal proposals, but to four bedrock matters, you'll have a far better sense of where we're really heading. These are air power, permanent bases, an "American" Kurdistan, and oil; and, not surprisingly, they coincide with the great uncovered, or barely covered, stories of the war.

We aren't going to get out of this easily. Clear thinking is needed. Perhaps a change of slogans would help. Instead of "bring the troops home", how about "no more innocent victims"?

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American impunity

In discussing the war, Americans focus tightly on American interests and American costs. The exact number of Americans killed is reported daily, but the number of Iraqis killed is not counted at all.

Last December Bush was asked by a private citizen how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war. As far as I can tell, this question has never been asked by an accredited news reporter. Bush guessed that 30,000 Iraqis have died because of the war. The Washington Post published a comment on this from Sarah Sewall, a Harvard professor. She suggests that the 30,000 number probably comes from Iraq Body Count, which counts only deaths that are reported in two or more separate media sources. She mentions that a Lancet study gave a figure of 100,000 as of November 2004, but criticizes that study because "the approach was flawed. War is not like a pandemic; it comes in pockets."

Dr. Sewall is anxious not to offend anybody, but thinks that America should at least try to find out how many civilians have been killed:

The number of civilian deaths also belongs in historical context. Considering that millions of innocents died in the world wars, hundreds of thousands in Vietnam and Korea, and tens and even hundreds of thousands in contemporary civil wars, Operation Iraqi Freedom looks astonishingly humane. The rest of the world may see us as trigger-happy cowboys, but the numbers suggest a different character.

The U.S. government ably quantifies many costs of war -- service members killed or wounded, financial burdens on taxpayers, strain on our military's equipment and readiness, Iraqi enemy fighters killed, impact on Iraq's infrastructure, and even civilians the insurgents kill. To refuse to acknowledge the full spectrum of civilian harm, including Iraqis mistakenly killed by their liberators or protectors, is to deny accountability.

This pathetic little bit of sucking up is the strongest statement I could find, in mainstream debate, about American responsibility to the millions in Iraq who never attacked us and never had anything to do with terrorism. We are fighting our war on terror and we are not counting the number of innocent Iraqis we kill. And America is surprised that this doesn't earn us universal love.

There is a way to deal with the professor's objection, that "war comes in pockets". It's called nonparametric statistics, which don't assume that the world follows the bell curve. When these techniques are used on the original Lancet data, the estimate of deaths turns out to have been low! Using nonparametric statistics, the most likely estimate is that the war had killed 183,000 Iraqi civilians by September, 2004.. Since the violence has increased in the 16 months since that study, an honest conclusion would be that between 300,000 and 700,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war.

In the article just quoted, Alexander Cockburn reports that in December of 2004 the Iraqi Ministry of Health attempted to quantify civilian deaths by monitoring emergency room admissions. It was ordered to stop, by the occupying authorities.


Iraqi deaths are not counted because, practically speaking, Iraqi lives don't count. Iraqis don't vote here, they don't watch American commercials, and they don't have much purchasing power, so they don't actually count for anything to our politicians or our media. But perhaps we could get some ideas about how to run the war, if we imagine that those people do count for something. Suppose, just for a moment, that it matters how many innocent people we kill.

Our troops have killed Iraqi civilians since the beginning, since before "Mission Accomplished". They are still killing civilians today. Can America kill children in the name of fighting terror? Of course it can. That's why we pay as much for our military as the rest of the world put together, so we can do whatever we want. America can kill everybody in Iraq if it wants to. But can we kill families and keep our honor? No. Sorry Charlie. All the money and all the robots in the world don't buy honor. If America had honor in Iraq, it wouldn't be killing civilians to "fight terror".

In a democracy, if someone destroys your house, you go to court and get a settlement. If someone kills your kids, you go to the police and have him arrested. But no court in Iraq can try our army. We knock down whole cities and if they don't like it they can go complain at the entrance to Abu Ghraib. The Iraqis have no legal recourse against abuse by our troops.

If a whole wedding reception gets wiped out, then maybe our army will conduct an "investigation". Troops who are dumb enough to let their pictures get out over the internet will be court-martialed. Iraqis cannot file a complaint, our army decides whether to judge itself, and our politicians never face judgement.

When there is an investigation, sergeants and below have been punished if they didn't follow the rules of engagement. If the troops followed the rules of engagement, and the house just happened to be full of kids, that's the end of it. It does not matter if the troops received direct orders to violate the rules. When Lyndee England was tried, there was plenty of testimony that "military intelligence" had ordered the prisoners to be abused. Lyndee England was convicted, but there was no investigation of the ones that gave the orders.

Our troops kill them, our contractors steal from them. While we claim legal impunity, billions of dollars of Iraqi oil money has disappeared into a corrupt network of the Bush Gang's contractor firms.Our government demands the right to commit any crime in Iraq.

Since our country is now run by thugs and suckups, all this is called "freedom" and "democracy". It is not democracy, it is empire. We have given Iraq a government where they get to vote but the law doesn't protect their lives or property. Troops roam the streets. Death squads go out at night. They can shoot your family and the law does not care. As far as our government is concerned, Iraqis are niggers. "Nigger" does not mean black, it means somebody who can be killed with impunity. A nigger is somebody you can hang from a tree when you're drunk, and the sheriff will be there with you. That is exactly how our government defines Iraqis. This government we have given them, let's call it "nigger democracy", where you get to vote, but they can shoot you.

Our government claims legal impunity for killing innocent Iraqis and refuses to join the International Criminal Court. It claims not to keep a count of innocent Iraqis who are killed by our troops and contractors. It has denied that innocent civilians were killed when there were dozens of eyewitnesses and videotapes. This incredibly stupid policy is the big hole in our national thinking about Iraq. It is not discussed in our media, because everybody in power supports it. This grand policy, the policy of American Impunity, is stupid. Here are some reasons why:

It is the reason we have no allies. Other countries won't support us because we refuse to be bound by law. Other governments, even Britain, are subject to law. If their soldiers kill innocent Iraqis, they can be accused of war crimes and taken to international court. America does not recognize the International Criminal Court. American soldiers and even private security contractors are under no law but their own. Other countries cannot work under our rules and anyway, they think killing innocent civilians is a stupid way to impress people.

It is the real cause of the Iraqi resistance. In the mainstream media we hear a lot of stories about who is in the resistance - "baathist dead-enders" and so on. But the fact is, if you are an Iraqi, and you don't think soldiers should have the right to kill your family for whatever reason they choose, then you have a big disagreement with the American occupation. If soldiers can shoot you down, you are not a citizen of a democracy, you are a nigger - a slave. Our government claims to be above the law, so the Iraqi resistance has to include any Iraqis who don't like being slaves.

It violates the principles of democracy. If we demand the right to kill Iraqis with impunity, we should stop stroking ourselves for "bringing them democracy". It's giving democracy a bad name.

This policy encourages bad strategy. If our generals don't have to count Iraqi lives, my thinking is they might miss something in working out their strategy for "winning the hearts and minds". It is because of the policy of American Impunity, that the Bush Gang got out of control. They fought the war they way they did because they didn't see any consequences to killing innocent people. Now our government is moving to a strategy of aerial bombardment. This will increase civilian casualties. It's not going to end terror.

This policy of American Impunity is not just a convenient way to run the war in Iraq, it is the entire point of the "War on Terror". Millions of people have died in political violence, just in the last 10 years, but mostly they don't come up on American's screens. It was always other people who died. 9-11 was a message to the American people, that there's a war going on. At that point, America had to choose the meaning of the war. We could have chosen to protect the innocent. As a country, we could have stood for the principle that innocent people should not be killed for political objectives. America did not do that. Instead, America's army is fighting for the principle that we can kill them and there's nothing they can do about it. If we were fighting to protect the innocent, a few thousand would have died. Since we are fighting for American impunity, we are going to have to so brutalize the Moslem world, that they give up fighting for justice. We are going to have to kill tens of millions of them.

As a country, we could do a job in Iraq that would make us proud, that would make this a time of pride in our country's history, and that would genuinely end terror. To do this, we would have to mean democracy when we say democracy. We would have to to believe, for example, that "all men are created equal". The fact is, we don't. Our policy is that Iraqis are niggers. As long as we insist on this, things will get worse.

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The President's Strategy in Iraq isn't working. Confusion reigns.

Apparently nobody in America guessed that this wouldn't work. Nobody who's 'credible' enough to get on TV, at any rate.

But the war is going wrong, and American politicians and media analysts are stunned and confused. There are so many questions. Why can't the President say what his strategy is? Why can't the Democrats come up with an alternative? Why can't the media tell us what is going wrong and how to fix it? How can American heroes be losing to Arab cowards? Don't we have any choices beyond 'stay the course' vs. 'exit strategy'? What is the big thing that cannot be said?

Except for Knight-Ridder, for the first two and a half years of the war, American media didn't notice anything much was wrong. In about August of 2005, the media began reporting that the war in Iraq was in trouble. That month we saw the first pictures of the coffins sneaking home in the night. About that same time alert blogwatchers started to hear about soldiers muttering under their breath. Shortly after that, Katrina blew in, then John Murtha spoke up. Criticism and negative comments on the war suddenly became commonplace. Suddenly everybody agrees that the war was a mistake except for the Bush Gang and its most loyal minions.

So why is the war going so wrong?

On this, we don't get anything useful from the media or the politicians. The debate is stuck on whether to start talking about getting out. The President, of course, doesn't think anything is going wrong. The High Democrats - the Democrats who are credible enough to get on TV - give two explanations for what went wrong:
1) we didn't have enough troops, and
2) Paul Bremer shouldn't have dismantled the Iraqi army.

For example, here's Bill Clinton:

The mistake that they made is that when they kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure of Iraq... We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders," said Clinton.

As the borders were unsealed, "the terrorists came in".

Clinton said it would have been better if the US had left Iraq's "fundamental military and social and police structure intact".

Clinton certainly knows that the insurgency is not "the terrorists" who came in, it is mostly Iraqis who don't like the occupation, but at the beginning of the war, the Army chief of staff recommended having several hundred thousand more troops, so this argument represents respectable military opinion. Here is the argument as presented within the army:

Shinseki of the Army drew not only on his experience in the Balkans, trying to administer a fractious region postwar. [He also drew from] all the corpus of evidence that had been produced by the Army War College, by every other group that looked into this, to say that there was a crucial moment just after the fall of a regime when the potential for disorder was enormous. So there would be ripple effects for years to come, depending on what happened in those first days or weeks when the regime went [down] ….

The Army War College study had worked out a very detailed checklist for how the military, and the Army in particular, should start thinking about the postwar, well before it actually went to war. One of their conclusions was that it was best to go in heavier than you actually needed to be, so that at the beginning of the postwar period your presence would be so intimidating that nobody would dare challenge you. You'd set a tone that would allow you then to draw down the forces very rapidly. So it was better to go in heavy and then draw down, than the reverse.

Unfortunately, this argument doesn't help us much now, so the High Democrats are left with no alternative to a declaration of defeat. Since they don't want to take responsibility for that, they are demanding that Bush come up with an 'exit strategy', that is to say, they want Bush to take responsibility for how we're going to withdraw. Just six months ago, politicians like Joe Biden were calling for more troops. Now, like everybody else, Biden just wants to start talking about how to get out. Except for Kucinich, the democrats are not saying there is anything we might do differently in Iraq, they are just demanding a plan for how to get out. So America's choices seem to be

1. lose now (Democrat plan), or
   
2. take a lot more losses and lose later (Republican plan).
   

These options have failed to convince the American people, so we're in a stalemate. The president's position has collapsed, the democrats are demanding a "plan", and there it sits.

Our army cost about 300 times as much as Iraq's. Our politicians get a lot of money, status, and perks. TV anchormen get a lot of money, status, and perks. And pundits, and academic researchers, and all the rest, they all get money, status, and perks. And none of them can see any changes we might make, to fix this situation. Don't you feel, sometimes, that the culture of excellence is not what it used to be?

What the High Democrats are arguing is that the U. S. did not establish physical authority in Iraq. The problem is that while 400,000 troops might have been able to do this in the beginning, now it would take a lot more, and America isn't willing to pay the price.

What cannot be said is that we also have no moral authority. The public strategy of the Bush Gang has been to use America's moral authority to make up for a shortage of troops. The Iraqis were going to meet us with flowers, remember? Unfortunately, we have thrown away our moral authority. Our troops have killed innocent civilians from the very beginning of the war. Our contractors have looted the Iraqi treasury. The war itself was based on lies. This is why we are losing. The overwhelming self-righteousness of American political debate makes it impossible to discuss this, so we are all stuck. watching the situation go down the drain, preparing for the coming festival of blame.

The alternative is to rebuild our moral authority. In fact, if we don't rebuild our moral authority, we will lose not only Iraq but the whole of the "war on terror". Unfortunately the weapons we have been using - force, self-righteousness, advertising, and cool hardware - don't work that well in a holy war.

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