Seeing What We Want to See in What We Can Barely Stand to Look At
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KTK
Though I doubt we share the same politics, and surely not the same enthusiasm for Bush’s murderous fiasco of an occupation of Iraq, I have been admiring Michael Yon’s reporting on urban fighting there. Yon is a self-funded blogger who traveled to Iraq on his own and managed to talk himself into an “embedment” as a journalist with several Army units involved in “the surge”. He’s been filing blog reports for most of the past two years, with a highly personalized, unit-level and sometimes soldier-level perspective and with an evocative and expressive prose style. He’s clearly drunk the military’s Koo-Aid, regarding both their tactics and their overall goals, but manages to maintain at least a degree of critical perspective; I think he reads like a modern-day Ernie Pyle (which I suspect he would think is an unmixed compliment, while I am not so sure). At any rate, it’s gripping and intrepid reporting.
His most recent dispatch, on atrocities against civilian villagers near Baqubah, is heartbreaking:
On 29 June, American and Iraqi soldiers were again fighting side-by-side as soldiers from Charley Company 1-12 CAV—led by Captain Clayton Combs—and Iraqi soldiers from the 5th IA, closed in on a village on the outskirts of Baqubah. The village had the apparent misfortune of being located near a main road—about 3.5 miles from FOB Warhorse—that al Qaeda liked to bomb. Al Qaeda had taken over the village. As Iraqi and American soldiers moved in, they came under light contact; but the bombs planted in the roads (and maybe in the houses) were the real threat.
The firefight progressed. American missiles were fired. The enemy might have been trying to bait Iraqi and American soldiers into ambush, but it did not work. The village was riddled with bombs, some of them large enough to destroy a tank. One by one, experts destroyed the bombs, leaving small and large craters in the unpaved roads.
The village was abandoned. All the people were gone. But where? . . .
[Most of the rest of the text is captions of photos illustrating the article:]
“The houses all were empty. We passed by two donkeys each shot in the neck. Al Qaeda had killed their livestock.”
“Al Qaeda often plants bombs inside the dead bodies of the animals and people they’ve killed. They have rigged children’s bodies with explosives.”
“We walked into the palm groves nearby. There was a terrible stench. The heat and the vegetation reminded me of the Killing Fields in Cambodia where I had visited shortly before the most recent trip to Iraq.”
“Soldiers from 5th IA said they’d found some of the villagers: They were dead.”
“There were bodies of men, women and children. Al Qaeda slaughters families everywhere: as these graves were being unearthed, more bombs were found in London.”
“By the time I arrived, 5th IA had uncovered parts of six bodies. But from what I could see, they did not all appear to have been murdered at once. In one grave, there were exposed ribs and other bones, although there was still flesh on the bones.”
“Soldiers from 5th IA said al Qaeda had cut the heads off the children.”
The pictures are terrible.
And, predictably, they have been seized upon by the usual right-wing cheerleaders as “proof” not only that there are terrible people in Iraq who have been stirred into doing terrible things to each other, but that Bush’s war is somehow made necessary, or even reasonable, in light of such events.
Ed Morrisey, at Captain’s Quarters, sets the tone by uncritically accepting Yon’s interpretation of events, and then simply misunderstanding his text:
AQI forces massacred the men, women, and children of the village, burying most of them before the battle and their subsequent withdrawal. Michael’s pictures show very disturbing images of the victims of AQI. Michael told the Iraqi and American commanders on this mission that it was important that Americans see this, and he’s right.
And the title of the post? It comes from a favorite tactic of AQI in Iraq. They “bless” the corpses of children and dead animals with explosives — in order to kill anyone who attempts to clear them.
(Yon mentioned booby-trapping corpses, but said nothing about “blessing” them. I imagine the post title was simply a call-out to the saccharine pop song of the same name.)
JammieWearingFool’s emotions run away with him, perhaps understandably, but unquestioningly as well:
In words and photos Michael once again brings us the reality of the enemy we are fighting. It is not pretty and they are brutal. I have to wonder why Michael’s dispatch is not the lead item on every newscast. It is horrific and have we in genteel society simply become unwilling to face the evil in our midst? Are we so adverse to confrontation that simply ignoring or wishing away the Islamic fascists we can magically make this terror go away? Do we think that because it is happening half a world away that it can’t come here?
We go through our day to day lives and never give a second thought to what could be. If we joined in one voice and screamed from the rooftops as loudly as we do about Abu Gharib and Gitmo about the atrocities being committed in the name of a most unholy god could we knock it down and diminish it?
But it’s to The Corner, predictably, that we must turn for totally unrestrained gibbering on life-and-death issues of global import. Michael Ledeen lets it all hang out:
Yon’s latest provides a clear picture of the terrorists’ savage methods. Literally, because it’s mostly photographs of what happened to a village that fell into the claws of al Qaeda. They just tore apart the villagers, their livestock, their children and women, and then boobytrapped the area to try to kill our guys, knowing that they would honor the dead.
And then I think about the terrorists’ latest efforts in England and Scotland, where only innocents were targeted. And of course 9/11. And then I think of so many of our leaders, who seem to be preparing to retreat from Iraq (and therefore Afghanistan), thereby leaving the beasts, as Michael Yon properly calls them, an even broader area of operation.
And then I return to my mantra: the war is much bigger than iraq, we cannot win it in iraq alone, and there is no escape from this war. They are already here, and “bringing the boys home” will gain us nothing. It will only increase the number of victims.
I stopped saying “faster, please” some time ago, because it is obvious that W and his people are not going to take the proper actions against the terror masters. But we must be clear about the nature of the war and the bestial nature of our enemies.
Here again, Conservative Reading Comprehension Dysfunction makes itself felt: Yon’s reference to “beasts” was literal (the livestock that had been killed), not a description of the attackers. And I suppose it’s too obvious and too inevitable to even bother taking exception to his categorizing “their women” along with children and livestock as possessions of “the villagers” (none of whom, apparently, are women). As to who, exactly, is “already here”, what that has to do with these killings in Iraq, and how he knows or imagines there is any link between this incident and the London bombings, is as much a mystery to us as it probably is to him.
But the real problems with all these reactions, and with Yon’s post itself, is their uncritical and apparently unaware interpretation of the real horrors Yon documents.
Every one of these commentators attributes these atrocities to “al Qaeda”; only one even references “AQI”, or “al Qaeda in Iraq”, and then without bothering to distinguish them from al Qaeda proper. But AQI is not al Qaeda; it is simply another name for the pre-existing terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (under new management since his death, and recently having changed its name again, as the supposed government of the “Islamic State of Iraq”). Zarqawi issued a statement of allegiance to Bin Laden when he assumed the name “AQI”, but there are no known connections between them; AQI is almost entirely composed of native Iraqis. It is a Sunni insurgent group that formally declared war on all Shiite Iraqis and Sunni collaborators. In other words . . . it’s the insurgency of deposed Sunnis that we created when we invaded Iraq and overthrew the Sunni government. And, as Wikipedia explains, Baquba is on the edge of the Sunni enclave, and has been subject to Sunni expansionist assaults for years.
It appears that Yon is simply adopting the US military tactic of declaring anyone in Iraq who does not support them to be “al Qaeda”, thereby enabling themselves to claim they are “fighting al Qaeda” while occupying the wrong country. Even Yon only has the second-hand word of the (notoriously unreliable) Iraqi forces as to who was responsible for the deaths they discovered, and those soldiers had no information on the incident at all - they just saw the dead bodies. But the US is happy with the Iraqis - who know which side of their bread is buttered, and who’s handing out the butter - when the Iraqis tell them they are fighting “al Qaeda”, the US is happy with itself when it can claim to be fighting al Qaeda, and Yon is all too happy to work it into his own pre-conceived narrative.
In fact, it seems obvious that these deaths are far more likely part of the ongoing Iraqi sectarian civil war, the work of the home-grown Sunni insurgency that didn’t exist until we kick-started it by invading the country, creating a power vacuum, and trying to take sides in the resulting scramble for domination. As horrible as these killings are, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever, and certainly Yon presents none except the unsupported word of some Iraqi soldiers traveling with the Americans when the bodies were found, that they were the work of al Qaeda - and in a country in the midst of a raging religious civil war, in territory that is the documented fighting ground of a large and vicious sectarian guerrilla group that has nothing to do with al Qaeda but is known for atrocities against both Sunni and Shiite civilians, “al Qaeda” would seem to be the least likely explanation.
Not only do none of the conservative commentators even raise this question, the one who does name AQI as the likely perpetrators then does not repudiate the claim about al Qaeda! And all agree - in some cases in quite distraught terms - that this internal sectarian struggle of our own making is the reason we need to keep fighting “al Qaeda” in Iraq, because otherwise “al Qaeda” will attack us in America. None seems to imagine that these deaths wouldn’t have occurred if we hadn’t started the civil war in which they took place, or that continually instigating violent unrest in someone else’s country, to protect our own, is essentially to choose more and more of such atrocities as a means of perpetuating Bush’s self-declared victory against imaginary enemies both there and here.
Yon is doing vital work in bringing such horrors to light. But he would be doing a much greater service - and perhaps allay some of Michael Ledeen’s confusion about who is “over there” and who is “already here”, as well as the (undoubtedly non-existent) link between sectarian violence in Iraq and global terrorism in London - if he would tell the story straigher, plainer, and truer:
“Religious extremists seeking to secure power after we destroyed Iraq’s government have been waging an ongoing sectarian civil war, including terrorist tactics against religious non-conformists, in Iraq since shortly after the occupation began. Baquba has long been a center of such sectarian violence, attributed to local Sunni insurgents who have openly declared their intentions in this regard. This incident is of a piece with similar atrocities attributed to the insurgency, and there is no evidence to suggest it is in any way linked with al Qaeda proper. Continuing US efforts to quell the insurgency by violence have served as a recruiting tool for the sectarian groups and inflamed further violence against both US forces and local collaborators, resulting in reprisal killings similar to those seen in this latest incident.”
