'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Well this would seem to me to be a high-stakes way to conduct negotiations. Using your example, Mandela was already in custody. De Klerk’s forces did not have knock down the doors of a house….and drag everyone out at gun point. Or at least that is what the reports claim. So, whatever else this was, it was, and is, a public relations nightmare. My take on this is it was just gross incompetence juxtaposed with ethnic and religious insensitivity. To say the least.

“It is also entirely possible that this was the best way they could think of to bring him in for some important negotiations... And not a completely stupid way, either”

The irony Helena we all knew that you and others uses the human right , freedom of speech, and other words that highlight the value of the human, to expressing your views, in reality you and others behaved and feel inside when it comes about Iraqis (lets call these words west values) not applied!
This guy when he was with Bremer line US chose him, but after what happened of the destructions and humiliations of 20 millions of Iraqi some realised that there were in wrong line, so may be the start talking loud and freely the reality on the ground, so I agree with what you said “And not a completely stupid way” to bring him in again or to shut his mouth even if it reach to point US will kill him as others experiences around the world from colonial time till now from Britt in the ME, France, Italy, and most and foremost US, I bring your attention US in Philippines when they systematically killed most of the oppositions to US polices and occupation of their country.

This obvious that you and other never be changed a bit about the human in general all you guys take these stories to your benefits each one in such way.
I just like to motioned Mandela I see it its UK makeup hero for south African as they used him when he is in person to trained him and then used him as a key stone of get rid of minority white group lead the country after ugly rolling no doubt about this and after they find the benefits for holding the power less from leaving it to the blacks majority.

I like to add this I had friend he is flee from South Africa (he is white) because the detritions of the security and live there that’s why we see a lot of white leaving south Africa now because no more a save place for them and they treated specially by hostel countries the go to.
When I asked about South Africa he told me that 90% of the Member of Parliament are corrupted (exactly Iraqi Parliament member and the government).
You keep bring our attention and used South Africa as your example of freedom and good example of west occupation well done job, sorry Helena this is WRONG.

Helena,

I seriously doubt they did this "just to talk to him". They used stun guns and granades, had him handcuffed and then had a soldier keep his foot on his head for 20 minutes before hauling him off. They humilated him in front of his whole family, and scared the crap out of them.

They trashed the house (and it was shown on Arab TV) and some items have gone missing, like they often do in these types of raids.

And they did all this at 4 AM. If they just wanted to talk to him (in a more or less friendly way) they would not have done it like this.

They either made a mistake or wanted to shut him up, or threaten him somehow. This was not a "negotiation" - it was too disrespectful and brutal.

I think it was a mistake. I don't think the troops there have a clue what they are doing, and the "information" they get from Iraqis is suspect. I fear that "information" is another twist on the "let's you and him fight" routine, only this time the game is deadly.

I see Bush playing the "lets you and him fight" game all over the place.

I must say I agree with Susan above. This certainly didn't sound like a "mock" or "staged" raid, and Hamid's indignation on his release seemed pretty genuine, either that or he's a very good actor.
The real question, I suggest, and one we'll never know the answer to, is at what level of command the raid decision was made - i.e. did it come from the top, from a General, say, or was it just a "cowboy" response to "intelligence" from some ignorant Colonel or Captain?
I suspect probably the latter, which would reinforce Susan's contention that the troops don't have a clue what they are doing.
And the real problem, of course, is the hundreds of other "suspect" Iraqis who will have been treated similarly in the last few days, but don't have the benefit of a privileged "get out of jail free" card.
If the US Army does get kicked out of Iraq, it will have mainly itself to blame.

"My take on this is it was just gross incompetence juxtaposed with ethnic and religious insensitivity. To say the least."

Doesn't that pretty much describe the whole Iraq adventure so far?

According to my "special correspondent" in Kurdistan, the Kurds are mightily pissed off about what the Americans did to Sheikh Hamid. (A lot of Kurds are in general mightily fed up with the Americans, period). The incident was the talk of Kurdistan yesterday. They see Sheikh Hamid as someone who does not think as "a Sunni Arab", but as an Iraqi, and they see the brutal raid on his home, the brutal and disrespectful way he was treated, and his deliberate humiliation as a slap in the face of all Iraqis.

And the real problem, of course, is the hundreds of other "suspect" Iraqis who will have been treated similarly in the last few days, but don't have the benefit of a privileged "get out of jail free" card.

Not to mention the other tens of thousands it has happened to already....

Helena,

If this was the Americans' way to bring Hamid in for negotiations, I cannot agree that it was not completely stupid. The way they conducted the raid - the hour, the brutality, the humiliation of a respected cleric, the hooding (which I was under the impression that they had stopped doing after all the negative attention connected to Abu Ghraib), trashing the house - was/is guaranteed to get a lot of Iraqis very, very angry. If what they did was bad enough to get the Kurds angry, you can bet it WAS completely stupid.

Shirin,

"My take on this is it was just gross incompetence juxtaposed with ethnic and religious insensitivity. To say the least."

>>>Doesn't that pretty much describe the whole Iraq adventure so far?

For most of the past three years I have been living and working in Afghanisan, but for several weeks during the leadup and execution of the invasion of Iraq, I was home in Seattle. At one regular drinkfest with my friends, overeducated lefties all, there was an unusual helping of military analysis of how the war had been going so far: charges of incompetence and stupidity flew around the table from my friends, who had never spent a day in uniform or even visited a military base, much less taken an interest in the specifics of military matters.

My response, as someone who spent a decade in the military and some considerable time afterward studying such things, was something like the following: several of the generals have PhDs, Petraeus from Princeton, in Intl Relations; Abizaid was a former Olmstead Fellow who has spent a fair amount of time in the middle east, etc. so their academic credentials certainly rival yours. Add to that two decades of rather intensive experience in military matters and years of some of the best service schooling in the world. What is it, I asked, that you think you know that they don't?

My point in raising this is not to defend the US military, and certainly not to defend the Bush administration and this moronic, self-destructive venture in Iraq. It's simply this: in fora like this, we can share a perspective where we clearly have an advantage, i.e. an informed perspective about the political fallout of certain policies, their significant moral trade-offs, and the cost of these not only to the Iraqi victims but to the United States as well. The details are very clear to us, from our vantage point, and we can share them here without being shouted down by shrill ideological voices who have over-invested in the policy at the expense of common sense, enlightened self interest, and perhaps even moral sanity.

When we spend our time lobbing charges of incompetence, stupidity, and the inherent evil of American soldiers, we are missing the point and wasting a lot of energy and ink. We also miss a key point of this tragedy, which not only concerns Iraqis (who get more of my sympathies than anyone else) but also Americans, especially soldiers, including 'ignorant, cowboy' colonels and captains, who have been put in a no-win situation and will probably make even more egregious and, from our perspective, unconscionable errors before this is over.

from a news article on Yahoo news:

In Washington, Pentagon officials said U.S. troops had never planned a specific operation to capture Hamid, who once served as head of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which has since been dissolved. Instead, troops arrived at the house of the politician, officials said, after getting intelligence from two previous raids that insurgents might be hiding there.

No senior commander in Iraq or Washington had ordered Hamid captured, Pentagon officials said.

"As soon as [top U.S. generals in Baghdad] figured out who this guy was, they released him," said one senior Defense Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the political sensitivity of the situation.

A second official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Defense officials could not ascertain whether the Americans were deliberately given bad information. The official said the earlier raids had taken place soon before the operation at Hamid's residence. "My sense was that they did not recognize who they had on their hands," the second official said."

And, if this is accurate, that means this was yet one more example of the "insurgents" giving bad intell to the US forces to extract revenge - this time against a politician who "assisted" the "occupiers". In short, the resistance is using the US forces to help destabilize the situation.

from wind:
"but also Americans, especially soldiers, including 'ignorant, cowboy' colonels and captains, who have been put in a no-win situation"

They do have a choice to get on that plane, ship, whatever..... or not.

They still have that choice. They are cooperating with the no-win situation. Americans have a choice too: lobby and protest and irritate your "elected" officials, or go about your daily life, pay your war taxes, and do nothing.

from wind:
"and will probably make even more egregious and, from our perspective, unconscionable errors before this is over."

Some of what our US troops have done is unconsciounable, but I wouldn't say "error". I never expected gay S & M pornography from US troops, that's for sure. And the US public did not see the worst of it. Our US Senators did, and one of them (I forget who) said "his stomach gave out".

Imagine what it might take for a US Senator, probably a middle aged or elderly white man, to say something like that.

Susan, I really appreciated your post because you are opening up something that is sure to be talked about a lot more in the years ahead and which has not really been discussed much now, and you did it without resorting to (either side of) the usual platitudes about ‘supporting our troops’. Let me respond and try to do justice: I’ll defer responding to two of your other important points; the moral calculus of a decision to or not to ‘ship out’; and your point (that I agree wholeheartedly with), that American citizens have a choice too, and have options, because they deserve (at the very least) separate posts. Forgive me in advance for what will surely be long, in any case.

First, a technical point which might be a good lead-in. When I said “error” I was trying to cover the whole gamut of things which will be (at one end) logical but wrong, (at the other) disgraceful and horrifying, or (somewhere in the middle) unconscionable, whether knowingly or post-hoc. I did not mean to understate the far end of that scale, I was trying to cover the whole range with some economy.

For my part, I was not surprised to see the worst extreme; not by Abu Ghraib, pornography (gay, S&M or otherwise) or some of the other horrors I have read about. We need to get out of the habit of viewing all “our troops” as cherubim, even though their age leaves that impression. I’m not saying they are bad, or evil, or inherently dishonorable, or that we are hearing about is entirely a result of individual weaknesses. They are human beings; they come into the army at a young age and with little experience, and often from backgrounds that offer them few tools for making complex decisions. In the army, they are molded into something new.

Those troops are the product, for better and for worse, of what we make them to be by training them to do their jobs. They go into a conflict under those antecedent conditions, which make them well prepared in some ways and particularly vulnerable in others. That is what we have to work with and what we should acknowledge, we citizens, when we are contemplating war. Decisions, allowances and remedial preparations need to be planned and accounted for with that in mind. The failure to do so is, in fact, incompetence; it is a charge shared by citizenry, elected officials, administration and senior leaders.

I started saying in 2002 that this was part of what we needed to be prepared for, what we had better take into account in our cost-benefit analysis of any war we might be contemplating. Viet nam is not so distant that we should have forgotten these lessons. I’m sad to say that I didn’t think, that spring, that we would really go to war in Iraq. I anticipated, wrongly, that there would actually be an airing of precisely these kinds of concerns by those who were in a position to know what was coming.

I’m pained, but again not surprised, by some of the other warzone stories that are starting to be told by separated veterans about soldier’s behavior. Combat sits on an extreme end of human experience; movies and mythology do a great deal to sanitize it in our public minds, but they don’t do it justice. Given enough exposure to such extremes … and it does not take much … you are going to start seeing some of the worst that humanity has to offer, in ways you did not expect. It’s easier to imagine such things in combat units, but in prisons you are already starting with a situation that brings abusive behavior to the surface in the absence of (or the presence of weakness in) a stringent set of procedures that keep the baser instincts out of it. Remember the Milgram study …?

In most every war that goes on for any extended period of time, such atrocities occur. That’s not an excuse, by any means; it somewhat redirects, but actually intensifies, the indictment. It is not as if no one knew this was coming. Military officers, and military professionals generally, have no excuse for not knowing it. They are schooled in dealing with it, though clearly that training is not adequate. It is something they have to deal with, in the very narrow sense of professional concerns, as a matter of maintaining order and discipline.

Given that moral decay is inevitably in the cards, no matter how professional or prepared the military force, officers and even more importantly, NCOs, have to deal with such things proactively. It is not as easy as it sounds, because the moral foundations are shifting underneath the chain of command as well. That’s the nature of life in the line, and it’s their job; the chain of command has a lot more to work with if the war is legal, is just (according to the criteria that such actions are deemed so) and defensible, and has gone through the necessary steps to maintain support for the duration. They will still struggle with it, but the foundation has been laid for them to use other elements of military discipline to hold the line. If none of that has been achieved (and it was not), then the ‘lower’ end of the chain of command goes in effectively unarmed. And without a miracle, they will fail. The troops are ultimately accountable for their own actions, but the decisions made beforehand, up and down the chain of command, condition the range of their choices, and those who were responsible for those decisions need to be accountable as well.

This has been made abundantly clear with respect to the abuse of detainees, certainly. The enlisted soldiers have been court-martialed, justifiably since they were the ones most directly responsible. But should it stop there? There was an unusual level of complicity all the way up the chain of command, but we don’t see that in who is serving time now.

In order for democracies to wage war, certain conditions have to be satisfied. We knew what those were, and we knew what the consequences would be if we did not satisfy them, but we failed to do them nonetheless. The sad results might be predictable, but they are no less tragic.

To ship out or not to ship out ...

Susan, I appreciate your moral clarity on this (and I mean that in the most sincere sense, the one that obtained before Bush cynically co-opted those two words). It's clear, and as such it makes a good foundation for advice to give young people who might be thinking of enlisting, for example. I've found myself in that position several times, in recent years; I think I will adopt your approach when speaking to them in the future, rather than indulge in the more intricate (and probably not persuasuve) path I've taken before now.

But I don't think you meant it that way; your post sounded more like a moral indictment of those already trained, in the unit, and under deployment orders. I think the decision, and therefore the weight of such judgment, is more complicated than you suggest.

In one sense, I think you are working against the dynamics of choice, which in miliary units have powerful things going for them. One is group dynamics; just as those who stay in a terrifying combat situation are motivated primarily by loyalty to their group, those facing a choice about whether or not to ship out are less likely to abandon the group out of concern for a somewhat more distant, or perhaps more political, consideration about whether they're participating in something illegal. There is a matter of principle which is going to resonate strongly with this group, and encourage them to get on that transport to support their comrades.

The second strong aspect of their decision is one of responsibility for others. It means: if I know this is a shitty situation, do I send my troops off alone to face it? Or might I be able to keep them out of trouble? That's something a NCO would think about. Sparing your own skin (which the matter of principle could not get around) would take a back seat to being there to look after those for whom you feel responsible.

Likewise, troops who are only responsible to each other are going to engage in a certain amount of 'cognitive dissonance'. They will think, look, I am not going to do anything illegal or immoral, I insist. If it comes to that, I will refuse. In fact, they receive training on how to disboey unlawful orders once every quarter, so they might feel confident about that. Things get a lot more slippery on the ground, of course, but they have no basis for knowing that yet.

The third important aspect is uncertainty. They don't really know what to believe. The press has been soft-balling the story for a long time now, and even the critical articles are greeted with suspicion (not without reason). The human thing is to gravitate toward believing what is most amenable to your situation; it might be wrong (as it is now) but you will adopt it anyway. Are you more morally culpable, having made the decision that a 'reasonable' person would have made?

Having said all that: there is the training I mentioned before, which says essentially that you are ultimately accountable, as an individual soldier, for unlawful acts you might commit, even if you are ordered to do so. 'I was just followign orders' is not an excuse. I don't know of any army that does more of it than the US, but as we can see it is not enough. The training relies on a rather black and white situation (say, My lai), that is not common. Even more, the 'frame' you as a soldier would engage to make that decision, knowing that you are heading into morally ambiguous territory, has been neutralized by your leaders, by the uncertainty I mentioned above, and other things.

What are your options, as a soldier? If you are a career officer, you are more than likely to think it is better for you to ship out, and do your best to keep things going in the right direction; you might find that impossible when you arrive, but you don't know that yet. If you are a trooper, you might ask for conscientious objector status: but this requires that you don't believe in killing during war for any reason, not just that you don't believe in this war, politically. Alternatively, you can spend your hard time in Leavenworth. It's a long way away from what most people think about when they join the army; they are just as likely to think they'll be able to work it out day by day, in the field. They could be wrong, but I don't know if that wishful thinking is something that yields as black and white a result as what you suggest, about whether they are cooperating with the no-win situation or not.

Finally (I promise): Armies have a way of enforcing this kind of discipline that is not even close to anything in the civilian world, so it is hard to fully appreciate. However, you can see parallels that don't rely on all the discipline.

In Afghanistan, I worked for an NGO that started out with a great project. It was good enough to entice skilled internationals who believed in the value of the project. At some point down the line, it became clear that the NGO was stealing the money for the project, and intended to shut it down once they had stolen all they could. Imagine this: the NGO is basically invalidating all the reasons you, the consultant, came to this country to start with, facing whatever dangers were involved with your coming there. Once it becomes clear to you, what do you do? Resign in protest? That's an option: in fact, it was the one I chose.

Others did not see it that way. They decided to stay on, and do the best they could to see it through, to see that those they were responsible for got the most out of what was an increasingly lousy situation. Not an easy decision; one I respected just the same. Probably easier, too, than the one faced by the soldiers in question, since they all had fall-back work and none were looking at incarceration as a result.

Okay, I'll shut up now. Sorry again for the length of the post.