Frayed Nerves and Death

If this article doesn't illustrate clearly the clusterfuck in Iraq, then I'm not sure what does:

Next to the scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, no other aspect of the American military presence in Iraq has caused such widespread dismay and anger among Iraqis [than checkpoints], judging by their frequent outbursts on the subject. Daily reports compiled by Western security companies chronicle many incidents in which Iraqis with no apparent connection to the insurgency are killed or wounded by American troops who have opened fire on suspicion that the Iraqis were engaged in a terrorist attack.

Accounts of the incidents vary widely, as they have in the incident involving Ms. Sgrena, with the American command emphasizing aspects of drivers' behavior that aroused legitimate concerns, and survivors saying, often, that they were doing nothing threatening. Since few of the incidents are ever formally investigated, many families are left with unresolved feelings of bitterness.

American and Iraqi officials say they have no figures on such casualties, just as they say they have no reliable statistics on the far higher number of civilian deaths in the fighting that began with the American-led invasion nearly two years ago. But any Westerner working in Iraq comes across numerous accounts of apparently innocent deaths and injuries among drivers and passengers who drew American fire, often in circumstances that have left the Iraqis puzzled as to what, if anything, they did wrong...

The American soldiers know that circumstances erupt in which a second's hesitation can mean death, and say civilian deaths are a regrettable but inevitable consequence of a war in which suicide bombers have been the insurgents' most deadly weapon. But Iraqis say they have no clear idea of American engagement rules, and accuse the American command of failing to disseminate the rules to the public, in newspapers or on radio and television stations.

The military says it takes many precautions to ensure the safety of civilians. But a military spokesman in Baghdad declined in a telephone interview on Sunday to describe the engagement rules in detail, saying the military needed to maintain secrecy over how it responds to the threat of car bombs...

The spokesman, as well as a senior Pentagon official who discussed the issue in Washington on Sunday, said official statements issued after the Friday shooting offered a broad outline of the rules. In those statements, the military said it tried to slow Ms. Sgrena's vehicle with hand signals, flashing lights and warning shots before firing into the car's engine block.

But many Iraqis tell of being fired on with little or no warning...

One of the starkest incidents in recent weeks occurred on the evening of Jan. 18 in the town of Tal Afar, a trouble spot west of the city of Mosul, where a platoon from the 25th Infantry Division was on a foot patrol. Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images, an American photo agency, said that soldiers of the Apache company were walking in near darkness toward an intersection along a deserted commercial street when they saw the headlights of a sedan turning into the street about 100 yards ahead.

An officer ordered the troops over their headsets to halt the vehicle, and all raised weapons. One soldier fired a three-shot burst into the air, but the car kept coming, Mr. Hondros said, and then half a dozen troops fired at least 50 rounds, until the car was peppered with bullets and rolled gently to a stop against a curb.

"I could hear sobbing and crying coming from the car, children's voices," Mr. Hondros said.

Next he said, one of the rear doors opened, and six children, four girls and two boys, one only 8 years old, tumbled into the street. They were splattered with blood.

No doubt the propensity to let bullets do the talking is at least in part related to the overall lack of planning--too few people who even grasp the local language, a lack of protective equipment (see below) the tenacity of the insurgents, and so on. The lesson of Bush's foolish war is that imperial hubris is not by itself an overwhelming force for anything except unbelievable stupidity. Thanks to that, we face a real interesting near-term future: all that money spent with NOTHING good coming out of it, either a hostile theocratic government in Iraq or an even MORE hostile revolutionary government, depending on how the insurgency develops, a whole slew of Middle Easterners who hate our guts thanks to the death and destruction we've brought about, western allies who can't trust us--and a whole generation of professional soldiers who, when they DO return to the United States, could well be walking powder kegs. By the way--in their infinite wisdom, the GOP hacks who brought you this war now want to tax the soldiers who wish to use their veteran benefits to seek medical care--to the tune of $230 a year or thereabouts. Nothing like supporting the troops.