Suddenly the sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost.
Start with the amazed discovery of the White House, the Defense Department
and the U.S. press corps that nations don't care to be invaded, even if they
have been misgoverned by a tyrant for decades. How many Russians died
defending the Soviet Union from German invasion after enduring famine and
Stalin's terror? This isn't 1991, when Iraqis asked themselves, "Why die for
Kuwait?"
Basra? "Military officials," ran a Tuesday European press
report, "later admitted that they had vastly underestimated the strength of
Iraqi resistance and the loyalty of Basra's population to Saddam." The
report quoted a British officer as saying, "There are significant elements
in Basra who are hugely loyal to the regime."
Kurdish-held northern Iraq? "Even in Kurdistan," reported the
London Independent, also on Tuesday (in the person of my brother, Patrick
Cockburn), "where the U.S. is popular and where President Saddam committed
some of his worst atrocities, there are flickers of Iraqi patriotism. A
Kurdish official, who has devoted years to opposing the government in
Baghdad, admitted: "Iraqis won't like to see American soldiers ripping down
posters of Saddam Hussein, though they might like to do it themselves. They
didn't enjoy watching the Stars and Stripes being raised near Umm Qasr."
And so it will all get much, much nastier. Saddam Hussein, a
devoted admirer of Joseph Stalin, must have the Stalingrad parallel in mind.
A confident invading German army, extended lines of communication vulnerable
to weather and guerrilla attack, and then Stalin's order to the Red Army,
"Not another inch of retreat," followed by the savagery of house to house
urban fighting.
One doesn't have to parallel the German defeat with one for the
U.S. and Britain, or substitute sandstorms and approaching summer heat for
snow and the Russian winter, but merely remember what happened to the city
of Stalingrad, in which scarcely one brick was left on top of another. The
actual fighting component of the invading U.S./U.K. force is not
particularly large, because (as anonymous Pentagon officers are now bitterly
complaining) Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's preference for Special
Forces prevailed over General Tommy Franks' recommendation of a massive
army, also because huge peace demonstrations in Turkey lopped off the
northern half of the invading pincers.
The temptation to flatten significant portions of Baghdad by
B-52 raids will grow sharply if the land force gets seriously stymied.
But perhaps the most grotesque chicken now roosting in the coop
came in the form of Rumsfeld's sudden discovery of the Geneva Conventions
regarding prisoners of war. When five captured U.S. soldiers were paraded in
front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Rumsfeld immediately
complained that "it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of
prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them."
True. But alas, the United States does not hold the high moral
ground in leveling this charge. In the Bush years, it's trodden the Geneva
Conventions into the dirt, as Michael Ratner of the Center for
Constitutional Rights points out.
In January 2001, the United States released the famous picture
of Guantanamo detainees kneeling, shackled and hooded. There was an
international uproar, and the Red Cross said the United States may have
violated the Conventions by releasing the photo.
No "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from
them information of any kind whatsoever." Under conditions of sleep
deprivation and bright light, and other techniques used by Israel against
Palestinians, several of the prisoners in Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo have
tried to kill themselves.
The U.S. government claims that these men are not subject to the
Geneva Conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war," but "unlawful
combatants." But as George Monbiot of the London Guardian remarks, "The same
claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the
U.S. soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is
itself a breach of Article 4 of the third convention, under which people
detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer
corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded as prisoners of war.
On March 6, American military officials acknowledged that two
prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had died during interrogation
at Bagram air base north of Kabul. A spokesman for the air base confirmed
that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide." The men's
death certificates showed that one captive died from "blunt force injuries
to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease," while another
captive, Mullah Habibullah, 30, suffered from a blood clot in the lung that
was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury."
On Nov. 21, 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun
civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern Alliance commander, General
Abdul Rashid Dostum. Jamie Doran's film, "Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death,"
records some hundreds, possibly thousands, of the prisoners being loaded
into trucks, the doors sealed and the trucks left to stand in the sun for
several days. Dostum's men finally machine-gunned the containers. When they
arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead. The U.S. Special
Forces running the prison watched the bodies being unloaded. According to
Doran, they instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before satellite
pictures can be taken."
Doran interviewed a Northern Alliance soldier guarding the
prison. "I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck.
The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them."
Another soldier alleged: "They took the prisoners outside and beat them up,
and then returned them to the prison. But sometimes they were never
returned, and they disappeared." After an investigation, the German
newspaper Die Zeit concluded that: "No one doubted that the Americans had
taken part."
The third Geneva Convention prohibits "violence to life and
person, in particular, murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and
torture," as well as extra-judicial execution." It is impossible to know
whether U.S. violations of the Conventions led to Iraqi non-compliance,"
Ratner says, "but U.S. compliance would have certainly made its current
complaints more credible and less hypocritical. Selective compliance with
the law by the U.S. leads to selective compliance by others."
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
