US military policy

Global Policy Forum has a wide-ranging report criticising US-led military actions in Iraq for attacking cities, killing civilians, destroying cultural heritage, and so on. Bernhard at Moon of Alabama calls particular attention to Section 6 of the report, on attacking cities, with its description of walling off cities, forced evacuation, cutting off water, heavy bombardment, blockage of media coverage, attacks on medical facilities, civilian casualties, and on and on. Bernhard recalls the term "urbicide" was coined for this type of operation in Bosnia, and in the West Bank. The GPF report deals with this and other issues mainly under the rubric of violations of international law. And in a similar vein, Robert Farley at Lawyers Guns and Money says the US now appears to have gone back to "pointless and destructive" sweep operations, writing:

Part of the point of the Surge was to allow the possibility for traditional counter-insurgency operations, in which insurgents were forced to launch their own offensives against American forces, and consequently be destroyed. This was, given the trivial size of the Surge compared to what Petraeus own counter-insurgency manual demanded, a forlorn hope. That the US has apparently returned to pointless and destructive sweep operations may be a recognition of that within the command structure. These operations are emotionally satisfying, but by and large have never worked, and almost inevitably cause more damage than they prevent.

It is sometimes pointed out that the increasing reliance on this kind of massive use of force is contrary to the principles laid down in the famous counterinsurgency manual 3-24 attributed to General Petraeus himself. The idea being that operations have deviated from policy.

However, there is another way of looking at this, namely that policy itself has entered a new phase.

When counterinsurgency expert Andrew Krepinevich briefed congressional staffers back in February, he ran through strategic approaches including what is called "counterinsurgency best practices" (the manual, in other words). He also said there were other approaches, and we can glean only this much from the bullet-point outline which has come down to us:

The Roman Model: Massive retaliation
Strategy: Rome creates a desert and calls it peace
Success Rate: Very high
Examples: Britain revolt c 60 AD; Israelite revolt c 70 AD
US adaptibility: Low. Owing to US political culture, it is unlikely the Roman model would apply, except in the most dire of circumstances.

The first point is that if the only bulwark against recourse to this kind of a scorched-earth strategy is "US political culture", without reference to international law, then it isn't really that remote. And secondly, we have to consider the possibility that what Krepinevich called "only the most dire of circumstances" is in fact, from the Bush-administration point of view, already upon us. (There is a discussion of the Krepinevich briefing and a gloss by another political scientist at the earlier post here called Flim-flam and its two prior posts).

In other words: The growing use of massive force in civilian environments may not be attributable just to excesses in particular cases, but rather to policy. People seem to be losing sight of the distinction. But recall that torture was also attributed to particular individual cases, and we still haven't gotten to the bottom of that policy scandal either.