Lidice

When you hold the military above the law, you end up with a military that considers itself above the law

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

04/17/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/lidice.htm

All we really know for sure is that on two consecutive days US troops fired into a crowd of Iraqis that were milling around outside the main government building in Mosul. Beyond that, as the famous expression has it, "accounts differ."

The two sides can’t even agree on how many died, let alone how many were injured. On the first day, the US claimed seven died, Iraqis 16. Most newspapers decided to split the difference and say 10 died. Nobody who was there says 10 died, which says something about lazy reporters. Most reports say about 16 were injured, but it’s not clear if that is limited to gunshot injuries. Some reports mention "hundreds" of injuries.

Most papers agree on this much. There was a crowd. There were US troops. The troops fired, and at least seven died and dozens more were injured.

The extreme ideological press, of course, went right over the top. "Brutal repression by U.S. occupation forces in Mosul!" screamed the official Cuban News webpage. Rupert Murdoch’s Australian Newscom (Daily Telegraph) page was even more lyrically absurd. "Marines foil bank robbery: AMERICAN marines yesterday earned cheers from a crowd of Baghdad citizens by foiling a multi_million dollar bank robbery." it reported (yes, with the all caps for AMERICAN). You had to read down a ways to discover that yes, they were talking about the same incident. Murdoch, apparently, has an even lower opinion of Australian intelligence than he does of American. But even these two paragons of journalism had to admit that, yes, there seemed to have been a bit of trouble in Mosul.

On the second day, another three died.

The Marines didn’t help their cause any by getting caught lying on both occasions. In both instances, they initially denied firing into the crowd. They claimed at first that they fired into the air, causing the crowd to scatter, and then fired at those remaining, assuming that they must be "hostiles," Then they spoke about having "returned fire accurately" at snipers on rooftops that happened to be in a different direction. The only person known to be on a rooftop who got shot was a little girl. Seven of the casualties were in a bus that was passing by, some 350 yards from the building in which the Marines were staying.

Both sides agree that Marines were jeered and cursed at and spat upon as they came up to the building. The Marines were acting with the subtlety and tact we’ve come to expect from the military, in other words, in overwhelming force and with big old American flags flapping all over the place – despite three separate direct orders from the Pentagon to refrain from such displays. Idiot jingoism means being patriotic, even if it hurts your country. The brass must still believe the admin propaganda that Iraqis are delirious with joy in seeing us. They aren’t.

Someone has been potshotting at the Marines from rooftops. That seems reasonably certain. But once inside, the Marines didn’t have to worry about rooftop snipers. The building, a vast six-story structure covering an entire city block that is the local equivalent of City Hall, is a veritable castle. The crowd, even if large (about 3,000, or thirty times the size of the crowd that attended that ridiculous pull-down-the-statue show the US staged in Saddam City) posed no real threat.

The casualties flowed into local hospitals, and outrage wildfired through the city. P.J. O’Rourke once claimed that there was no Arabic phrase that meant "calm down." I doubt the claim is true – certainly the Arabs I know seem to grasp the concept readily – but in this case, it might as well have been true. The whole country is a seething mass of rage and fear, and even the administration seems to have abandoned the pretense that the Iraqis are happy to see us.

The brass hats realized that they were rapidly losing control of the situation, and couldn’t massage it. Even the embedded journalists were reporting that US Marines were firing into a crowd of civilians. "The marines returned accurate fire" as one colonel put it.

Then the brass hats trotted out the "these guys aren’t trained to do police work." That’s true, but it doesn’t require four years at the police academy to know that firing into crowds of people, no matter how rude they’re being, isn’t going to bring about a sense of calm and civic pride.

One question that nobody seems of have asked is if someone gave the order to fire, or whether some of the Marines simply panicked and started potshotting the locals. Normally, a largely unarmed crowd of civilians is no match for 130 heavily armed Marines who have the advantage of being in a sturdy defensible building. The crowd just couldn’t have been that big a threat.

One version of events – the one that gave the sad sacks at Murdoch News their lead angle – is that Mosul police (and don’t ask where Mosul got police from) were shooting at looters at a nearby bank, and the soldiers, hearing the shots, assumed they were under attack and returned fire. At anything that moved, apparently.

Stories abound of Marines firing lethal shots at civilians in lieu of warning shots. One French journalist praised one Marine, who did fire warning shots and saved at least ten lives by doing so, but noted that he was the only one in his unit bothering with such a nicety.

It’s impossible to gauge how much truth lies in these stories, but they form a layer of fear and hatred building in the Iraqi population, and the events in Mosul over the past two days are certain to raise tensions to ever-higher levels.

If the American troops feel that they are besieged and not in control, atrocities will follow. These soldiers have demonstrated poor discipline and judgement, and that goes right up to the top. (Case in point:: the flag over Saddam’s face stunt became a subject of worldwide jeers when it came to light that the particular flag JUST HAPPENED to be the very flag that was flying over the Pentagon on 9/11. That stupid piece of stagery had to be planned by high levels at the Pentagon, and it not only sent the wrong message right off the bat to the Iraqi people, but mocked 9/11 itself – an event the world knows Iraq is being unfairly punished for. It shows that the Pentagon, which had ordered no flag displays on three separate occasions, was perfectly willing to trash its own orders for the sake of some cheap political theater. This is not good discipline. If the clowns in the Pentagon can’t take their own orders seriously, what should we expect from the troops?)

We’re blowing it left and right in Iraq.

One of the more ominous signs is the large number of Iraqi flags that are appearing everywhere. The message is clear: "We don’t miss Saddam. But now we have a worse enemy."

The Brits, who are having problems of their own getting the town of al Bashra up and running, are probably taking this all in and remembering 1946. They had problems with restive populations and terrorists, particularly a really vicious bunch lead by Menachem Begin, and were forced out of the area after Zionists blew up the King David hotel, killing 91 people. Some Americans might remember our efforts to "stabilize" Lebanon during the Reagan years didn’t go well, either.

In the meantime, the domestic American media, afraid, as most Americans are, to criticize the military for fear of being called disloyal, are trying their best to pretend that the soldiers are just the innocent victims of circumstance and we should support them, no matter what they do. Which gives the brass hats license to do some pretty awful things, knowing they won’t have to account for it.

When the Germans took the town of Lidice, in what is now the Czech Republic, nationalism among the locals surged, along with hatred for the German invaders. Eventually, the villagers managed to assassinate a high ranking member of the Nazi party who was visiting.

We called them "freedom fighters." The Nazis called them "terrorists" and reacted.

The stage is set for history to repeat.