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an infantryman's perspective

By Charles Bird Posted in Featured Stories | War — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I've written little (if anything) on Haditha since last June (here, and a 9,000+ word whopper here), but there are a few subsequent pieces worth bringing up.  The first is a New York Times article which does its own job of piecing together what took place.  The writers put themselves in the shoes of the investigators, interviewing Marines, their lawyers, Iraqi residents and the investigators themselves.  They did a fair job at reconstructing events, and although it's premature to come to any conclusions, there is a possibility that U.S. Marines committed crimes.

Read on...

Open questions abound.  There are inconsistencies in the stories about the Iraqi men killed in or near a taxi (and conflicting accounts about other events that day).  There are questions about the Marines using the same tactics in Haditha (where civilians were intermingled with paramilitants) as were used in Fallujah (where civilians were warned to leave and most did).  There are questions about the Marines not changing tactics after clearing the first house.

Last month, an article by the New York Times reported allegations of malfeasance higher up the chain of command:

The investigation found that an official company logbook of the unit involved had been tampered with and that an incriminating video taken by an aerial drone the day of the killings was not given to investigators until Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, intervened, the officials said.

Those findings, contained in a long report that was completed last month but not made public, go beyond what has been previously reported about the case. It has been known that marines who carried out the killings made misleading statements to investigators and that senior officers were criticized for not being more aggressive in investigating the case, in which most or all of the Iraqis who were killed were civilians. But this is the first time details about possible concealment or destruction of evidence have been disclosed.

But the October 2006 Atlantic Monthly takes a different look at Haditha, with the author seeing it not from the perspective of an investigator, but an infantryman.  The initial conclusion is apt...

How did the heroes of Fallujah come to kill civilians in Haditha? A Vietnam veteran who witnessed the battle of Fallujah says it's too soon to judge the marines—but not the high command.

...but requires much more explanation than the simple paragraph would indicate.  It is too soon to judge the Marines, but in terms of "high command", Bing West wasn't talking about the alleged cover-up by superior officers.  Rather, he is addressing the entire strategy employed by the coalition after major combat operations were completed.  I've been meaning to re-subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly, and the Road to Haditha is as good a reason as any for a re-up.  Below the fold are some excerpts worth mentioning.

Although all Marines, the faces and levels of experience changed markedly from early 2004 to late 2005. But first, a little history:

When Baghdad fell that April, the population was in awe of the Americans. When the American soldiers did nothing to stop the looting, that feeling of awe vanished.

The Iraqi army had melted away, but its soldiers were eager to regroup in order to gain pay and prestige. Indeed, the American commanders working with Iraqi officers reported that they could easily reconstitute several trained battalions. But in May, the American proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, hastily disbanded the Iraqi army and outlawed former Baathists from government service. The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not object, and American soldiers moved alone into the Sunni cities west and north of Baghdad.

The insurgency began that summer, as gangs of Sunni youths and unemployed soldiers heeded the urgings of imams and former elements of Saddam Hussein’s regime to oppose the infidel occupiers, protectors of the Shiite apostates. The Sunni population sympathized with and was intimidated by the insurgents, who freely mingled in the marketplaces. The insurgents’ tactics were trial and error; attacks increased as respect for the Americans and their armor dissipated.

The Americans responded to the low-level attacks with vigorous sweeps and raids. This was the wrong approach, because mobile armored offensives could not hope to neutralize the insurgent manpower pool of a million disaffected Sunni youths. The American divisions lacked a commander who would curb their instinct for decisive battle and lay out a counterinsurgency plan. Instead, their inexperienced commander, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, expressed confidence that the tactic of offensive operations was succeeding.

In March 2004, the Marine Corps assumed responsibility for Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency. The Marine commander, Lieutenant General James Conway, quickly reported that the security condition was terrible, contradicting Sanchez’s optimism. Nine Marine battalions—some 9,000 men in all—were trying to control twelve cities stretching from the outskirts of Baghdad to the Syrian border, 200 miles to the west. When the marines moved into one city, the insurgents shifted to another. Elementary arithmetic showed there were not enough troops for the task. Yet the military chain of command never sent a formal request to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for additional troops.

Emphasis mine.  Bremer was directly accountable to Rumsfeld but the U.S. envoy was also charged with adhering to UN Security Council Resolution 1483.  Most would agree that coalition forces were too light after May 1st, 2003, allowing an insurgency to grow.  The situation was exacerbated when the Iraqi army was disbanded.  Also, we were too slow in recognizing the growing insurgency and too slow in adopting proper counterinsurgency tactics.  However, in Haditha, U.S. Marines did adopt the right tactics, and the situation was under control.  The problem is that the Marines got jerked around.  Twice.  By the time they came back the second time, Haditha had horribly regressed.  Bing West:

The 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment was sent to the city in March 2004. Battalion 3/4 had experienced heavy fights during the 2003 invasion and had hauled down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, an image seen around the world. The battle-tested battalion flooded Haditha with hundreds of four-man foot patrols. Insurgents who responded with their standard "shoot and scoot" tactics were chased down by squads of marines. Although the mayor had been assassinated the previous summer, the insurgents were not well organized. A platoon was ordered to combine forces with the local police; Lieutenant Matt Danner, the platoon commander, moved his men into the police station. Joint patrols became the norm.

The joint patrol, known as a Combined Action Platoon, or CAP, was a counterinsurgent tactic from Vietnam, where squads of fourteen marines lived for a year or more with local militias of about thirty farmers. In my CAP south of DaNang in 1966 we engaged in firefights every night for the first few months. Then the shooting petered out as the villagers, coming to trust us, betrayed local guerrillas and began to point out strangers. In Haditha, this pattern was repeated. When the first marines arrived, fights broke out every third night; six months later, they were down to twice a month. Danner had hit on an elementary axiom of guerrilla warfare: once the police in the CAP were accepted by the population as the strongest fighting force, information flowed to them. As the Iraqis in the police force became more self-confident, they became more aggressive and more effective.

Exactly 29 months ago, I wrote about the CAP program in Vietnam (one of the few successful operations in that incompetently fought war) and how this could be successfully applied to Iraq.  Bing West lived it, seeing the CAP program firsthand.  It also worked in Haditha.  So what went wrong?  In March 2004, Fallujah went wrong:

Rumsfeld ordered the Marines to attack the city, with the concurrence of Bremer and the military high command. The division commander, Major General James N. Mattis—"Mad Dog" to his admiring grunts—demurred. His strategy, he said, was to repeat the success of Haditha and move in "as soft as fog," supporting and reinvigorating the demoralized local police.

Washington overrode General Mattis’s objections and the Marines went in. Simultaneously, Bremer decided that coalition forces should move against the dangerous Shiite demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr. American troops were thus engaged on two fronts—against Sunnis west of Baghdad, and against Shiites in Baghdad and to the south. Calls for jihad swept across Anbar province, and insurgents besieged Baghdad, reducing it to a few days of fuel and fresh food.

To finish the fight in Fallujah, Mattis called Battalion 3/4 down from Haditha. "Some of the jundis in my Combined Action Platoon were up for the fight," Danner recalled, referring to the Iraqis who had joined forces with his platoon. "I told them they had to guard Haditha and that we’d be back for them. They wanted to come with us. We had lived together, fought together." While the Iraqis in Danner’s CAP volunteered for Fallujah, other Iraqi soldiers around the country mutinied to avoid going there.

Televised images of the house-to-house fighting in Fallujah stirred anger across Iraq. After three weeks of fighting and confused negotiations, just as Mattis was squeezing the insurgents into a corner, Bremer, concerned about a degenerating political situation, persuaded the White House to pull the Marines out of Fallujah. When the order came through, Danner and his men were bewildered. "Fallujah and the Sunnis out west are a sideshow," a senior Pentagon official told me at the time. "We have to get the Shiites to agree to an interim government in return for early elections."

Within a month, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other jihadists had taken control of Fallujah. To the south, al-Sadr was cornered, but American officials in Baghdad decided not to arrest him. He slunk away, to emerge later as the leader of the most dangerous Shiite militia in Iraq.

Danner and his men returned to Haditha in early May and resumed living downtown with the police. "Most of the police we lived with were local Sunnis," Danner said. "A few were tough enough to stand on their own, but 80 percent needed to know we Americans were there with them and would back them up."

In late summer, Danner’s battalion rotated home, and Battalion 1/8 moved into the Haditha area. Fresh from the States and eager, the new marines continued the joint policing and patrolled vigorously. Word of how Americans had fought in Fallujah had spread, and the insurgents avoided the new marines, targeting instead the Iraqi soldiers.

We were not only under-manned going into Fallujah--redeploying troops away from a working but volatile situation--our April 2004 actions in Fallujah made overall conditions worse.  Six months later, the Marine battalion in Haditha was jerked around again.

In October 2004, one month before the U.S. election, Battalion 1/8 was called away from Haditha to prepare for a second battle of Fallujah. The White House had made a terrible mistake in not letting the Marines finish in April. At the time, Mattis had cited a quote from Napoleon to his field marshal: "If you’re going to take Vienna, then by God, sir, take it!" Delay played to the advantage of the defenders, and Fallujah was now held by 2,000 die-hard jihadists. To take the city, American forces were stripped from other cities across the province. After most residents had left, ten battalions fought block to block in a ferocious urban slugfest. The deeper the marines penetrated into the city, the fewer civilians they encountered and the tougher the fighting became, with jihadists hiding among the 30,000 buildings, waiting to kill the first American to open the door. The 3rd Platoon’s bloody room-to-room fight in the House From Hell was typical of the savagery of Fallujah II.

Many of the jihadists, including leaders such as al-Zarqawi, fled Fallujah before the fight and regrouped in the cities the Americans had vacated. In Haditha, two weeks after Battalion 1/8’s departure, insurgents captured the police station and executed twenty-one policemen, including the police chief. With the police knocked out, the insurgents became the de facto government. The deputy police chief gathered his family and fled to Baghdad.

"He was a good man," Danner said. "The November battle in Fallujah pulled the rug out from under the police. We left them on their own. Without moral support, they collapsed."

General Casey didn't issue a workable counterinsurgency plan until late 2004, well over year after the paramilitants took root.  By the time the Marines came back to Haditha the second time, there were no Iraqis willing enough to work with them.  The situation was too dangerous.  Sunni paramilitants executed Haditha police, and killed other suspected "spies".  Marines were also taking casualties.  Finally, in fall 2005, the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Regiment entered the picture and, later on, 24 Iraqis were killed on November 19th after an IED killed one of their own.  The media coverage of Haditha didn't really get out until later.

Time magazine broke the Haditha story in March and presented a balanced report. Then, on May 17, Representative John P. Murtha held a press conference and declared that the troops "killed innocent civilians in cold blood." As the leading advocate for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, Murtha advanced his own agenda by acting as judge and jury.

After Murtha’s incendiary remarks, Haditha captured worldwide attention. Many commentators leaped to conclusions. The European press gloatingly linked Haditha to the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam, but My Lai was on a much larger scale, with implications that the high command looked the other way. If in the coming months the press does transpose the killings at Haditha into a metaphor for the war—as happened with My Lai—the consequences will be tremendous, and misleading.

West is right that "it remains for the military justice system to sort through the chaos of battle and reach a conclusion about individual guilt or innocence,"  and he adds this:

It is too soon to judge these men, but it is not too soon to judge the high command and the underlying policies governing the conduct of the war. As Americans, we have been fighting the war the wrong way. Haditha degenerated due to a lack of security manpower, both American and Iraqi. We didn’t have sufficient troops in Anbar province, and those we did have were shifted to fight a battle provoked by feckless senior leadership. The hardened veterans of Fallujah were sent into Haditha to operate in isolation from the Iraqis, rather than in combined units, as counterinsurgency doctrine demands. We left our squads to fight alone for too long on a treacherous battlefield.

West is in favor of Casey's strategy, but he proposes more changes...

Given the persistence of Sunni versus Shiite mass murders, military logic calls for martial law and for placing the untrustworthy police under the control of the Iraqi army. But Iraqi politicians prefer to keep the police under local control, shared with Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, and President Bush has chosen to praise rather than to pressure Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

...and finishes with this:

In his defining new book, War Made New, the military historian Max Boot has written that "the most important military unit in the emergence of modern states was the humble infantryman." For two decades, the Pentagon has neglected the infantry, believing that high technology would win wars. Today, American forces have more combat aircraft than infantry squads, and more combat pilots than squad leaders. Fully 75 percent of our Army and Marine infantry leave the military after their four-year tour. They receive no pension, a tiny educational stipend, and no immediately transferable skills.

Of all those who serve our country, the humble foot soldiers sacrifice the most for the rest of us. They don’t see it that way, of course. They have each other; they are their own tribe. General Casey told me that he has talked to dozens of grunts about Haditha. "Universally," he said, "they tell me, 'We hope our brothers get a fair shake.'"

Amen.