Redstate

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

On that early morning of February 27, 1902 when former lieutenants of the Bushveldt Carabiniers, Harry Morant and Peter Handcock held hands and marched to their deaths at the hands of a firing squad from the Cameron Highlanders, they served, in the view of many senior British officers and diplomats, a useful function. Through their deaths they were helping to bring to an end the Second Boer War.

The Boer government was, after an extraordinarily brutal little war featuring concentration camps and summary executions, interested in gaining what it could through negotiations. The Kaiser, who had provided the Boers with Mauser rifles and Krupps field guns by way of its African colony, German Southwest Africa, was making noises about intervening on behalf of the Boers. The British, having lost 21,000 men, wanted to bring the war to a close.

Morant and Handcock had allegedly shot nine or so Boer prisoners and a German missionary. It was a two-fer. The British got to demonstrate to the Boers that they stood for fair play, justice for all and all that, and they got to mollify the Kaiser over the death of one of his subjects. All the threads came neatly together at a rifle range outside the fort at Pietersburg in Transvaal.

One doesn’t have to look far to see the beginnings of a clamor to make some of our own troops a sacrifice for the sake of appeasing foes in Iraq and at home.

Read on.

Back in July CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post entitled The Price of Success In Iraq.

Another price to be paid: It must be shown, by the Iraqi government, that it will separately investigate any charge against U.S. personnel in Iraq. The new government cannot claim to be free or sovereign while ignoring American abuses to date. We have made real mistakes, and a handful of soldiers have committed real crimes. The Iraqi people must see that their government will not ignore this or defer to us because of its dependence upon us.

At the same time, we need to understand that honest investigations of this kind will save American lives. Iraq is filled with false charges and conspiracy theories. Exaggerating or falsifying U.S. incidents and crimes is a key propaganda weapon for our enemies. Iraqi investigations that refute such charges, explain the necessities of battle, and show that U.S. and Iraqi forces are cooperating will defuse such charges and the anger and vengeance that follow.

While I think we can all agree to the premise, I think we can all see the ultimate outcome. Eventually there will be instances in which Iraqi and US investigators will disagree on the findings, maybe in good faith and maybe not, and there will be a demand that US soldiers be tried before Iraqi courts.

The second line of attack is that military courts simply aren’t tough enough. The idea that courts martial are easy tickets out of trouble will be news to anyone who served but then you wouldn’t have read Homicide Charges Rare In Iraq War. Now there could be a very good reason for that. Like, for instance, there being very few homicides but it could just be the corrupt military machine protecting its own:

Some military officials and analysts say the small numbers reflect the caution and professionalism exercised by U.S. forces on an urban battlefield where it is often difficult to distinguish combatants from civilians. Others argue the statistics illustrate commanders' reluctance to investigate and hold troops accountable when they take the lives of civilians.

"I think there are a number of cases that never make it to the reporting stage, and in some that do make it to the reporting stage, there has been a reluctance to pursue them vigorously," said Gary D. Solis, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former Marine prosecutor. "There have been fewer prosecutions in Iraq than one might expect."

…

The homicide data have caused concern among some human rights advocates and experts on military law, who say the low conviction rate and seemingly lenient punishments may be sending the wrong signal, both to U.S. troops and to the Iraqi people.

"We are indeed having trouble getting convictions and accountability, and so are other countries," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. "It has struck me that the sentences are kind of modest."

Now we have the predicate set. In the first instance, Iraqi investigators should conduct their own investigations into allegations against US servicemembers and in the second, military courts are unduly lenient in punishing those who commit crimes against Iraqi civilians.

Today, in the midst of an important story on a battle between Iraqi troops and the Mahdi Army (or Jaish-al-Mahdi as I’m sure the New York Times will be calling it in the near future) we find this which oddly enough has nothing to with the Mahdi Army or even the general area where the fighting took place:

Meanwhile, new allegations of indiscriminate killings by U.S. troops surfaced Monday. Relatives and neighbors of seven civilians shot dead during a gun battle in a Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday said U.S. soldiers had stepped out of their vehicles and randomly fired at their car.

"The soldiers decided to kill everyone on the streets, and my mother was one of them," Mohammed Sabah al-Dulaimi, 19, an engineering student said in a telephone interview. "They were angry. There's no other reason for killing. They took revenge."

It seems to be a safe bet that we will see more of these stories, more allegations that military courts are too lenient, and more calls for Iraqis to be involved in the investigative process. In no prosecutions arise from the Haditha investigation, and at the rate at which those allegations are imploding (see here | here | here for coverage contra Murtha’s dubious version of events) that is an increasingly possible outcome, we can count on a full-court press to remove investigations from military jurisdiction.

Implicit in this demand will be the idea that we have to prove to the Iraqis that we are fair and impartial in meting out justice in order to strengthen the hand of the Iraqi government, to reduce the power of the militias (how long before a fawning story appears on how the only reason the Mahdi Army exists is to protect the people from US forces?), and to bring the Sunnis into the political process. Against this laudable goal what chance does a young sergeant or lance corporal or lieutenant have?

Not much more than Harry Morant or Peter Handcock.