A Pilgrim’s Digression

Er, we didn’t do body counts, at least up until the past year or so. Reading the Washington Post this morning, specifically an article titled In Tal Afar, a brawl to blow off some steam, I was struck by the contradiction at the heart of the story.

The first line of the story says that our soldiers spent “months” training “for a battle with insurgents that never fully materialized.” This basically echoes what I’ve read in other places. The Tal Afar offensive has been a bust; the insurgents melted away before the Army moved in.

And yet:

During the incursion into Tall Afar, a city of more than 200,000 located about 40 miles from the Syrian border in northwestern Iraq, more than 550 suspected insurgents have been killed or captured this month, commanders said. Much of the fighting was carried out with air strikes or by the Iraqi army, which led the assault.

Do you see the contradiction? 550, besides being a smooth, even number, is also an extraordinarily high body count for a “battle…that never fully materialized.”

Others have reported on the Vietnam syndrome of inflated body counts, but this sounds to me like the most outrageous example yet of blatant lying by the military leadership. There is also that curious word “suspected” that is always attached to insurgents. “Suspected insurgents.” What does that mean? It means a lot of people died, but since “insurgents” don’t wear uniforms, no one really knows who in the hell the dead are or what they were doing getting in the way of our bullets and bombs.

These are troubling signs. Considering that at the same time that the Army is meeting little resistance in Tal Afar (but still managing to kill nearly six hundred “suspected insurgents”), car bombs and assassinations kill at least 80 people in Baghdad and other towns across Iraq.

The enemy is getting smarter. I don’t think they will ever again fight us directly, the way they tried to do in Fallujah. The military campaign in Iraq is going to become more and more frustrating for the Army.

There are just a couple other disturbing items to point out about the Tal Afar offensive, disturbing because they call into question the story the military and the press are telling us about Iraq.

Note in the “brawl” story, the reporter says that much of the fighting has been done by “the Iraqi Army.” I read yesterday that this “Iraqi army” referred to here is “drawn primarily from the Kurdish pesh merga militia.” The Kurdish military was already well-trained and well-equipped before we ever invaded Iraq. My question is, is this really an “Iraqi” army?

The article in which it was reported that the Kurds are aiding us in the Tall Afar operation, it was also reported that we are relying on informants to tell friend from foe. The title of the article is Informants decide fate of Iraqi detainees. Read this:

A masked teenager in an Iraqi army uniform walked slowly through a crowd of 400 detainees captured Monday, studying each face and rendering his verdict with a simple hand gesture, like a Roman emperor deciding the fate of gladiators.

A thumb pointed down meant the suspect was not thought to be an insurgent and would be released by U.S. soldiers. A thumb pointed up meant a man would be removed from the concertina wire-encased pen, handcuffed with tape or plastic ties and taken by truck to a military base to be interrogated.

It would be almost funny, if the consequences and implications weren’t so serious. Can you imagine Hamburg, Germany, summer 1945. A German teenager walks among a line of his fellow German citizens, rendering a thumbs up or down verdict on each of them in turn. The thumbs up prompts G.I.’s to drag the person away as a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.

No, I really can’t imagine that myself. That wasn’t how it happened. Why would this Iraqi teenager be deserving of such confidence that he could make life and death decisions about his fellow Iraqis? This is really shocking. Yet the implication is, we really have no better way of telling friend from foe.

I don’t really know what is going on in Iraq, nor do those who claim that Iraq is a burgeoning democratic Utopia where our soldiers are beloved as liberators and milk and honey flow from the rocks of the desert landscape.

I know only what I read, and inasmuch as what I read is a snapshot of life there, presented with some or all of the biases of the reporter, it is hardly a complete picture. I just wonder if Hurricane Katrina has had the unfortunate effect of allowing disturbing news from Iraq to pass unremarked upon by the American people. I am still reading and watching, and I am waiting for the referendum on the Iraqi constitution in October. My hope is that it passes, and that it provides us with the political cover we need to withdraw. Somehow, I am not sure withdrawal has ever really been on the table. Maybe our real goal is to keep a battle-hardened contingent of soldiers in the Middle East indefinitely. There was an article recently that quoted a U.S. military commander as saying he was building what look more and more like “permanent structures” in Iraq, where before there was only a hastily constructed base of operations.