New Rules of War

[P]retending that the very specific charges that our troops used illegal chemical weapons against unarmed and innocent civilians is really all about the larger appropriateness of the battle for Fallujah is tantamount to accusing an innocent man of rape simply to raise the larger issue of sexual assault ....

Thank goodness for John Cole. Tough on stupid, no matter where it grows.

Here are three passages from the same page of Bing West's book on the battles for Fallujah. All refer to the spring 2004 offensive, the one that was called off (from the top, for political reasons) before it could finish the job:

Mortar attacks were common, day and night. Sometimes the shells dropped in with disturbing accuracy; other times they missed by a city block. Whenever a Cobra gunship flew over the city, it attracted a fusillade of machine gun fire and RPG rockets, a few detonating in the air, most exploding on roofs and streets.

...

The same message was broadcast from most minarets: America is bringing in Jews from Israel and stealing Iraq's oil. Women, take your children into the streets to aid the holy warriors. Bring them food, water and weapons. Do not fear death. It is your duty to protect Islam. After a few nights, when asked what the imams were yelling, the translators, bored by the repetition, simply said, "Stealing oil, bringing in Jews, protect Islam. The usual stuff. Same old, same old."

...

LtCol Olson and Capt Zembiec watched through binoculars as boys about ten years old lugged mortar shells across a road. On the roof with them were a Delta Force sniper with a .50 caliber rifle and a Marine corporal with the standard .308 sniper rifle. They sat in separate sandbagged shelters, peering out through mouse holes. Zembiec called them "cooperative carnivores." They waited all day, hoping that a grown-up insurgent would grow impatient and walk out to take one of the mortar shells from a boy. None did.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is a description of your enemy.

West is not writing a book of polemics. He doesn't feel compelled to justify the U.S. to a world that dislikes it. He's writing about a battle in progress. He's writing about "our" troops, and in his case, he means it. While al-Jazeera, embedded with the Fallujah insurgents, was unabashedly the "Arab network," the American networks were busy being citizens of the world. For Americans, where was the home-team media coverage of the Iraq war, unless you dug deep online for the free-lancers? As a result, most of us never got a clear view of our side, or who we were fighting.

In Fallujah we were fighting Al-Qaida in Iraq, alongside a gaggle of small-time Islamist groups, swelled by thousands of part-time jihadis, and potentially tens of thousands of angry citizens, each with an AK-47 in the house, who would join the fight if they thought the insurgents were winning, and melt back into being sullen civilians if the Marines surged.

This is the new face of war in a world where no nation yet -- with the possible exception of China -- dares face the United States in an open battlefield. As recently as the 1930s, the world contained 8 or 10 serious military powers that were capable of waging war against one another. The days when Canada and Italy were world-class military powers are over.

Yet the old rules of war, which still are invoked, evolved in that world. Those rules were devised by decent and fair men, and they were meant to protect innocent civilians and soldiers who had been rendered hors de combat. They were meant to apply to armies that fought in the open, in uniform, and to civilians who cowered in the cities and prayed the battles would pass them by.

As late as 1945, they still were in play. As the 12th Army Group pushed through Franconia and approached picturesque little German cities, the civilian leaders often sent out secret negotiators to arrange to surrender the town before it was stormed. Usually the German military had pulled back already, but it was a risky business. If they returned and found "collaborators," they tried them on the spot and hanged them.

If the American generals agreed, the town would open its gates to them. Many a gem of a medieval city was spared this way. But sometimes a few SS fanatics or Hitler Youth would sneak back into the town, hide in the attics, and open fire as the Americans approached then scurry out. The U.S. troops invariably pulled back then, and they called up the artillery and the bombers to flatten the town before moving on. The deal was off. How would Fallujah have fared under those rules?

The rules were not meant to bind the hands of American power, so that extremist ideologies, if they took refuge in populous cities, could always defeat the United States. The rules were not meant to level the playing field among combatants. They did not take into account the mass electronic media, and the difference between democracies, where a handful of media images can shake the national foundation, and tyrannies, where pictures of abused prisoners can easily be made to disappear before they are seen, along with anyone who owns them.

The U.S. Marines don't deliberately kill women and boys, even those actively aiding the enemy, because their warrior code forbids it. Yet any time a battle rages in a city, they will die. Who chose that battlefield? Who brought the non-combatants into the fight? Which side took infinitely greater care to avoid killing them?

It is absurd that the world now believes Americans used "chemical weapons" on Fallujah, thanks to the braying of people for whom all the evil in the world is summed up in the seven-letter word "America." Yet only the handful who will read "No True Glory" will know about the two snipers, the trained killers at the peak of their art, the modern-day Ajax and Teucer, watching the deadly weapons go up and wound their comrades all day long and never pulling the trigger.

After Vietnam, anti-war zealots spit on returning soldiers. Thanks to the Internet, today they don't have to wait for the troops to return to start spitting.