More On Marine Mosque Killing Iraqis

More on Marine Mosque Killing

Iraqis continued to be furious Wednesday over the shooting by a US marine of a wounded Iraqi fighter in a mosque in Fallujah. Indeed, the Arab press in general expressed horror and outrage. Unlike US news outlets, al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite news stations actually showed the prisoner being shot, which made the footage more powerful. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that both the Iraqi interim government and the Arab League have condemned the mosque shooting and demanded the perpetrator be tried.

US veterans and military justice experts were less willing to jump to judgment. They point out that the full context is not apparent from the snippet of film. This second team of Marines had not known that a previous team had left these wounded guerrillas in the mosque for subsequent medical pick-up, and appear to have assumed that they were active combatants and that one of them was a suicide bomber only pretending to be dead. Such contextualization and nuance were not part of the debate in the Arab press.

Readers have written me on all sides of this issue. Some have insisted that the wounded guerrillas were not technically prisoners of war, as I had termed them, and that the US marine’s action cannot be judged until we have all the facts.

Others expressed surprise that I declined to accept any comparison between the US Marine Corps and the guerrillas who beheaded aid worker Margaret Hassan. (!) I kid you not. They actually wanted to put them on the same plane.

Let me just clarify my comments. First of all, I did not say that the Iraq war was a legitimate war. It was not. It violated the charter of the United Nations.

What I said was that the role of the US military and other multinational forces in Iraq is now legitimate because it was explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. This is true. Many readers appear to have forgotten all about UN SC Resolution 1546 (2004), which was adopted unanimously. Here is what the Security Council said about the issue at hand:

“9. Notes that the presence of the multinational force in Iraq is at the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq and therefore reaffirms the authorization for the multinational force under unified command established under resolution 1511 (2003), having regard to the letters annexed to this resolution;

“10. Decides that the multinational force shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in accordance with the letters annexed to this resolution expressing, inter alia, the Iraqi request for the continued presence of the multinational force and setting out its tasks, including by preventing and deterring terrorism, so that, inter alia, the United Nations can fulfil its role in assisting the Iraqi people as outlined in paragraph seven above and the Iraqi people can implement freely and without intimidation the timetable and program for the political process and benefit from reconstruction and rehabilitation activities;

“11. Welcomes, in this regard, the letters annexed to this resolution stating, inter alia, that arrangements are being put in place to establish a security partnership between the sovereign Government of Iraq and the multinational force and to ensure coordination between the two, and notes also in this regard that Iraqi security forces are responsible to appropriate Iraqi ministers, that the Government of Iraq has authority to commit Iraqi security forces to the multinational force to engage in operations with it, and that the security structures described in the letters will serve as the fora for the Government of Iraq and the multinational force to reach agreement on the full range of fundamental security and policy issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations, and will ensure full partnership between Iraqi security forces and the multinational force, through close coordination and consultation;

So, the Marines at Fallujah are operating in accordance with a UNSC Resolution and have all the legitimacy in international law that flows from that. The Allawi government asked them to undertake this Fallujah mission.

To compare them to the murderous thugs who kidnapped CARE worker Margaret Hassan, held her hostage, terrified her, and then killed her is frankly monstrous. The multinational forces are soldiers fighting a war in which they are targetting combatants and sometimes accidentally killing innocents. The hostage-takers are terrorists deliberately killing innocents. It is simply not the same thing.

Now, I don’t like the timing of the Fallujah mission. I don’t like all the mistakes made along the way, which produced this operation. I don’t like its tactics. I don’t like the way it put so many civilians in harm’s way. I don’t like the violations of international law (targetting the hospital, turning away the Red Crescent, killing wounded and disarmed combatants), etc. I protest the latter. I don’t know enough about military affairs to offer an alternative on the former issues, and don’t mind admitting my technical ignorance. You can’t do everything.

But the basic idea of attacking the guerrillas holding up in that city is not in and of itself criminal or irresponsible. A significant proportion of the absolutely horrible car bombings that have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially Shiites, were planned and executed from Fallujah. There were serious and heavily armed forces in Fallujah planning out ways of killing hundreds to prevent elections from being held in January. These are mass murderers, serial murderers. If they were fighting only to defend Fallujah, that would be one thing; even the Marines would respect them for that. They aren’t, or at least, a significant proportion of them aren’t. They are killing civilians elsewhere in order to throw Iraq into chaos and avoid the enfranchisement of the Kurds and Shiites.

Some of my readers still want good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats. That’s not the way the world is. It is often grey, and very bleak.