My previous item got me to post about something war-related that I’ve been thinking about since the war started. Clearly, the moral authority for our going to war rests on the fact that our plan is to liberate the Iraqis from the brutal regime that controls the country. That’s why the operation is called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But it seems to me that one of the inevitable trends in any invasion is that the people become alienated from the invaders and vice versa just due to the unavoidable effects of war. That’s one of the reasons why it was so important for this war to end rapidly.

The equation hoped for by the US was that the Iraqi people would see the coalition troops invading the country as liberators, and turn against the regime immediately. The real hope, in fact, was that the Iraqi military would throw down its weapons and let us in to bring them the American way, or whatever. In a war where it’s the US military and the people of Iraq versus Saddam Hussein and his hardcore loyalists, the outcome is not in doubt. So for Saddam Hussein, the key is to get the Iraqis to see the invaders as the enemy, and fight against them tooth and nail every step of the way. We’ve seen the Iraqi military (and paramilitaries) use any number of tactics to blur the distinction between soldiers loyal to Saddam and innocent civilians trying to save their own lives.

The other half of that is to train American soldiers to mistrust all Iraqis. This increases the number of civilian casualties, thus inciting the Iraqis against the Americans, and also causes the Americans to fear everyone, not just the soldiers wearing Iraqi uniforms. The atrocities of the Saddam Hussein era in Iraq were well documented before this war began — it’s hardly surprising that he would do atrocious things when his regime and his life are on the line.

We haven’t even been at war in Iraq in two weeks, and I’m already seeing people everywhere backing away from the idea that civilian casualties must be avoided at all costs. The spectrum now ranges from “civilian casualties are inevitable” to “Iraqi civilians are the enemy just like Iraqi soldiers” to “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” I’m sure that we’d find a similar spectrum of opinions among the US infantrymen coping with a confusing and brutal war zone on a day to day basis as well.

The point here is that this is what going to war meant from the beginning. The idea that we would somehow surgically extract Saddam Hussein and his loyalists from Iraq without destroying a lot of healthy tissue as well was foolish, and the idea that we, the invaders, could be buddies with the citizens of the country we were invading was silly as well. Even if the bombs going off in markets were planted by Iraqis to put blame on Americans, or women walking with children are acting as spotters for Iraqi soldiers, the people of Iraq won’t find out before it’s too late. Even if they saw on CNN that every civilian death in Iraq happened for a good reason (and even if that were true), they’d assume that the reports were false (just like Americans don’t seem to believe anything reported on Al Jazeera).

I don’t really know where to go from here, but I wish that this outcome had been discussed more before the war. It’s going to cost lots of Iraqis their lives, some Americans their lives, and a lot of American soldiers are going to come home with horrible memories of women and children they killed either because they weren’t really given any other choice or because war destroyed their perspective, the way it always does.

Stories like this one illustrate the price of war, not only on innocent bystanders but on the humanity of the combatants as well.

I’m probably like most people in that the large majority of my media consuming attention right now is being paid to the war. However, there’s lots of other stuff going on that bears monitoring as well, one of which being the so-called Super-DMCA, which would do lots of preposterous stuff. Anyway, right now the definitive resource seems to be Ed Felten’s blog. The link above is to an archive of his Super-DMCA postings.

Things I want to write something about but can’t, for lack of anything meaningful or enlightening to say:

• SARS
• Peter Arnett
• The suicide bombing in Iraq.

The Rumsfeld-bustin’ Seymour Hersh article I mentioned this weekend is now available online.

If it seems like I detest Donald Rumsfeld, it’s because I do. He’s the kind of guy who makes you feel like if you weren’t an idiot, you’d understand why it was OK for him grant himself a $15,000,000 bonus the same year he laid of 5000 employees (if he were in the private sector, of course).

Colin Powell has joined Donald Rumsfeld in making belligerent statements against Syria and Iran. Odd to think that Syria joined with coalition forces in the Gulf War in 1991, and now they’re saying flat out that they want to see us lose this war. Does anyone think that a transformation in the Middle East toward democracy, individual liberty, and opposition to Islamism is closer now than it was before we went to Iraq? I really believe at this point that if the Bush administration tried to launch wars against Syria or Iran in the same way they did against Iraq, they’d lose the American people entirely. At least we could attack Iraq under the pretense that we wanted to enforce UN sanctions, no such excuse is available for Syria or Iran.

Tacoma the dolphin has returned. This is the story that never ends.

Seymour Hersh already took down Richard Perle, and now it looks like Donald Rumsfeld is going to be his next victim. Now that the war in Iraq has turned out not to be a cakewalk, the criticism of Rumsfeld’s insistence on using the minimum number of troops possible is mounting, and the Hersh article could be the thing that polishes him off.

Last summer, I brought up an Army Times article that discussed the resignation of Paul Van Riper from Millenium Challenge 2002, a wargame designed to test tactics that could be used in a war with Iraq. Van Riper was the leader of the simulated opposing forces, and quit because he was unhappy that the people running the game tied his hands behind his back by restricting the use of certain tactics and even forcing him to divulge the locations of his forces. Now, the other shoe has dropped. Slate’s Fred Kaplan follows up on that article with one of his own. Before September 11, 2001, I thought Donald Rumsfeld was going to be the first Bush cabinet official to lose his job. I sure wish that had been the case at this point.

Remember the mine-clearing dolphins I mentioned yesterday? One of them is AWOL.