The Washington Post carried a
dispatch from Iraq last Friday that is not for the faint of
heart. Anthony Shadid told the macabre story of the death of Sabah
Kerbul in the northern village of Thuluya. In the pre-dawn hours,
his executioners led him out “behind a house girded with fig trees,
vineyards and orange groves.” The first man aimed an AK-47 and shot
him in the leg and torso. The second fired three shots; at least
one struck Kerbul in the head, killing him.
The kicker: The triggermen were Kerbul’s father and brother, and
the story was largely sympathetic. Had they not killed him,
villagers threatened to tear the whole family limb from limb.
Kerbul was suspected of being the informant who ratted out
rocket-toting saboteurs of a U.S. tank patrol. The Americans
responded by killing
some 27 Iraqis and temporarily rounding up several hundred
suspects.
U.S. spokesmen were admirably frank — perhaps too frank —
about the death of Iraqi informants. While the military will pay
good money for vital intelligence, it has neither the manpower nor
the will to protect the tipsters. That is, inform at your own
risk.
Easy for them to say. For some reason — easy cash, hatred for
the old regime, a chance to curry favor with the new rulers or
settle old scores — thousands of informants are helping U.S.
forces to root out resistance, to avoid ambushes, and to find old
Iraqi bigwigs and send
them to hell. This intelligence has been so effective that
guerrillas have started trying to staunch the flow by targeting the
tattle tales.
I’d recommend that the military take some action, to announce
that these vigilante type reprisals will not be tolerated, but then
the brass seem to have one-upped what anybody had expected
in the show-of-force department. A minor flap followed another
story in the Post last week. It revealed that the Army
had detained the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general
and left him a note saying that he’d better turn himself in if he
wanted them released. He surrendered the next day.
This skirted ever so close to a war crime. Kidnapping was
outlawed under the Geneva
Conventions at the tail end of the first half of the 20th
century, and has been considered a no-no under various Just War
theories for some time now, as it violates the important distinction between
combatants and noncombatants. The official story is that the wife
and child were being “detained” as part of a legitimate
intelligence operation, when someone decided to make it a twofer
and see if they couldn’t bluff the husband and father out into the
open — and it worked.
Because the lieutenant general surrendered quickly, we’ll never
know if the child and woman would have been held indefinitely, but
that may be the whole point. One doubts the Army would’ve announced
it was holding hostages. Rather, this incident was part of
something much larger, including thousands of temporary detentions
and hundreds of military raids. The point is to send a message, to
Iraq and the world at large, that the U.S. military will do
whatever it takes to pacify Iraq. Apparently, winning the peace
will be more complicated than anyone imagined.
