morale armi USA

[Gość: RobertFisk]

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Robert Fisk: One, two, three, what are they fighting for?

The worst problem facing US forces in Iraq may not be armed resistance but a
crisis of morale. Robert Fisk reports on a near-epidemic of indiscipline,
suicides and loose talk

By Robert Fisk

Oct 24, 2003: (The Independent) I was in the police station in the town of
Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher
Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the
attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim
Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home down the
road - "Dreamland", the Americans call it - but this was not the extent of
his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being attacked by," he
said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come
again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called them - and
rightly so.

Here's the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe - indeed
have to believe, along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld - that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's
borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close allies and
neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the equation),
are assaulting United States forces as part of the "war on terror". Special
forces soldiers are now being told by their officers that the "war on terror"
has been transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous way, 11
September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the Americans always leave the
Iraqis out of the culpability bracket - unless they can be described
as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or "deadenders" by the US proconsul,
Paul Bremer.

Captain Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth.
Ordinary Iraqis - many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein - are
attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area
alone. And Captain Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, where
America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles and - no
doubt - fathers of some of those now waging guerrilla war against American
soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect, are indeed themselves
the "terrorists". So if he calls the bad guys "terrorists", the local cops -
his first line of defence - would be very angry indeed.

No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the
streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about their
own government. US troops have been given orders not to bad-mouth their
President or Secretary of Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters (who have
about the same status in the eyes of the occupation authorities). But when I
suggested to a group of US military police near Abu Ghurayb they would be
voting Republican at the next election, they fell about laughing. "We
shouldn't be here and we should never have been sent here," one of them told
me with astonishing candour. "And maybe you can tell me: why were we sent
here?"

Little wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military's own
newspaper, reported this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq
suffered from low morale. And is it any wonder, that being the case, that US
forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising
prisoners, trashing homes and - eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds
of Iraqis - stealing money from houses they are raiding? No, this is not
Vietnam - where the Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men in a month - nor is
the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not yet. And they remain light
years away from the butchery of Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights monitors,
civilian occupation officials and journalists - not to mention Iraqis
themselves - are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the American
military occupiers.

Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under
attack - or who merely pass the scene of an American raid - are being gunned
down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely
result in either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of
engagement" - rules that the Americans will not disclose to the public.

The rot comes from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq,
US forces declined to take responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We
do not do body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So there was no
apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when the "Allies" - note how we
Brits get caught up in this misleading title - bombed a residential suburb in
the vain hope of killing Saddam. When US special forces raided a house in the
very same area four months later - hunting for the very same Iraqi leader -
they killed six civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged
woman, and only announced, four days later, that they would hold
an "inquiry". Not an investigation, you understand, nothing that would
suggest there was anything wrong in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in
due course the "inquiry" was forgotten - as it was no doubt meant to be - and
nothing has been heard of it again.

Again, during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster bombs
on villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a butcher's shop of
chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half during the raid was not even
transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there
were "no indications" cluster bombs had been dropped at Hillah - even though
Sky TV found some unexploded and brought them back to Baghdad.

I first came across this absence of remorse - or rather absence of
responsibility - in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men
had run a new American checkpoint - a roll of barbed wire tossed across a
road before dawn one morning in July - and US troops had opened fire at the
car. Indeed, they fired so many bullets that the vehicle burst into flames.
And while the dead or dying men were burned inside, the Americans who had set
up the checkpoint simply boarded their armoured vehicles and left the scene.
They never even bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out the
identities of the men they killed - an obvious step if they believed they had
killed "terrorists" - and inform their relatives. Scenes like this are being
repeated across Iraq daily.

Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian
organisations are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the US
army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their own
role in killing civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so
many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is
really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths."
Human Rights Watch has counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the
capital. The organisation also criticised American forces for humiliating
prisoners, not least by their habit of placing their feet on the heads of
prisoners. Some American soldiers are now being trained in Jordan - by
Jordanians - in the "respect" that should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and
about the culture of Islam. About time.

But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single
soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians - even when the fatality
involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities. No action has been
taken, for instance, over the soldier who fired a single shot through the
window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his translator, in northern
Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne who gunned dow