A Lesson in 'Disappearing the Dead'

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/030604J.shtml

    A Lesson in 'Disappearing the Dead'
    By David Isenberg
    The Asia Times

    Friday 27 February 2004

     When planning war, military officials have various targets: enemy
combatants, their support forces, the surrounding civilian population, and
their national infrastructure. But there are other targets as well, although
these are not always discussed publicly. Among the most important of these is
public opinion, both the world at large, and the highest priority - that of
their own public. This holds true especially in a democracy, when one is
fighting a war of choice - as in invading another country - instead of
fighting a war of national survival.

     In such wars, issues like human rights and civilian casualties loom
larger. Since such casualties are inevitable, special pains must be taken to
explain them away. But how to do so?

     In a word, spin. Such is the conclusion of a just-released monograph,
"Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Idea of a New Warfare" by
Carl Conetta of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Project on Defense
Alternatives (PDA).

     Of course, the idea of shaping public opinion is hardly new. For example,
a 1975 study by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library
of Congress, in analyzing possible United States takeovers of Persian Gulf oil
fields, wrote: "The administration, Congress, or both - assisted by the mass
media - could take steps to sway public opinion one way or another if they
believed it advisable."

     But the PDA documents how the Bush administration has taken spin to a new
level. It notes that increased international and domestic attention to the
collateral effects of military operations has been a persistent concern of the
US defense community since the Vietnam War. And thus has it taken significant
steps to minimize that concern. The "US Defense Department, State Department
and White House conducted large-scale perception management" or "strategic
influence" campaigns in support of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi
Freedom, as well as in support of the broader "war on terrorism" according to
the PDA study.

     One of the Iraqi war incidents analyzed by the PDA was two market
bombings in Baghdad that together claimed more than 70 lives early in the war.
US and British authorities quickly suggested that these might have been the
result of Iraqi air defense missiles falling back to the ground.

     But this was an unlikely scenario, according to the PDA study, for two
reasons: the relative numbers of suitable weapons used by the two sides in
Baghdad, and the attack vectors and performance characteristics of these
weapons. In regard to the first point, coalition air-to-surface weapons
outnumbered Iraqi surface-to-air missiles by a ratio as large as six-to-one.
Second, minor errors and inaccuracies - even standard ones - in the delivery
of air-to-surface missiles could have produced the market attacks. The PDA
study states: "Shooting downward into thickly populated areas is simply a very
dangerous and demanding endeavor. By contrast, for an air defense system to
have been at fault would have required a string of errors and failures - some
catastrophic - in the employment, performance, and functioning of both the
system and its failsafe mechanisms."

     Nevertheless, US and British officials kept making this claim even after
a British reporter found and confirmed that debris from the second marketplace
bombing came from a US HARM anti-radar missile.

     Of course, such implausible claims could not have flourished without a
complicit partner, the media. The PDA study states: "Spin is a form of
misdirection on emphasizing the minor aspects of an event or promoting a
tendentious or idiosyncratic interpretation of it - one that favors one's own
interest. However, for spin to work, there must be a media willing to 'take
the pitch' (so to speak), rather than letting it fall flat. With regard to the
marketplace bombings; the news media's willingness to adopt the uncertainty
frame and give the coalition 'the benefit of the doubt' divided along
predictable lines. While the marketplace bombings reverberated loudly in the
Muslim and Arab worlds, the story has no 'legs' in the United States and only
short ones in Britain."

     Another tactic used by the Pentagon was what the study calls "lawfare";
the manipulation of both public perceptions and international law that aims to
create or reinforce the impression that one's opponent is violating either the
letter or spirit of the law. The goal is to undermine international and
domestic support for the opponent's actions or causes.

     A case in point was the US-British framing of the Baghdad "shock and awe"
air campaign. At the same time that coalition forces were bombing the city,
they also complained about the legality of Iraq's placement of air defense
systems in and around residential and industrial areas of the city. In this
"the coalition's case [regarding] air defense was overstated", according to
the PDA study. "It implied strictures that would have precluded any adequate
air defense of the city - an outcome not consonant with the intent of
international law. In fact it is not uniformly illegal to operate in or near
civilian areas if such operations are militarily necessary. For better or
worse, international law gives wide berth to military necessity."

     Particularly questionable were coalition complaints about Iraq placing
air defense systems within 300 feet of residences. In fact there is no
international law or rule of warfare that prevents that. Reached by phone, the
study author, Carl Conetta said "their rhetoric implies that unless you place
your systems at a distance from a target we chose to hit, that won't hit
anyone, it's illegal. It's a typically Orwellian approach."

     But these issues represented ad hoc attempts at perception management in
the view of the PDA study. The Pentagon also put forward broader ideas to help
frame the view of its conduct of warfare. Most important was the concept,
which had arisen before the Bush administration took office, was the idea of a
"new warfare". This has four distinct subsets:

    * US precision attack capabilities have revolutionized warfare making it
possible to wage war with greatly reduced casualties and reduced damage.
    * US armed forces go to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage
and civilian casualties and are doing more than anyone has done before.
    * The number of war casualties cannot be known with certainty.
    * The number of casualties is not especially meaningful in assessing the
success or progress of a war effort.

     But these claims are both deceptive and meaningless. The standards on
which expectations about the "new warfare" are based - weapons precision and
care in targeting - do not reflect actual casualty and damage outcomes on the
battlefield. The basis for making such claims is the technical performance of
the weapons, such as their circular error probable (CEP), which is the radius
of a circle centered on an aim point within which some percentage, usually 50
percent, of weapons fired at the aim point will fall. But this only measures
the relationship between the aim points and impact points as determined in
controlled tests, not the battlefield reality.

     The study notes that the ease with which public discourse has adopted the
language and frame of "precision warfare" is surprising. As noted above, just
a few years ago military professionals would not have described most of the
guided weapons used in the Iraq war as "precision" instruments, reserving this
adjective instead for systems with a CEP of three meters or less. Common,
civilian usage of the term "precision" is even more restrictive. Not many
practices in civilian life that routinely miss their mark by 20 to 40 feet
would be considered "precise" - and especially not those involving the use of
hundreds or thousands of pounds of high-explosives: That the expenditure of
six kilotons of explosives in aerial attacks (and more than this in ground
attacks), some involving guided weapons and some not, should gain the moniker
of "precision warfare" reflects a singular triumph in branding.

     It is little appreciated that "precision" weapons are not error-free.
Many of them have inherent errors in the sense that they reflect limitations
in the systems employed that cannot be removed without improving or changing
the systems. Beyond that other factors contribute to errors, such as bad
intelligence, including intentional deception by allies; mechanical or
electrical malfunctions in guidance, navigation, flight control or bomb
release systems; human error on the part of pilots or ground controllers; and
unexpected or severe weather conditions.

     Furthermore, even if weapons work perfectly they are still likely to
cause damage simply due to their destructive power. This is because they carry
hundreds of pounds of enhanced high-explosives wrapped in hundreds of pounds
of steel. Most everything will be severely killed, damaged or destroyed within
20 meters of a 500-pound bomb blast and 35 meters of a 2,000 lb blast.

     Weapons performance and procedures for limiting collateral damage are
only two variables in a complex equation. Other more important factors are
operational plans and methods, which determine the types of missions that will
be attempted; political-strategic factors, which include the goals for which a
war is fought; and issues of national strategy, which determine the role of
force in a nation's foreign policy.

     These facts, despite precision attack capabilities and specific targeting
procedures, help explain why US military operations have claimed the lives of
50,000 people worldwide (combatants and non-combatants) during the age of
precision warfare (beginning with Desert Storm in 1991, while during the
preceding 14 years overt US operations claimed the lives of approximately
2,000 people).

     In fact the goal of limiting civilian casualties has not been met. The
PDA study notes that the non-combatant fatalities during the one month of
major combat operations in Iraq last year actually outnumbers those suffered
during the three years of the ongoing intifada by the Palestinians against the
Israelis.

     Insofar as the claim by the US that civilian casualties cannot be known,
the study calls it "casualty agnosticism". It found that the US administration
distorted the casualty issue by depreciating the value of information flow
from recent battlefields, categorically dismissing hundreds of detailed
casualty reports and positing an unnecessarily high standard for what
constitutes a useful degree of precision in aggregate casualty estimates.

     In regards to that standard, the study noted: "The proposition that it is
impossible to calculate a casualty figure that is both absolutely certain and
exact is true. True but facile. This truth holds not only for the Afghan and
Iraq conflicts but for all wars and genocides. No one has individually counted
and verified all the victims of the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, for
instance, much less the victims of the World Wars or the Indochina conflicts.
Nonetheless, we accept some of the casualty estimates associated with these
events as sufficiently accurate and precise to usefully inform policy."

     In fact, the flow of open sources of information from the battlefield has
never been richer than in the Afghan and Iraq conflicts. These were the most
intensively reported wars in history.

     The study concludes that the administration's perception management
efforts can only impede a full appreciation of the war's blood cost and its
repercussions, thus making a dispassionate assessment of the war option more
difficult. Bottom line, "The efforts were antithetical both to well-informed
public debate and to sensible policy-making."

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