Fallujah

It's taken me two days to post anything about the horrific killing of five U.S. military soldiers and four U.S. paramilitary contractors Wednesday in Fallujah, Iraq.

It was a horror show, and I think Paul Bremer and Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said mostly the right things yesterday. Particularly Kimmitt's pledge that the U.S. response would be "deliberate … precise … and overwhelming." ("Precise" here seems to mean "discriminating." Officers really do know their jus in bello criteria.)

Here's the exact quote from the transcript of Kimmitt's briefing:

Well, quite simply, we will respond. We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city. It's going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming. We will not rush in to make things worse. We will plan our way through this and we will reestablish control of that city and we will pacify that city.

The USA Today story the (Gannett) paper I work for ran oddly botches this quote from the general, rendering it: "It will be deliberate and precise and be overwhelming …" Reporter Kevin Johnson's version doesn't distort the meaning of what Kimmitt said, but we still corrected this in our newsroom because of the tradition of wanting the words that appear in quotation marks to be, you know, the actual words that someone said.

Johnson's USAT report also uses the word "civilians" throughout to describe the four U.S. contractors. That's not quite accurate, which is why our paper changed this term to "contractors." As Dana Milbank and Mary Pat Flaherty report in The Washington Post:

The four men brutally slain Wednesday in Fallujah were among the most elite commandos working in Iraq to guard employees of U.S. corporations and were hired by the U.S. government to protect bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers.

These contractors were employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm based in North Carolina. James Dao provides a good backgrounder on Blackwater in The International Herald Tribune.

Private paramilitary contractors now constitute the second largest coalition force operating in Iraq. I have not found a precise figure, but the estimated number of paramilitary security contractors far exceeds the number of British troops now in Iraq. This force is irregular, but it is no more civilian than were my Hessian ancestors who came to America to fight alongside British redcoats.

USAT's Johnson, following the logic of the term civilian, describes the killing of the four contractors as "Wednesday's murders." This too is inaccurate. The killing of these four men was wrong, brutal, cowardly and execrable. And the mob's behavior after the killings was, as Bremer said, "bestial." But they were soldiers who died in a war; they were not murdered.

The United States' increasing reliance on such private military forces muddies the water for those who want to maintain the essential moral significance of the distinction between soldier and civilian, between combatant and noncombatant. (Thousands of U.S. Marines were stationed just outside Fallujah while the bodies of these four contractors were dragged through the streets of the city for hours Wednesday. I wonder if these soldiers would have allowed this to continue unchecked if the four men had been uniformed Marines.)

For more than a year now I've been referring to the occupation of Iraq as "Gaza on the Tigris." Part of what I mean by this is that unquestioned military superiority alone cannot guarantee the stability or security of a region of desperate people who do not wish to be occupied. The failure to respond with force to Wednesday's attacks in Fallujah would send a dangerous signal, but even an "overwhelming" military response will not, cannot "pacify" the city.

Juan Cole, a reliable source for both knowledge and wisdom when it comes to Iraq, outlines what seems to me to be the only real hope for bringing stability to Fallujah:

It seems likely to me that the guerrilla violence will continue for years, since it has a firm class base in the Sunni Arab rentiers who had benefitted from Sunni dominance in the Baath, and to whom the best jobs, infrastructure and most power had been thrown. They are not going to be quietly reduced to a small powerless and much less wealthy minority.

The only hope is political. The Sunni Arabs have to be convinced that they are not playing a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is one where there is only one pie, and it always stays the same size. In a zero-sum game, if your rivals get a bigger piece of the pie, then your piece will inevitably shrink.

But politics does not have to be a zero-sum game. The Iraqi economy has the potential to expand greatly. So the pie won't stay the same size, and Shiites could get richer without robbing the Sunni Arabs. Likewise, in a parliamentary system, the Sunni Arabs could make coalitions with Kurds and moderate Shiites in such a way as to be a key player and to retain a great deal of political power and to forestall the radical Shiites from taking over. A minority can leverage its power by being a swing vote.

Unless the Sunni Arabs are drawn into parliamentary politics and convinced that the new game is not a zero-sum game, the bombs will continue to go off.