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by Conn Hallinan
In 1805, the French army out maneuvered, outsmarted, and outfought the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz. Three years later it would flounder against a rag-tag collection of Spanish guerrillas.
In 1967, it took six days for the Israeli army to smash Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and seize the West Bank, the Golan Heights,
and the Sinai Peninsula. In 2006, a Shiite militia fought the mightiest army in the Middle East to a bloody standstill in Lebanon.
In 1991, it took four days of ground combat for the United States to crush Saddam Hussein's army in the Gulf War. U.S. losses were 148 dead and 647 wounded. After more than five years of war in Iraq, U.S. losses are approaching 4,000, with over 50,000 wounded; 2007 is already the deadliest year of the war for the United States.
In each case, a great army won a decisive victory only to see that victory canceled out by what T.E. Lawrence once called the "algebra of occupation." Writing about the British occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire's collapse in World War I, Lawrence put his finger on the formula that has doomed virtually every military force that has tried to quell a restive population.
Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has cited Lawrence to this effect: "Rebellion must have an unassailable base…it must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form a disciplined army of occupation too small to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in a striking force, and 98 percent passive sympathy. Granted mobility, security…time and doctrine…victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive."
There is an inexorable trajectory to this process. An army vanquishes another army, only to find that wars don't always end when generals surrender and capitals fall. When a few locals take up arms because they object to being occupied by "aliens," the occupiers act like armies, which are designed to kill people, not to win their hearts and minds.
So the occupiers break down doors and search for weapons, terrorizing and humiliating people in the process. They call in air strikes, which kill innocent bystanders. They choke off commerce and impose curfews to teach the locals a lesson, lessons that are never learned. For over 800 years the English beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hung hundreds of thousands of Irish, and it made the natives not the slightest bit quieter or more respectful. Indeed it made them quite the opposite.
In this process of trying to get the occupied to accept defeat, a certain corruption of spirit begins to seep into the soul of an army, transforming it from a war-fighting machine into a kind of monster.
Listen to some of these voices.
Reporter Chris Hedges, who talked with solders, officers, and medical personnel in Iraq, said his interviews "revealed disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops: innocents terrorized during midnight raids, civilian cars fired upon when they got too close to supply columns. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of fear and even hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom, losing ground and beleaguered, have, in effect, declared war on all Iraqis." Sgt. Camilo Mejia told Hedges that, as far as the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, "This sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."
Except among the survivors and relatives, of course, who now know who their enemy is. "Our children are being killed. Our homes are being destroyed. We are bombed. What should we do?" asks Abdul Qader, who lost seven family members in a June 29 U.S. air strike that killed 60 people in southern Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
"The Americans are killing and destroying a village just in pursuit of one person [Osama bin-Ladin]," one man told The New York Times. "So now we have understood that the Americans are a curse on us, and they are here just to destroy Afghanistan."
Israeli psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen and psychology professor Joel Elitzur interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories. They found that the soldiers routinely engaged in murder, assault, threats and humiliation, and many of them enjoyed it.
"The truth is that I love this mess-I enjoy it. It is like being on drugs," one soldier told them. Another said, "What is great is that you don't have to follow any law or rule. You feel you are the law, you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories, you are God."
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