COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The Washington Post has some coverage of the recent airstrikes near the city of Ramadi.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/17/AR2005101700808_3.html

The facts are always hard to ascertain. And doubly hard to ascertain when you're circling a mile overhead at 300 mph.

But the optics available on modern fighter jets are sophisticated enough now to do some impressive things, and the modern fighter aircraft is now refined enough to be a valuable real-time intelligence-gathering and firepower resource on the counterinsurgency battlefield. I know because I've seen them used in that very capacity. (Nevermind just how!)

Whether they are a cost-effective resource in the routine combat patrol role in a guerrilla fight is another question. But they are valuable in that they can simultaneously provide eyes-on, real-time intelligence, and deliver enough firepower to destroy a good-sized house within seconds.

A helicopter cannot deliver the same immediate punch, though it can call for artillery fires. But that will take a few minutes, and by that time the cockroaches may well have scattered.

I suspect the truth is somewhere between the military's official account and those of the civilians in the area. I have no doubt noncombatants were killed, and that's tragic and I hate that. All of us do.

I also have no doubt that we must kill the insurgents where they are. And if the people choose to allow those insurgents to live among them, then they will pay the price.

That's not to say I'm insensitive to civilian casualties. Every measure must be taken to minimize civilian casualties. But giving the insurgents a free pass to plant IEDs that themselves kill civilians, because we will not attack them where they expose themselves, is simply not an option.

The force must be proportional. We will not drop a daisy cutter on an urban apartment complex to kill two guys holed up inside (a rocket through the right window will work fine). But if we find these cockroaches, we will kill them.

The Iraqi people understand that.

If the military says they're confident that 70 insurgents were killed in airstrikes in an urban area, and that it knows of no civilian deaths, well, that just defies credulity.

But if 13 insurgents were among the dead - as confirmed even by civilian sources in Ramadi, then them's the breaks. An entire squad or light platoon sized element is going to draw some firepower. The best thing Ramadi citizens can do is call the coalition and let us know where they're staying so the place can be raided, or hit with smaller ordnance.

And if 20 men were caught red-handed planting bombs in craters, then that's a whole platoon, and hitting them with whatever ordnance is available on the spot is a no-brainer. And the civilians should have engaged them, or called the police and gotten out of the way. If they were open enough about it for them to be seen from an F-18, they were open enough about it for local civilians to know what was going on, too.

And if the insurgents were bold enough to operate like this right in their neighborhood, then they were getting at least tacit support in that very neighborhood (remember, this wasn't the first IED attack there. They were there just a few days ago, and the neighborhood didn't stop them), then the people in the neighborhood must bear the responsibility for their own apathy.

They know who the bad guys are. If they don't stop them, then we will have to.

These weren't local punters, either. The Ramadi hospital is confirming that 13 of the dead were members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. This buttresses the pilot's account (He counted 20. It might have been 13, or it might be that some civilians were misidentified. It's probably not the case that 70 Al Qaeda got out of five vehicles, unless they dressed in clown suits.

Whether to bomb the house of a noncombatant who had offered to open his house to wounded insurgents seeking medical care is an interesting question. Presumeably, we had some intel suggesting that was the case. I'm speculating here, but chances are good, in my view, that local Iraqis or allied forces had given this guy a chance to turn informant, and he refused.

Doom on you, motherf****r.

There's no way that his supporting the insurgency in other ways could be ruled out, and medical care is freely available from coalition forces and from the Ramadi hospital. Maybe Ramadi hospital will tip coalition forces and maybe they won't, but that is a calculus for Al Qaeda's commanders to work out.

Al Qaeda exhibits no qualms whatsoever about violating the law of land warfare. The U.S. need not stoop to their level, nor need the Iraqis. But neither should Al Qaeda expect the least bit of quarter.

It's two dogs in a pit, at this point. And we're the bigger dog.

Doom on you, motherf****r.

Splash, out

Jason

UPDATE: The NY Times is reporting that the insurgents were spotted rolling artillery shells into the craters at 1:30 pm. That means the insurgents had no qualms about operating in that neighborhood in broad daylight, in the same spot as the attack last weekend that killed 5 soldiers. That's chutzpah. That's also pretty damning evidence that this neighborhood itself was complicit.

If these guys were there trying to do this in the dead of night, I could cut the neighborhood some slack. But these people made their bed. They can lie in their bloodsoaked sheets.

I remember driving through the area just east of Ramadi a couple of times a day. Where the kids in other neighborhoods would smile and wave, the kids in this neighborhood would wave their sandals at us in the Iraqi version of the finger. This is along Hwy 10, just east of the arches, for those few readers who know the real estate.

It was not in the 1-124's sector. The area just north of that was largely in our sector, though, and is called the Sofia district. It is known to be a very rough area, and word was that even Saddam's security forces were afraid to go in there. The area was patrolled and regularly fought over by our Charlie company, and the area was host to near nightly mortar attacks on Combat Outpost, which was home to Charlie Company and about thirty guys from my own company.

The area around the arches west of Ramadi was a regular site for IEDs during our tenure there, and some of the wounded from those engagements were treated by our medics. Some of them, from the 1-16th, I think, never made it out of our aid station. Our medics don't like to talk about that much, but it happened, and it hurts.

I'm not terribly sympathetic to that neighborhood's complaints.

I also never met an 8 year old who deserved to lose her life.