The Independent London, Iraq on the brink of anarchy By Robert Fisk in Fallujah NOT content with surrounding the largest Sunni city west of Baghdad with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and heavy machine guns, US forces used Apache helicopters to attack the Shia Muslim slums of Shoula yesterday, sent dozens of their main battle tanks into the hovels of Sadr City and then slapped an arrest warrant on the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr — who must dearly have wanted the United
States to do just that. David Irving comments: I HAVE been troubled by the curious references to American “civilian contractors” which have cropped up ever since four of them were killed under horrific circumstances in Fallujah last week. The pictures were sickening enough, although unlike the television moguls and newsroom producers we in the West have not seen the worst stuff; I am sure that DVDs of it are already on sale in the street markets of Iraq.
The scenes were probably as gruesome as any to be seen in Iraq after we, the “coalition of the willing,” dropped our napalm bombs on villages, or sent cruise missiles into private family villas where Ahmad Chalabi ( above ) and his henchmen had wrongly told us to find Saddam Hussein and his friends. What however is a civilian contract ?
From American movies like The Godfather and The Sopranos, we are familiar with the notion of putting a contract out on somebody, and these people seem to have been not unassociated with killing in the recent past, as their curriculum vitae all seem to include an impressive period of employment by Special Forces, or Seals, or whatever other name commandos nowadays operate under.
MY problem is this: In the eyes of military and international law are they combatants, protected by the 1949 convention, or are they not? The four hapless victims were said by Dan Senor , ( right ), the Hebrew-University educated chief spokesman for Paul Bremer , to have been escorting a food convoy.
That is in itself a rather curious occupation for burly, able-bodied men being paid rather more than the average US Army grunt; it is a fair guess that these four men had more than peashooters, slingshots, and B B guns in their pockets. Why are the press not commenting on the curious fact that the Americans are employing “civilian contractors” as soldiers in plain clothes, call them whatever else you will. Because that is a risky business.
In the eyes of international law they may be seen as francs tireurs, liable to be summarily executed if caught in military engagements. The Germans faced precisely the same problem in 1944, when the Americans captured numbers of civilian (or at least non-military) workers for Xaver Dorsch ‘s huge Todt Organisation, the body that constructed the autobahns in peacetime, and then the fortifications, weapons sites, etc., in the occupied countries during the war.
Although the OT workers wore swastika armbands which carried the words Organisation Todt , the Americans considered them to be francs tireurs if caught on the battlefield and executed more than a few of them until protests were lodged through the Protecting Power, if my memory of the archive material serves me right (or did Dorsch tell me that himself when I interviewed him?)
During the invasion of Normandy in 1944 — oops, “liberation” is the approved word — the Americans adopted an unusual tactic, one used by the Germans in their own occupied territories: young French women had to bare their right shoulder, and if a bruise was seen on it — resulting from a poorly handled rifle recoil — they were deemed to have engaged in unlawful combat, and shot on the spot. Nobody suggests that these four American civilians were in fact francs tireurs.
But the law becomes very murky when a military government arms its own civilians and sends them into a battle zone, undistinguished by uniform or insignia. Why weren’t four uniformed US soldiers sitting in that SUV, escorting the “food convoy” that day? Are the Americans unwilling to show their own uniform in battle zones now? A reader has helpfully drawn my attention to this book by P W Singer Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003).
Gun battles in Sadr City overnight had cost the lives of up to 40 Iraqis and at least eight Americans, but in the sewage-damp streets yesterday, they were handing out letters, allegedly written by the Sunni townspeople of Fallujah, newly surrounded by 1,200 marines. “We support you, our brothers, in your struggle,” the letters said. If they are authentic, it should be enough to make the US proconsul, Paul Bremer , wonder if he can ever extricate Washington from Iraq.
The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920. The Americans are achieving it in just under a year. Anarchy has been a condition of our occupation from the very first days when we let the looters and arsonists destroy Iraq’s infrastructure and history. But that lawlessness is now coming