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September 24, 2001
Civilians
Targets of Revenge
"Draining the Swamp
of Terrorists"
By Robert Jensen and Rahul
Mahajan
It is odd to hear a U.S. secretary of
defense borrow metaphors from Mao Tse-tung during a Washington
press briefing.
But it is frightening when
that metaphor is turned on its head to announce matter-of-factly
that the most powerful nation on earth intends to directly target
civilians, and so few seem to notice or care.
Last week Donald Rumsfeld explained
to reporters that one of the ways the U.S. military intended
to go after terrorist networks was "to drain the swamp
they live in."
The phrase has roots in Mao's
description of guerilla fighters as fish swimming in the sea
of the people. U.S. counterinsurgency experts after World War
II took up the phrase in their strategies of "draining the
sea" to counter guerilla warfare.
Drain the sea: Deprive a fighting
force of cover. Drain the civilian population.
For those unlucky civilians
who make up the sea, to be "drained" mean one of two
things. Either they are forcibly driven out of their villages
and towns, often with their homes, property, and crops destroyed,
or they simply are killed.
In Rumsfeld's formulation,
the sea has become a swamp. But the effect will be the same:
the creation of refugees and/or mass murder.
No matter how often this kind
of direct targeting of civilians is done by cruel and cynical
nations, it is a war crime. Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions
states clearly: "The civilian population shall not be the
object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose
of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are
prohibited."
But many will counter that
when terrorists hide among the people, the rules change. Article
50 of the Conventions: "The presence within the civilian
population of individuals who do not come within the definition
of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian
character."
Though these laws -- and the
moral principles that underlie them -- apply equally to the
United States, our record is not pretty. Counterinsurgency techniques
targeting civilians were "perfected" during the Vietnam
War. Large areas were declared "free-fire zones" in
which civilians were unprotected. To "protect" civilians,
the "strategic hamlet" program herded people out of
villages and into barbed wire-ringed camps. Others were driven
into the camps by B-52 raids on densely populated areas -- what
journalist Bernard Fall described as "unlimited aerial
warfare inside the country at the price of literally pounding
the place to bits."
U.S. allies are fond of the
concept as well. It was a staple of Saddam Hussein's operations
against the Kurds in northern Iraq in the 1980s (back when he
was a friend of the United States because he was training his
guns on Iran, our enemy at the time). Israel employed the same
strategy in Lebanon; in fact, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak
used the same terms in 2000, when he likened fighting terrorism
to "fighting mosquitoes. You can chase them one by one,
but it's not very cost effective. The more profound approach
is to drain the swamp."
Civilians also were the most
common targets of the so-called Contras, a terrorist army created
by the United States in the 1980s to attack Nicaragua because
revolutionaries there had overthrown a brutal U.S.-backed dictator
and dared to try to break out of the U.S. system of control.
The Contras preferred to hit what were called "soft targets"
rather than take on the Nicaraguan army.
Some of the most brutal attempts
to drain the sea were carried out by the U.S.-backed military
regimes of Central America throughout the 1970s and '80s. In
December 1981, an elite battalion of the Salvadoran army destroyed
the village of El Mozote, killing everyone except for one woman
who managed to crawl to safety. Together with similar operations
in nearby villages, the operation left at least 750 dead, none
a guerilla. But that was irrelevant, just as it seems to be
irrelevant to Rumsfeld that the vast majority of Afghanis don't
support Osama bin Laden. A U.S. adviser to the Salvadoran battalion
explained the idea:
"You try to dry those
areas up. You know you're not going to be able to work with
the civilian population up there, you're never going to get a
permanent base there. So you just decide to kill everybody.
That'll scare everybody else out of the zone. It's done more
out of frustration than anything else."
Although there is much talk
in Washington about how this new war of the 21st century cannot
be fought like old wars, military planners seem ready to draw
on old tactics.
It's a safe bet that our secretary
of defense knows this military history. If we assume he does
not choose his words carelessly, then we can conclude that the
illegal and immoral tactics used to combat guerilla warfare will
now be applied to the new enemy, international terrorism.
But a new target does not change
the enduring truth: Under international law -- under any standard
of morality -- we cannot punish civilians simply because they
are unfortunate enough to be near our enemies.
Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the
University of Texas. Rahul Mahajan serves on the National
Board of Peace Action. Both are members of the Nowar
Collective. They can be reached at rahul@tao.ca.
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