The Powell Doctrine: Baghdad/Jenin/My Lai
Heather Wokusch
With the US poised to attack Iraq, it's helpful to
recall what pushed us over the brink last time ... the
invisible steps and the unspoken consequences.
In the fall of 1990, when the US Congress was debating
going to war, Amnesty International (AI) released an
explosive report detailing how Iraqi soldiers had taken
Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and left them to die
on hospital floors. Many US Senators later claimed it
was the Amnesty "dead baby" report that finally
convinced them to use vicious force against the Iraqis.
Minor glitch. It was soon revealed that the Amnesty
report was a complete sham - Kuwaiti propaganda put
together by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton. The Summer
2002 edition of Covert Action Quarterly describes how
political infighting at AI had pitted a board member
(who said the report was too "sloppy" and "inaccurate"
to release) against a high-level official at Amnesty
UK, now suspected of having been an undercover British
intelligence agent, who released the sham report anyway.
Regardless, the attack on Iraq had already begun and
television viewers worldwide were absorbing endless
footage of laser-guided bombs, pinpoint missiles and
other" precision warfare" that miraculously seemed to
destroy machinery without harming civilians. Back home,
flag-waving hysteria followed Operation Desert Storm to
its climax, and returning conquerors, including then
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell,
were feted as national heroes.
Minor glitch. A few months later it was revealed that
actually 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis, many of them
unarmed civilians, had died during the six-week attack,
including tens of thousands mowed down in aerial
assaults as they were trying to flee along what became
nicknamed "The Highway of Death."
Equating civilians and combatants is integral to "The
Powell Doctrine" which recommends using overwhelming
force on the enemy, regardless of civilian casualties.
In his autobiography, Colin Powell discusses the
Vietnam War and explains the benefits of destroying the
food and homes of villagers who might sympathize with
the Viet Cong: "We burned the thatched huts, starting
the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters ... Why were
we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh
had said people were like the sea in which his
guerillas swam. We tried to solve the problem by making
the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war,
what difference does it make if you shot your enemy or
starved him to death?"
Unmentioned is the moral implication of targeting
civilians, or why doing so would make them want to
sympathize with the US.
A few years later, Colin Powell was an up-and-coming
staff officer, assigned to the Americal headquarters at
Chu Lai, Vietnam. He was put in charge of handling a
young soldier, Tom Glen, who had written a letter
accusing the Americal division of routine brutality
against Vietnamese civilians; the letter was detailed,
its allegations horrifying, and its contents echoed
complaints received from other soldiers. Rather than
speaking to Glen about the letter, however, Powell's
response was to conduct a cursory investigation
followed by a report faulting Glen, and concluding, "In
direct refutation of this (Glen's) portrayal, is the
fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the
Vietnamese people are excellent."
Minor glitch. Soon after, news surfaced about the
Americal division's criminal brutality at My Lai, in
which 347 unarmed civilians were massacred; Powell's
memoirs fail to mention the Glen incident.
Fast forward to April 2002, and having risen to
Secretary of State, Colin Powell reported to a US
congressional panel about his visit to the Jenin
refugee camp, site of a recent Israeli attack. Powell
testified, "I've seen no evidence of mass graves ... no
evidence that would suggest a massacre took place ...
Clearly people died in Jenin - people who were
terrorists died in Jenin - and in the prosecution of
that battle innocent lives may well have been lost." In
the same vein, Amnesty International issued a short
release stating that while it appeared "serious
breaches of international human rights and humanitarian
law were committed ... only an independent
international commission of inquiry can establish the
full facts and the scale of these violations." For its
part, the White House also claimed more facts were
needed, and then Bush called Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon a "man of peace."
So in essence, the whole Jenin attack would need to be
swept under the carpet because (since Israel had not
allowed a UN investigation and NGOs had come up with
very little) there was not enough solid information to
support accusations.
Minor glitch. Unmentioned is the fact that the US
military, under the auspices of learning about urban
warfare, had accompanied the Israeli military on its
attack on Jenin (Marine Corps Times, 5-31-2002). Or the
fact that dozens of foreign journalists witnessed 30
Palestinian corpses being buried in a mass grave right
near the hospital. Or the fact that local hospital
personnel describe seeing the Israeli military loading
other corpses "into a refrigerated semi-trailer, and
taking them out of Jenin" (which would answer the
question posed in Amnesty's release, "What was striking
is what was absent. There were very few bodies in the
hospital. There were also none who were seriously
injured, only the 'walking wounded'. Thus we have to
ask: where are the bodies and where are the seriously
injured?'').
Moral of the story? Truth is often the first casualty
of war. Before we hang our hopes on heroes or
unquestioningly believe what we hear from even the most
reliable sources, we need to dig deeper to find the
real story. Second, while the US was appropriate to be
outraged at the targeting of its civilians in the
September 11 attacks, we should extend that outrage to
scenarios in which our government targets, or is
complicit in targeting, civilians elsewhere.
Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer. She can be
contacted via her web site at www.heatherwokusch.com
Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it. -
Mark Twain