The Powell Doctrine: Baghdad/Jenin/My Lai
by Heather Wokusch
August 19, 2002
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, May 3,
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 with a background in
clinical psychology. Her work as been featured in publications and websites
internationally. Heather can be contacted via her website: http://www.heatherwokusch.com/