Dangerous
Liasons
By Peter Beaumont
Guardian
22 June, 2003
There was a picture last
week in London's Evening Standard newspaper of a group of young American
soldiers. It brought me up short. I had turned inside from the front
page story about a group of American soldiers who had admitted that
they were so indiscriminate with their fire that they had killed civilians,
perhaps a lot of them, in the battle for Baghdad. The young men looked
like any other of the US troops I had met in Iraq. And then a face jumped
out. One of the group seemed somehow familiar. Scouring the text I realised
that I had met men from this unit as I drove into Baghdad. And how,
by their own account, they had almost killed me.
It had been a strangely chaotic day when I ran into the men of 3/15th
batallion of the 3rd Infantry Division, a support unit, that had followed
the first tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles into Baghdad's outskirts
with petrol tankers, food and ammunition. We had driven up from the
southern port city of Umm Qasr close to the Kuwaiti border, where we
had been camping outside the port while we covered the fall of Basra.
But as the news from Baghdad became more urgent we decided to head north
and try to reach Baghdad on the same day. Four car-loads of us set out
- the majority Americans - following the 3rd Infantry Division's main
supply route until we emerged on a deserted motorway not far from Baghdad's
airport.
The first intimation of trouble
came a little later as we tried to pass a burned out Iraqi tank blocking
the north bound carriageway. Passing the tank a group of Americans nearby
fired a 'warning shot' that passed close to the lead car, so close in
fact that a furious row emerged between the American driver and the
gunner and commander of the Bradley, who simply laughed it off.
They let us pass and we continued
into Baghdad's suburbs past a scene of utter devastation - burning buildings,
burning US military vehicles and bodies by the road - spead out between
three motorway intersections.
It was late in the day and
the fierce fires and smoke in the twilight gave the scene a hellish
glow. But for all that the American tank crews we passed, most of them
mobbed by curious Iraqi civilians, waved at us cheerfully enough and
so we carried on hoping to reach the hotels of Baghdad city centre where
we hoped to spend the night.
Aware that we were approaching
through a fighting army's rear we took it very slowly the flashers on
our cars turned on, with white flags and in cars marked with taped on
orange panels and taped on cehvrons to signify that we were friendly.
We crossed a bridge and that
is when things suddenly turned nasty. Heading down the bridge towards
a luxurious area of palaces we didn't see the wire perimeter across
the road ahead or the Bradley in the dusk. We heard the warning shot
and stopped the vehicles dead. But something was wrong about the soldiers
ahead. We could see them deploying and bringing weapons to bear on our
vehicles. And suddenly we very afraid.
Sometimes you make decisions
on the hop. Several of us jumped out of our vehicles and strated screaming
'Media!' 'American journalists!' including a tall, blond US woman reporter.
So tall and blond - I am convinced - that she could not be mistaken
for anything else. As they ran towards us and searched us and our vehicles
I recognised something - that these men were both very scared and very
angry, the worst kind of soldiers to encounter.
They led us to their headquarters
where they fed us and let us sleep. They seemed nice boys. But something
the gunner on the Bradley said, scared me. He apologised and told us
that he had been about to kill us. He said he had his finger on the
trigger. A second later, it would have been too late for an apology.
Later when I went back to
visit them they told their stories. Of a terrifying battle with Arab
volunteers. Of vehicles destroyed on both sides. They said they had
been driven at by suicide cars. What they did not say was what they
later told the Evening Standard: that among the hundreds that they had
killed in their 8 hour battle on that motorway and in the days that
followed, many were certainly unarmed civilians killed for being in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
I should have guessed. Among
those who I interviewed in Baghdad's hospitals over those few days were
occupants of cars - many of them children - whose vehicles had been
destroyed. Gun camera footage broadcast round the world showed tanks
and Bradleys engaging any car they came across as they drove into Baghdad.
At Nasiriyah too American troops had admitted the same thing. Faced
with the Saddam Fedayeen, in their civilian clothes, anyone was assumed
to be an enemy and killed.
A young Marine admitted it
to me himself outside the main complex of Baghdad's hospitals: how his
unit had shot up a car approaching a checkpoint too fast. The only survivor
was a boy with his face cut in half.
So what happened then in
the advance into Baghdad - and what is happening still as American soldiers
fire on crowds of demonstrators? The answer struck me recently. The
world's biggest and most formidible army - the most technologically
advanced - lacks discipline regarding its own rules of engagement and
an ability - the critical ability - to properly identify targets before
engagement.
This is not a new problem.
It is behind the too frequent incidences of US friendly fire on its
allies; behind the arrogance with which US forces treated many Iraqis.
But the result is a recklessness
and a lack of care for civilian casualties that borders on the criminal.
When I look at that picture
of those young men from the 3/15th, when I remember their terrible baptism
by fire in the battle on that motorway, I would like to feel more sympathy
for them than I do. They are good men most of them, but they have put
on the green suit and taken up the gun. And they have failed in the
terrible responsibilty that this confers upon them.