Catch-22
Revisited
By David Leigh
28 May, 2004
The Guardian
The
horrors of American military conduct are being documented every day.
But one aspect of the leaked US report into prison abuse in Iraq has
been little noticed. General Taguba, head of the investigation, painted
a picture of an army which can be not only brutal, but is also riddled
with incompetence.
Some of the details in his dossier read dismayingly like a chapter from
Catch-22, Joseph Heller's second world war black comedy about the lunatics
and shysters who held men's lives in their hands at a fictional military
base.
What is one to make,
for example, of the way Captain Leo Merck is said to have behaved? Captain
Merck, in charge of a military police unit, is alleged to have spent
his time in Iraq taking "nude pictures of female soldiers without
their knowledge".
His colleague, Captain
Damaris Morales, is ticked off for failing to train his troops. One
of them proved unable, it is alleged, to get out of his vehicle without
accidentally letting off his M-16 rifle. Taguba drily notes: "Round
went into fuel tank."
The commanders were
at each other's throats. General Janis Karpinski was barely on speaking
terms with Colonel Thomas Pappas from military intelligence, who had
ousted her from control of the Abu Ghraib cells. "There was clear
friction and lack of effective communication," says Taguba. "No
clear delineation of responsibility between commands, little coordination
at the command level."
He found General
Karpinski "extremely emotional" and was disturbed, he said,
that she seemed unwilling to accept that any problems were caused by
poor leadership. She claimed she visited the prison regularly but did
not do so, and saw very little of her individual soldiers. Battalion
commander Jerry Phillabaum was "extremely ineffective". His
unit had to be run day-to-day by the major below him, as "numerous
witnesses confirm", but he was allowed to continue nominally in
charge.
The general's two
staff officers, Major Hinzman and and Major Green, were "essentially
dysfunctional". Despite complaints from demoralised colleagues,
they stayed in post. The legal officer, judge advocate Lt Col James
O'Hare, "appears to lack initiative and was unwilling to accept
responsibility for any of his actions".
It was, perhaps,
unsurprising that armed solders wandered round the prison in civilian
clothes; that logbooks were filled with "unprofessional entries
and flippant comments"; that they "wrote poems and other sayings
on their helmets"; that old friendships replaced the military chain
of command; and that saluting of officers was "sporadic".
Those dishevelled
non-saluters at the bottom of the pile - ex-truck drivers, chicken processors
and car mechanics - received no training in the guarding of prisoners.
They were under-manned, thanks to the incompetence of their superiors.
They were provided with few comforts, were too hot, and under constant
mortar attack. They were bitter because they had been prevented from
going home, as promised. This too was due to the incompetence of their
senior commanders, who failed to predict the upsurge in violence last
year.
No one disputes
that incompetence went far higher than the six who started tor turing
inmates on suggestions from private-enterprise interrogators, and also,
it appears, merely to amuse themselves.
During the inquiries,
the overall commander in Iraq, Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, made a scapegoat
of one general, claiming that lack of clear standards, proficiency and
leadership "permeates the brigade". But the evidence laid
out suggests military incompetence went far higher and wider than that.
Why are US soldiers
of such poor quality? One reason for the alarming level of incompetence
appears to be that many officers and foot-soldiers are not professionals.
They are two-week-a-year reservists. The 320th military police battalion,
at the heart of the abuse scandal, was a reserve unit based near Scranton,
Pennsylvania. Karpinski, in charge of the brigade, was a corporate management
consultant in civilian life. Phillabaum, in charge of the battalion,
was a reservist. The company commander, Captain Donald Reese, who "failed
to properly supervise his soldiers", was a salesman.
And, as Naomi Klein
has pointed out on these pages, many troops were from the poorest parts
of rural West Virginia. They had often joined the reserve to pay their
way through college, or to get medical care.
The present US administration,
led by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is trying to exploit these
200,000 army reservists, to get a smaller, lighter, cheaper, full-time
army, as well as seeking to privatise many jobs out to commercial firms.
"The nature
of reserve service as a purely one weekend a month, two weeks in the
summer, training group of soldiers that never gets mobilised over a
20-30 year period is over," says Lt Gen James Helmly, its commander.
"That is not the world we live in." The army reserve, he adds,
should be seen as a good business deal: "The cost for 100 active
duty soldiers to maintain readiness for a year is approximately seven
times greater than that of 100 army reserve soldiers."
Cheap they may be.
But this motley collection of part-timers have now sparked the worst
US military scandal since Vietnam. It is they who are accused of being
the true face of the force which President Bush claims is bringing freedom
to Iraq.
Like several other
Rumsfeldian fantasies, it seems the idea that US neo-imperial soldiering
can be conducted painlessly and on a grand scale leads to disaster when
it comes into contact with reality on the ground.