Military Occupations and Their Effects

This article was originally published here: http://whatsleftofreligion.com/2016/07/25/military-occupations-effects/

The Nature of Military Occupation

Military occupations are never tolerated by the occupied. The British Armed Forces were deployed in Northern Ireland in 1969 at the request of the Unionist Government of Northern Ireland. These soldiers were welcomed by the Catholic population of Ireland in response to Protestant riots and terrorism against Catholic marches for civil rights at the time. However, by 1971 the same Catholics, organized as the IRA, were fighting the British in a brutal campaign of terrorism.

From Wikipedia’s article Provisional Irish Republican Army:

…the IRA was responsible for 1,768 deaths, about 47% of the total conflict deaths. Of these, 934 (about 52%) were members of the British security forces, while 639 (about 36%) were civilians (including 61 former members of the security forces).

Source: David McKittrick et al. Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Random House, 2006. pp. 1551-55

Military occupations are always brutal. There is no other kind. The United State’s occupation of Iraq has been shockingly brutal. Below are a few anecdotal examples of terror inflicted on civilians by US Marines in military occupied Iraq:

1. Haditha massacre
2. Mahmudiyah rape and killings
3. Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre
4. Hamdania incident
5. Ishaqi incident

6. “…the victims had been taken to the hospital and one of them looked deceased. I asked them [the American soldiers] why they fired into the crowd. Without saying a word, the soldier turned away from me and asked the gathering group of Iraqi men if the “gunman” was shot. No one answered. I interrupted and said that as far as I knew — and I was standing next to the man who was shot — there was no gunman in the crowd. (Four other journalists in the crowd at the time told me later that the only shots fired were from the American soldiers.) Apparently satisfied, the Americans walked away.”

   Reporter Scott Anger reporting for PBS Frontline

More exhaustive lists of these incidents are easy to find but a Human Rights Watch report on the topic Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad caused by US Forces provides numerous “case-studies” and gives a good sense of the scope and regularity of these abuses. From the opening summary:

The individual cases of civilian deaths documented in this report reveal a pattern by U.S. forces of over-aggressive tactics, indiscriminate shooting in residential areas and a quick reliance on lethal force. In some cases, U.S. forces faced a real threat, which gave them the right to respond with force. But that response was sometimes disproportionate to the threat or inadequately targeted, thereby harming civilians or putting them at risk.
In all of these scenarios, U.S. soldiers can be arrogant and abusive. They have been seen putting their feet on detained Iraqis’ heads—a highly insulting offense. Male soldiers sometimes touch or even search female Iraqis, also a culturally unacceptable act.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the British peace-keeping force during Ireland’s Troubles turned deadly as well. From Wikipedia’s article Operation Banner:

The British military was responsible for about 10% of all deaths in the conflict. According to one study, the British military killed 306 people during Operation Banner, 156 (~51%) of whom were unarmed civilians. Another study says the British military killed 301 people, 160 (~53%) of whom were unarmed civilians. Of the civilians killed, 61 were children. Only four soldiers were convicted of murder while on duty in Northern Ireland. All were released after serving two or three years of life sentences and allowed to rejoin the Army. Senior Army officers privately lobbied successive Attorney Generals not to prosecute soldiers, and the Committee on the Administration of Justice says there is evidence soldiers were given some level of immunity from prosecution.

Source: Ulster University’s Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) (also)
Here are a few reasons I can think of that explain why occupations are so brutal:

1. Like all terrorism the behavior of only a few “bad actors” is sufficient to thoroughly terrorize a whole population
2. The Stanford prison experiment highlights the way human beings are inclined to suspend their otherwise sound moral judgments when lording power over other people (see also).
3. Soldiers are generally young, trained to kill and can be expected to make mistakes when found in a state of unremitting stress, discomfort and fear.

The occupied rebel against their occupiers because occupation feels like state-sponsored terror. Moreover, the tendency for rebellion against power by the powerless seems to me to be a basic characteristic of human nature. “Healthy” human beings do not tolerate systemic abuse, abasement and marginalization and will go to great lengths to achieve self-determination. Terrorism and military occupation go hand-in-hand.

Whether or not an occupation is justified in an entirely different question. A brutal occupation is not necessarily illegitimate or unnecessary. However, the reality of occupation needs to be understood by the general public so that its worst effects can be mitigated and the value gained from occupation can be weighed against its moral and human cost.

The Social Effects of Occupation

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault outlines the emergence of the modern prison system and the “delinquent class” of people that inhabit it. Foucault, like legal scholar Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow and others, shed light on the way large portions of the poor black population in the United States have been systematically criminalized, incarcerated and excluded from the project of social mobility.

What emerges from these analyses is a template through which a superfluous population can be effectively eliminated. Uneven policing and incarceration (for minor drug offenses for example) inculcates an adversarial relationship with authority, surrounds the incarcerated with other criminal aspects of society, tears apart families, creates long-term obstacles for successful education and employment, and brands the incarcerated individual as a felon for the rest of his or her life leaving them vulnerable to other forms of discrimination and social exclusion. The inevitable effect of mass incarceration is more incarceration, more criminality and more violence. The consequences of the US’s “war on crime” policies are dramatic:

“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.” (source)

The violent crime rate in the mostly black city of Detroit was 21.23 per 1,000 (15,011 violent crimes) in 2012, that same year the virtually all-white city of Grosse Point, Michigan nearby reported a rate of only 1.12 per 1,000 (6 violent crimes) (source).

On the other side of criminalization is a climate of fear and racism of the powerful toward the powerless. Affluent neighborhoods expect local police to patrol and protect them from anyone who might try to enter from a lower-class neighborhood. The constant barrage of local news reports on inner-city violence promote a narrative that the lower class is a dangerous population that must be contained. Before World War II our delinquent class would be called genetically predisposed toward violence, but in a Post-World War II world that same behavior is called a “cultural predisposition.” The racist implications of both sentiments are the same. The project of criminalization produces more segregation, fear and racism toward the criminalized.

The ingredients for criminalizing a population and the creation of a delinquent class are segregation, an adversarial relationship between members of that population and law enforcement, incarceration, dire economic conditions and a general climate of powerlessness. Many or all of these ingredients may be found in military occupations. The Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank for example, are fully excluded from the prosperity enjoyed by their occupiers. Israeli policing and law-enforcement in those areas generates antagonism and continuously underscores the powerlessness of that population. From the International Labor Organization for example:

The Palestinian people continue to suffer under an occupation that has jeopardized the attainment of their basic human rights and human security, as well as any meaningful progress in human development. The economic situation has also been exacerbated by a continued divide between the West Bank and Gaza, stagnating economic growth, persistent fiscal crises, higher unemployment, as well as increased poverty and food insecurity. 

Following economic gains primarily attributed to the upsurge in construction activity linked to the tunnel economy in Gaza during the 2008 to 2011 period, gross domestic product (GDP) growth has stagnated. Increased political instability, the absence of any further easing of Israeli-imposed restrictions on economic activity, as well as Israel’s 2012 military operation in Gaza have all contributed to raising the rate of unemployment from 21 per cent in 2011 to 24.5 per cent in 2013. (source)

Young jobseekers face an even more serious challenge as the youth unemployment rate reached almost 40 per cent for young men and 63 per cent for young women in 2014. More than 70 per cent of Palestinians are under 30 years of age and they are facing very serious difficulties in finding a job after completing their education. (source)

Due to an inequitable distribution of water between Israel and the Palestinians territories, Palestinians endure water shortages and rationing. The predictable outcome of these conditions is anger, criminality and violence on the one hand, ghettoization, harsher policing and racism on the other.

On Israel’s Military Occupation

The West Bank was seized by Israel from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, during the Six-Day War in 1967. The West Bank was never annexed by Israel and she maintains a large military presence there to this day. In 2005 Israel withdrew its military from the Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, the United Nations still considers Gaza to be under Israeli military occupation because Israel controls Gaza’s borders, waters and airspace.

The term “occupation” is understandably upsetting to people who are pro-Israel because it implies that Israel doesn’t belong in these places. And indeed, there are some pro-Palestinian voices that fight the occupation from the perspective that Israel does not belong in the region altogether. Nevertheless, “military occupation” is an accurate label for the way Israel restricts the flow of goods in and out of the territories, and policies the movement of people through overcrowded and demeaning security checkpoints. Israel’s anti-terrorism policing in the territories is aggressive, preemptive and violent (from 15:15 in the video, one soldier’s candid testimony). To the world, this is a definitional example of military occupation and we don’t do ourselves any favors by staying oblivious to that fact.

None of this is to say that the Israeli occupation is unjust or unnecessary. There are circumstances when military occupations are legitimate. The standard pro-occupation position is that the occupation is necessary for security reasons, and indeed this is a defensible argument. Moreover, one can argue that the Israeli government has taken steps to end the occupation and these projects proved to be impossible for one reason or another. However, it’s important to understand the implications of occupation so an informed cost-benefit analysis can be made for the short and long-term.

We are obviously distraught by terrorism emanating from the occupied territories, but we shouldn’t be surprised. When we think about Israel’s current policies, it’s critical to recognize that terrorism against Israelis is their inevitable side-effect. No matter how deeply we care about Israel, no matter how intractable the conflict seems, no matter how necessary the military occupation appears to be, we shouldn’t act surprised by:

1. Racism and anti-Palestinian violence flourish in the settler movement (Duma arson attack, Israeli price tag attacks).
2. The overwhelming consensus among recent heads of the Shin Bet, (Israel’s Security Agency), is that Israel’s policy in the Palestinian territories is damaging to security of the country and should be reformed (source, documentary on this topic).
3. Prominent Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote: “Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions… A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations. Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.” (source)
4. Human Right Watch and other independent human rights organizations incessantly publish reports about horrendous abuses perpetrated by Israeli security forces in the occupied territories, eg: source, source, source.
5. The whole international community condemns the occupation as unjust and illegal.

The path forward isn’t simple, but if we are to achieve a more peaceful and equitable future for the region, it will be through honest and rigorous introspection, an openness to the narrative of others, and the courage to think creatively about the challenges we face.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins

At a time when trust in the American news media is at historic lows, The Forever War is a demonstration of the invaluable journalism that is so necessary for being informed about the world and makes democracy possible. Before reading this book I knew almost nothing about my country’s war in Iraq and I didn’t know how little I knew. The way the US was operating in Iraq, its agendas and processes, the personalities entrusted with the success or failure of the project, the enemies we faced, the experience of Iraqi civilians caught in the conflict, the potential or lack thereof for installing a Democracy in the wake of Saddam Hussein, the reality of the conflict on the ground, the causalities of the conflict, the experience of our troops, etc. 

The book covers the initial invasion of Iraq until 2008, so it doesn't speak directly to the rise of ISIS in Iraq, but it gives invaluable context necessary for understanding why ISIS happened.

The book opens with the author’s experience of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City. After describing the carnage around him, Filkins reflects:

All those street vendors who worked near the World Trade Center, from all those different countries, selling falafel and schwarma. When they heard the planes and watched the towers they must have thought the same as I did: that they’d come home (p. 45).

The Forever War gives us access to a place where terror and bombs are a fixture of day-to-day life. In describing the terror attacks that permeated Iraqi cities shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein:

They started to come in waves. Four a day. Ten a day. Twelve a day. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Sometimes, all of them before breakfast….No one wanted to stand in a crowd anymore. No one wanted to stand in line. Every morning the Iraqis who worked for the Americans in the Green Zone lined up for security checks before they were allowed inside, and the lines stretched for hundreds of yards into the streets, sometimes for hours….One after the other, the car bombs flew into the lines. One after another, men wearing puffy jackets wandering into the lines, sweaty and nervous, mumbling to themselves, then exploding.

After a while, everything started to sound like a bomb. A door slamming in the house sounded like a bomb. A car back-firing sounded like a bomb. Sometimes it felt like the sounds of bombs and the call to prayer were the only sounds the country could produce, its own strange national anthem (p. 174).

Like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, this book is written in a style that is concise and understated, but paints a vivid picture of unfathomable suffering – human beings in the orbit of anarchy and violence. There are no poetic flourishes, only harsh and haunting experiences from which the mind reels. In one episode, Filkins maneuvering with a group marines at night describes the scene of their commander accidentally approving a massive air strike on their own position and noticing the mistake just seconds before the whole company is annihilated. In a separate episode, after a fire-fight with an insurgent shooting at American troops from a minaret, Filkin’s and his photographer Ashley start running toward the minaret to get a picture of the dead insurgent.

…Ash and I stepped to go through the door when a pair of Marines stepped in front of us. We’ll go first, they said….and they bounded up the stairs. Ashley with his camera fell in behind them and I was behind Ashley.

…The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backwards, falling onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face. Three of us tumbled backward out of the doorway….The shot had come from farther up the stairs. A very loud shot. Then tumbling and screaming and then quiet. The guy who had fired was in the minaret, at the top of the stairs, sitting up there.

Filkins goes on to describe a scene of panic and chaos as marines storm the minaret to rescue Miller, the shot American soldier trapped inside.

Again and again they went up, Goggin and the others, and there were more shots and more dust and more loud fucks. I wondered how many people were going to die to save Miller, who was shot for a picture. The insurgents didn’t leave their dead behind, and neither did the marines….Maybe the whole platoon would die, I thought.

Eventually:

Miller appeared. Two marines had pulled him out, Goggin one of them, chocking and coughing…Miller was on his back; he’d come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe, with the two sides jiggling.
“Please tell me he’s not dead,” Ash said. “Please tell me.”
“He’s dead,” I said.

 As they are running for cover through a storm of bullets:

“I want to die,” I heard Ashley say. “I hope they shoot me.” (p. 209-210)

Later in the book, Filkins meets and is received warmly by Miller’s parents.

In addition to describing the experience of combat, this book is about the reality of military occupation and doomed project of nation-building in Iraq. The extravagant aims of America’s investment into Iraqi society are undermined by shocking levels of corruption and incompetence and chaos at every level. From a meeting between the American army leadership and Iraqi provincial government officials:

They moved on to the next topic: the bank robbery. “Yesterday, about 10 billion Iraqi dinars disappeared from the Rafidain Bank in downtown Ramadi,” one of the marines said. “That’s about $7 million.”
“It’s most of the bank’s deposits,” Rashid said.
“How did they do that?” Colonel MacFarland asked. “There’s an American overwatch post right next door. You’d need several trucks to carry out that much money. Did anyone see anything?”
“Apparently no one saw anything,” Governor Rashid said.
“There were more than 150 people in the bank that day,” Colonel Corte said. “That doesn’t sound right to me, Governor.”
The governor agreed.
“It is hard to believe that with this much military presence next door, they could do this,” Rashid said. “It must have been an inside job.”
MacFarland weighed in again. “People’s life savings were in there,” he said. “Were the deposits insured?”
The governor allowed himself a small smile.
“In Iraq, we don’t have that,” he said.
After an hour, the meeting ended. We stood up and gathered near the front door.
A marine gave the usual warning.
“Sniper area – run!” he shouted, and everyone leaving the meeting ran (p. 311-312).

Filkins describes brutal and dangerous policing in which soldiers conduct door-by-door raids, often netting no weapons and no arrests and characterized by Filkins as: “Americans making enemies faster than they could kill them” (153).

The tenor of this project is well summed up by a Colonel Nathan Sassaman:

“I think we are close,” he said. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

Filkins, shocked by this suggestion, asks Sassaman if he really thinks that “fear and violence” is what is needed to rebuild Iraq. Sassaman confirms this is what he thinks. On the immense cultural divide separating the Iraqi people from their American occupiers:

Some of Sassaman’s soldiers had begun throwing around the phrase, “the Arab mind,” which they had picked up from a pseudoscientific book by the same name that was popular among American officers. One of them was Captain Brown.…”You’ve got to understand the Arab mind,” Brown told me outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force-force, pride and saving face” (p. 160).

Unsurprisingly, Sassaman tactics led him to be discharged by the army. Marwan and Zaydoon were two Iraqis who were pushed off a ledge at gun point into the Tigris river at night, a practice common among Sassaman’s men. Zaydoon drowned that night leading to the arrest of two American soldiers under his command. Filkins gives a sad epilogue to the story that seems to highlight the inescapable effects of psychological trauma that haunts many soldiers once they come back home:

In the case of Marwan and Zaydoon, [Ralph] Logan was the only American who acted with unquestioned honor. Logan, a low-ranking specialist from Indian Lake, Ohio, had been in the Bradley that night when his comrades spotted Marwan and Zaydoon driving around after curfew. He’d helped cuff them. But when his lieutenant ordered him to throw Marwan and Zyodoon into the Tigris, Logan refused. Logan’s commander was angry with him, but he let him stay behind in the road. The other soldiers walked Marwan and Zayoon down to the riverbank….Like Sassaman, he’d left the army, too. “Basically, the guys in the unit made it clear they didn’t want me around anymore,” Logan said.
…
On the night of September 10, 2006, Logan walked into the lobby of a Comfort Inn motel and robbed the attendant at knife-point. Then Logan drove to his mother’s home. He left the $4,000 he got from the hotel in a bag in the car….Three days later, a police officer came to the house…Logan had been waiting for him. He confessed on the spot. He got two years in prison. His mother, Nany, visits him twice a month…she’d never heard about Marwan and Zaydoon (165-167).

Filkins’ book describes the transition from the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein to the anarchy and sectarian violence that sprouted its wake. For civilian Iraqis, that transition is well summed up by a diagram drawn by an interpreter named Yusra al-Hakeem:

She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page.…She drew a large circle in the middle.
“This is Sadaam,” she said. “He is here. Big. During Saddam’s time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard.”
She flipped to another blank page. She drew dozens of circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.
“The dot in the middle, that is me – that is every Iraqi,” she said. “From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.” She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.
“We Iraqis,” she said. “We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom” (p. 326).

One of the most dramatic moments in the book, is the day of Iraq’s ultimately unsuccessful first democratic election in 2005:

The Iraqis came with mixtures of pride and defiance on their faces. Husbands and wives and children were walking together, some of the men in coats and ties. Mortar shells were exploding nearby.
…
I turned off the main drag in Karada toward the Marjayoon Primary School. People were waiting in silence in long lines between colis of barbed wire. They were shuffling inside, without a sound, as bombs exploded a block away.
….
I spotted a young woman with eyes so bright they seemed to beam out of her head scarf. Her name was Batool al-Musawi. She was a physical therapist and a newlywed. Her parents stood by.
“I woke up this morning at 7 a.m., and I could hear the exlposions outside,” Musawi told me. “And I threw the covers back over my head. I did not want to come. I was too afraid. It is so bad now. And then, hearing those explosions, it occurred to me – the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they are losing. So I got my husband, and I got my parents, and we all came out and voted together.
…
I stepped inside Lebanon High School, another polling place. It was filled and it was quiet. The explosions were thundering outside. A middle-aged man looked up from the ledger, a finger pointed to the ceiling.
“Do you hear that, do you hear the bombs?” Hassan Jawad said, calling out to me over the thud of a shell. “We don’t care. Do you understand? We don’t care.”
“We all have to die,” Jawad said. “To die for this, well, at least I will be dying for something.”
And then he got back to work, guiding an Iraqi woman’s hand to the ballot box (p. 243).

A few miles away, a woman stepped from the voting booth at Yarmouk Elementary School...Her name was Bushra Saadi....Why vote at all? I asked Saadi. Why not just stay home?
She shot me a withering look.
"I voted in order to prevent my country from being destroyed by its enemies," she said.
What enemies? I asked Saadi. What enemies are you refering to?
"You–you destroyed our country," Saadi said. "The Americans the British. I am sorry to be impolite. But you destroyed our country, and you called it democracy."
"Democracy," she said. "It is just talking" (p. 244).

There’s nothing political about this book. Having read the book, I don’t have a hint about Filkins’ political leanings. However, as a politically minded person, I can’t help but read the book through the lens of American politics. For me, this books makes it harder to see the “Islamic world” as a monolith and makes it harder to think about or treat and refugees as potential terrorists. More than anything, The Forever War is about a universal humanity shared by American soldiers and Iraqi civilians and about learning from our nation's mistakes in Iraq and using it as a foundation for selecting the policies that can move us in the direction of a better future.

The scene after a young Terry Lisk is helicoptered away in a body-bag:

In the darkness, as the sound of the helicopter faded, Colonel MacFarland walked to the front of the group.
“I don’t know if this war is worth the life of Terry Lisk, or 10, or 2,500 soldiers like him,” the colonel said. “What I do know is that he did not die alone.”
“A Greek philosopher said that only the dead have seen the end of war,” Colonel MacFarland said. “Only Terry Lisk has seen the end of this war.”
The Soldiers turned and walked back to their barracks in the darkness. No one said a word (329).