Like the Wehrmacht, we've descended into barbarity The treatment of Iraqi prisoners is a consequence of coalition policy Richard Overy
Monday May 10, 2004
The Guardian
Flicking through a Sunday magazine a few years ago I was struck by a colour photograph of heavily armed German soldiers on the eastern front in Russia burning a village to the ground. With the heavy helmets, camouflaged combat jackets, submachine guns thrown over shoulders, the image seemed standard fare. It was only when I looked at the caption that my illusions dissolved. It was a picture of US troops in Vietnam punishing Vietcong guerrillas.
It was an easy mistake to make. Since the 1940s, all instances of asymmetrical warfare - where local populations have sustained irregular campaigns against an occupying army - have occasioned a brutal, sometimes atrocious, response. This was true of British forces fighting the Mau Mau in Kenya, US troops in Vietnam, Russian armies in Chechnya and, it now turns out, of coalition forces in occupied Iraq. The term used to describe the terrible behaviour of German forces in the Soviet Union, the "barbarisation of warfare", can be transferred to many other contexts, though none as grim or murderous.
How does it happen? Some historians of the eastern front see the degeneration of military behaviour as something provoked by the fearful and dangerous reality of guerrilla warfare. When military forces are attacked by resistance movements using ambushes, bomb attacks and hostage-taking, they inevitably respond with accentuated violence.
Others have argued that what matters is the set of assumptions - about race, about the occupied society, about what is permitted when troops are fighting irregular warfare - which soldiers bring with them. The predisposition to see the enemy as inferior, bestial, or outside the law, so the argument goes, produces a rapid descent into casual brutality and mistreatment. The dialectic of terror between the two sides - heavily armed soldiers on one side, and poorly resourced but desperate resistance on the other - has always proved hard to reverse.
In Iraq, both elements are at work. Coalition soldiers and security men are the subject of random, repeated attacks which have resulted in many deaths. The arbitrary nature of those casualties, and the impossibility of seeing the enemy clearly, encourage armed forces to respond in ways that would be intolerable in conventional warfare.
Many of the Iraqis who have been killed have been bystanders, rather than insurgents. Attacks against resistance targets have resulted in further destruction and the death of more civilians. The mistreatment of prisoners, common in Iraq as in occupied Russia or Vietnam, has horrified world opinion. But it is the standard behaviour of troops under pressure, fighting a war whose purpose is hard for them to understand.
There is, however, an important difference in the Iraqi case. The troops are professional soldiers (albeit some are reservists), not reluctant conscripts. The perpetrators of atrocities on the eastern front were, in Christopher Browning's well-known phrase, "ordinary men". In Vietnam, young recruits were thrown into a tough and pointless war.
This time we are dealing with soldiers trained to high professional standards - and it is alarming how their behaviour has degenerated. The images of gung-ho marines, armed to the teeth, guarding emaciated, poorly clad Iraqis, shows how unequal is the contest. A recent picture of two US tankmen flexing their muscles for the camera as they withdrew from Falluja conveys the cult of machismo which has invaded the professional armies, as it permeated the German army that entered Russia 60 years ago.
But more damage has been done by the endless propaganda to which coalition forces have been subjected. The chief culprit is Bush's war on terror, which has created the illusion that, in the Middle East, everyone is a potential threat. The "terrorist" - this was, of course, the term used by the Nazis to describe the resistance movements throughout occupied Europe - has become a generic, demonised fanatic, capable in the popular imagination of the worst atrocities. The effect has been to dehumanise the alleged enemy in Iraq, just as German propaganda dehumanised the Bolshevik commissar in 1941, and permitted their mistreatment and execution.
The exaggerated propaganda stems from the coalition's political leadership. The extravagant fears of Saddam's regime, the division in the Bush/Blair view of the Middle East into putative "democrats" or terrorists, has created a climate of fear. In this sense - as in the Barbarossa campaign, or Vietnam - the terms in which the conflict has been communicated by those who began it infect the way the troops behave towards the occupied population.
Contrary to the mythology spun over the past year, the wave of violence is not primarily being conducted by disgruntled Ba'ath party officials, but is driven by a growing anger and disillusionment about the occupying force and its intentions. Villagers in some parts of the Ukraine welcomed German troops with salt, bread and flowers in 1941 for freeing them from the yoke of Stalinism, yet a year later thousands of them were in the Soviet partisan movement, hounding the very forces that "liberated" them. In Iraq the photographs of happy crowds greeting coalition soldiers have given way to exultant crowds celebrating the macabre death of American servicemen. The spreading guerrilla war is a new war of liberation by Iraqis who have no trust in the good faith of the occupiers; the more the record of occupation is scarred by random atrocities, the more difficult it will be to restore that trust.
It is vital that the Iraq crisis does not imitate the conflict between Israel and Palestine, where routine murders and atrocities against civilians are a daily occurrence. If it does, escalation of violence is unavoidable; the greater the threat, the more likely that coalition forces will react with mounting brutality.
Of course, unlike German soldiers in 1941, coalition soldiers are supposed to be subject to discipline if they mistreat prisoners. But the root of the problem lies in the position to which they have been exposed. The "ordinary men" on the eastern front would not have done the things they did if Hitler had kept the army at home. Violence in Iraq is a function of the crass political calculations of the Bush/Blair alliance. Only by changing the wider picture will the conditions on the ground improve.
Ultimate responsibility lies at the top. For all the disingenuous outrage shown by Bush and Blair at the crop of revelations, it is their foreign policies, their determination on war, their unmediated demonisation of the "enemy", that has presented coalition soldiers and the Iraqi population with the terrible dilemmas of confrontation. Their lawless war has provoked the lawlessness of occupation.
· Richard Overy is professor of modern history at King's College London, and author of The Dictators, to be published by Penguin next monthhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1213035,00.html
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