Iraq War: The mosque killing in Fallujah

Regardless of the outcome of legal investigations, the image of a US Marine shooting to death a wounded prisoner lying unarmed on the floor of a mosque in Fallujah has already become yet another face of the war for much of the Arab and Muslim world.

But despite appearances, this is not such an open-and-shut case of criminal conduct as the torture in Abu Ghuraib, Guantanamo and other stations of the gulag.  Since US soldiers are going to be fighting Fallujah-type actions for years to come, if the Bush Doctrine continues to be applied as we have every reason to assume it will be, we might as well get used to looking at what the laws of war mean.

Owen West and Phillip Carter lay out the legal and practical issues in some detail in this article: What the Marine Did: The shooting of an unarmed Iraqi was a tragedy. But was it a war crime?
Slate 11/18/04.

The twin essences of war are chaos and killing, so the very idea of placing inflexible constraints on the act of killing is at odds with the fundamental nature of warfare. Managing this cognitive dissonance while trying to stay alive takes tremendous skill. Professional militaries, like the U.S. Marine Corps, do this well because of their discipline and training. But the very existential nature of combat tilts the moral plane under these young riflemen's boots. In a place where you are fighting for your very survival, like the streets of Fallujah, any action that keeps you alive is a good one. And any misstep could get you or your buddies killed.

In this unit's case, one early lesson in Fallujah was to avoid Iraqis altogether, dead or alive. Iraqis wearing National Guard uniforms had ambushed them, killing one of their own. Another Marine had been killed when an explosive detonated under an insurgent corpse. Several insurgents had continued desperate fights notwithstanding gruesome wounds. Others tried to exploit the civil-military moral gap, acting as soldiers at 500 meters and as civilians when the Marines closed in. The Iraqis in the mosque may have been immobile, but to the Marines, they posed a threat.

Further, the Marines were fighting in an enemy city with little uncontested territory. There were no "friendly lines" behind which they could rest. The Marine in question had been wounded already. He was no doubt exhausted by five days of continuous fighting by the time he risked his life and burst into the mosque on Saturday. A well-rested man would have faced a dilemma inside, filled with shades of gray. A sleep-deprived man weary from days of combat saw only a binary choice: shoot or don't shoot, life or death.

I should stress that this article does not at all appear to involve any casual dismissal of the laws of war or an attempt to minimize the seriousness of the incident.  The also discuss in a serious way the issue that Arab critics have raised, suggesting a moral equivalence between that shooting and the kidnappers' execution of aid worker Margaret Hassan, who as they rightly say, "was, in every sense of the word, a noncombatant."

Juan Cole has also addressed this question at his Informed Comment blog:

Sunni Arab Regions in Flames 11/16/04:

As for the apparent murder of a wounded guerrilla by a Marine, it was horrible. I fear that the attitude of the other troops, which wasn't exactly shock, suggests that these sorts of murders of prisoners are not uncommon. (But they are not universal, or else there wouldn't be 400 prisoners. There would be no prisoners.) It does concern me that the wounded and bleeding guerrillas were just stacked up in that mosque awaiting medical attention, apparently for days. If there are many prisoners treated that way, then there really is an issue here with regard to US military policy. And, what is the difference between letting them bleed to death and putting a bullet in their heads? Col. Shupp might want to reconsider his position that the Red Crescent is unneeded.

Iraqi Press Reaction to Fallujah Mosque Killing 11/17/04:

I was initially a little surprised that al-Hayat (a Saudi-funded daily published from London, which is generally moderate with regard to attitudes to the US) paired the killing of Margaret Hassan with the killing of a wounded prisoner in Fallujah in this way. It seemed to take the edge off the rawness of the murder of the prisoner, to say that there are bad characters on the Iraqi side, as well.

But as I thought about it, it became clear to me that the author had put the marines and the Sunni Arab guerrillas who murder their hostages on the same level. Since I am after all an American, this equation seemed to me eminently unfair. The guerrillas in Fallujah were responsible for a lot of bombings and killings of innocent civilians in Iraq, which involved deliberately targetting and killing, e.g. Shiites. The Marines are, in contrast, a legitimate miliary force that is operating in Iraq with UN sanction. I personally think that the assault on Fallujah was problematic, ethically and politically. But it doesn't put the Marines in Zarqawi's camp!

More on Marine Mosque Killing 11/18/04.  In this one, he also talks about some wider issues of international law related in particular to the Fallujah operation:

Now, I don't like the timing of the Fallujah mission. I don't like all the mistakes made along the way, which produced this operation. I don't like its tactics. I don't like the way it put so many civilians in harm's way. I don't like the violations of international law (targetting the hospital, turning away the Red Crescent, killing wounded and disarmed combatants), etc. I protest the latter. I don't know enough about military affairs to offer an alternative on the former issues, and don't mind admitting my technical ignorance. You can't do everything.

But the basic idea of attacking the guerrillas holding up in that city is not in and of itself criminal or irresponsible.  A significant proportion of the absolute horrible car bombings that have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially Shiites, were planned and executed from Fallujah. There were serious and heavily armed forces in Fallujah planning out ways of killing hundreds to prevent elections from being held in January. These are mass murderers, serial murderers. If they were fighting only to defend Fallujah, that would be one thing; even the Marines would respect them for that. They aren't, or at least, a significant proportion of them aren't. They are killing civilians elsewhere in order to throw Iraq into chaos and avoid the enfranchisement of the Kurds and Shiites.

The International Committe of the Red Cross (ICRC) has criticized both sides strongly for their conduct in Iraq: Iraq : ICRC calls for greater respect for basic tenets of humanity ICRC Web site 11/19/04.