Are Americans beginning to understand the reasons for continued Iraqi resistance to US occupation, asks Mark LeVine* The explosion of violence in Iraqi towns like Falluja and Najaf that has led to the battles now raging there could not have come as a surprise to the Bush Administration. When I visited both cities in mid-March the situation was already deteriorating rapidly; Falluja's main street was filled with thousands of angry and armed young men looking for someone on whom to vent their rage, while an elderly mid-level Ayatollah I visited in Najaf denounced Ayatollah Al-Sistani, praised Muqtada Al-Sadr, and wanted to be photographed with his Kalashnikov. People were scared, and so was I; more so than at any other time during my stay in Iraq. As Americans attempt to understand the reasons for continued resistance an extemporaneous remark by American commanders during the shaky cease-fire last week should have alerted us to one of the central issues behind the mounting hatred for the occupation: By explaining to reporters that they would start "letting in medical and relief supplies" after two weeks in which the main hospital was also closed and medical personnel were prohibited from entering the city, US marines admitted to committing a war crime. Specifically, they have violated articles 55 and 147 of the 4th Geneva Convention which prohibit either side in a conflict from disrupting the provision of medical relief for any reason. Even before the latest fighting it was hard to travel around Iraq and not feel that the level of violence deployed to maintain the occupation is a major reason it has lost legitimacy in the Arab two-thirds of the country. Sadly, the mistreatment of prisoners by US guards shown in photographs on CBS News is not an isolated phenomenon, but reflects a larger, structural problem. Take Falluja, for example, where during the present siege doctors on the ground have confirmed to me hundreds of civilian deaths and likely thousands of casualties, including many children, under circumstances that constitute war crimes as defined by the Hague and Geneva conventions. This includes not only indiscriminate use of lethal force during combat but documented cases of firing on ambulances and of snipers, sometimes positioned on top of Falluja's main hospital (in itself a war crime), shooting civilians when no Iraqi fighters were present. UN special envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Labrahimi confronted the problem of war crimes on "This Week" when he asked ABC News' George Stephanopoulous, "When you surround a city, you bomb the city, when people cannot go to a hospital, what name do you have for that?" As a group of Belgian doctors who have spent the last year in Baghdad describe it, whatever the role of Iraqis in the current violence and chaos (stealing supplies, killing civilians), "the current humanitarians catastrophe is entirely and solely the responsibility of" the internationally recognised belligerent occupiers, "the US and British authorities." They have documented violations of at least a dozen articles of the 4th Geneva Conventions by Coalition forces (including articles 10, 12, 15, 21, 35, 36, 41, 45, 47, 48, 51 and 55). Beyond the decrepit health system and the death of over 10,000 civilians at the hands of coalition forces (a war crime as defined in Article 147 of Geneva IV), there are at least 10,000 Iraqis being held without charge in what were previously Saddam's prisons. This is also a war crime under Geneva IV (Articles 17, 18 and 33), as is the detention of relatives of wanted persons (Articles 33 and 53) and the destruction of homes of suspected insurgents or their families (Article 147), all of which have been widely reported in the international, and especially Arab, press and admitted by US forces. Making the issue of war crimes particularly damaging to America's position in the world is that the political opposition (including John Kerry, who once called US actions in Vietnam war crimes) has either remained silent on the issue or called for even more troops, which under the present dynamics of the occupation would certainly mean more frequent violations of international law. Even the peace movement is strangely silent on this issue. But when I'm outside the US, whether in the Muslim world, Europe or elsewhere, people invariably ask me why Americans don't care that their country is violating the very principles of international law the US designed half a century ago. And in fact, however bloody or criminal the actions of the Iraqi insurgency the onus is on the Coalition, as the country's internationally recognised occupying power, to conduct itself strictly according to international law. In this context, expressions of "disgust" by President Bush or Prime Minister Blair are meaningless when the occupation itself makes war crimes and other violations of international law both necessary and commonplace. That the chances of senior American commanders or their political superiors being prosecuted or convicted for war crimes are slim in the present international climate does not diminish their seriousness, or the fact that millions of people around the world -- yes, egged on by Al-Jazeera (which increasingly feels like the Arab equivalent of Fox News), but also informed by The BBC, Le Monde or Al-Ahram Weekly -- believe that the United States has arrogated to itself the right to engage in practices it rightly condemns when done by other states. If such perceptions and the reality shaping them are not changed soon, Iraq and the larger war on terror will surely be lost, with grave consequences for the entire world. * The writer is assistant professor, Department of History, UC- Irvine.
