The United States and Iraq are planning a major offensive against ISIS in Mosul Iraq. This description in The Week about what is expected to happen to civilians is a bit shocking. If we are doing this to keep civilians from being oppressed, is it really worth it?
About 4,000 Kurdish peshmerga are fighting to retake a string of ISIS-held villages east of Mosul, with support from U.S. warplanes, artillery, and special operations commandos. The main attack is being launched from Qayyarah air base, some 40 miles south of Mosul, where 560 U.S. military advisers, 22,000 Iraqi government troops, and 6,000 mainly Sunni tribal fighters have gathered in recent months. Backed by coalition air support, liberation forces will advance along the Tigris River, clearing ISIS from towns and villages before reaching the city’s edge in early November. Experts say the main urban battle will probably last through December. Much of the battle could be fought street to street and house to house — the winding, narrow streets of Mosul’s Old City are inaccessible to tanks or artillery…
Its [ISIS’s] roughly 5,000 fighters in the city have spent months creating an elaborate network of defenses. IEDs have been hidden underneath roads and in buildings, and five bridges have been rigged with explosives. Residents told Reuters that a 6-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep moat has been dug around Mosul’s perimeter, which will be filled with oil and set on fire, creating plumes of smoke to make it difficult for warplanes to spot targets. To evade airstrikes, ISIS is funneling men and equipment through underground tunnels. Former Iraqi finance and foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari says militants are “shaving their beards to blend in with the population and constantly moving their headquarters around.” The jihadists are desperately trying to boost their numbers: Local men who refuse to take up arms have had their ears cut off, and locals say children as young as 8 have been handed pistols and knives and ordered to spy on citizens…
Relief agencies say the battle for Mosul will trigger a mass exodus: Many of the city’s remaining residents are expected to flee at once, leaving their possessions behind. “We’re facing this enormous tsunami coming at us,” says Lise Grande, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. Coalition forces will have to screen out jihadists from the refugees, and, with some 3.3 million Iraqis already displaced by violence, overstretched aid agencies will struggle to feed and house all of Mosul’s desperate civilians. Says Matthew Nowery of U.S. relief group Samaritan’s Purse, “This is going to be a very large-scale catastrophe.”
So is it worth it? This made my think of Obama’s Nobel speech, where he argues that there is such a thing as “just war”.
And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.
Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of “just war” was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God. Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations — total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred. In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent. And while it’s hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished…
Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states — all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today’s wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.
It also reminded me of Human Smoke, where Nicholson Baker puts forth the heretical view that the human cost of the fight against the Third Reich and the Axis powers itself may have exceeded its benefit.