The Cost of Killing Civilians in Iraq

By: Greg Mitchell Long before the Haditha revelations, I was always amazed, if not surprised, when newspapers routinely took at face value reports from the military on the results of a raid, air strike or firefight in Iraq: you know, "15 insurgents were killed," and so forth. After more than three years of fighting a shadowy enemy in Iraq -- not to mention the Vietnam experience -- you would think the strong chance that a few civilians were among the dead would inspire more skepticism.

I understand that it is extremely risky for individual reporters to travel to insurgent hotbeds to secure the true facts -- but at least their papers, and the wire services, could use the word "claimed" or "asserted" when referring to the military's report, or add, "could not be independently confirmed." This, of course, is only the truth.

I've long felt this way, and even written so, but perhaps this approach now has gained some traction following the Haditha revelations -- remember, the initial accounts carried in all papers was that only "insurgents" were killed there. Then, this past week, came revelations in The Boston Globe and, today, in The New York Times, about U.S. payoffs to thousands of families of civilians we have killed or maimed.

The Times even provided a city-by-city chart today tracing the recent payments -- more than $6 million just in Baghdad last year -- and observes that the Marines have made the bulk of the payments.

The local custom is known as "solatia" --it means families in Iraq receive financial compensation for physical damage or a loss of life. The practice has earned more attention in recent weeks, with news that the U.S. military paid about $2500 per victim to families in Haditha following the alleged massacre there last November.

But how common is the practice? And how many deaths do the numbers seem to suggest?

A chilling report from the Boston Globe on Thursday revealed that the amount of cash the U.S. military has paid to families of Iraqi civilians killed or badly injured operations involving American troops "skyrocketed from just under $5 million in 2004 to almost $20 million last year, according to Pentagon financial data." The payments can range from several hundred dollars for a severed limb to a standard of $2500 for loss of life.

There is no explanation on how that top figure was arrived at.

Globe reporter Bryan Bender observed: "If each of the payments made in 2005 was the maximum $2,500 for an Iraqi death, it would amount to 8,000 fatalities. But it's unknown exactly how many payments were made or for what amount."

Defense Department officials stressed to Bender that the payments shouldn't be seen as an admission of guilt or responsibility. But Bender observed that "the fourfold increase in condolence payments raises new questions about the extent to which Iraqi civilians have been the victims of U.S. firepower."

A report earlier this week by Tom Lasseter for Knight Ridder described the accidental death of three civilians, a woman and two men, in a U.S. raid of an insurgent hotspot south of Baghdad one week ago. That story closed with the military indicating it would probably be making compensation payments to families -- and an Army captain saying he wasn't looking forward to making that visit to hand out the money.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is pushing for a broader investigation into condolence payments. "The dramatic rise in condolence payments raises many questions of accountability and process -- and serve as a warning sign for incidents like Haditha," Kennedy told the Globe.

Compensation payments come from the Commanders Emergency Response Program, which allows commanders to make payments to help win the hearts and minds of Iraqis affected by the war. But is it possible that the ability to make the payoffs encourages the military to feel that this closes the book on a civilian kiling or true atrocity? Bender notes that "some experts have said that the commanding officers who approved the Haditha condolence payments should have asked more questions about what happened that day -- and whether the Marines were responsible."

The Times' charts today seem to show that the payoffs, already high, soared in January, with more than $4 million shelled out in that month alone. And the carnage has only increased since.

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UPDATE:

One wonders if the new scrutiny on civilian killings had anything to do with the rather swift admission by the military on Monday that two children had been killed (along with seven adults) in a skirmish near Baghdad.

Also, on Tuesday, The New York Times published an Op-Ed by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, and deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1996. She rightly notes that the "hard cases" are not the out-and-out massacres but the "grindingly routine judgment calls, the snap decisions soldiers have to make...Their actions must be closely monitored, especially the bellwether of civilian harm. Yet the military consistently denied the value of tracking civilian casualties. It therefore had no early warning system.

"What's more, the military's institutional procedures helped keep the reality of abuses at a distance. The mechanism to make war more humane ? the law of war ? paradoxically limited understanding of war's impact.

"Such a legalistic lens can create a blind spot. Investigations are not routine; they occur when the system suspects a problem. With civilian casualties invisible, it's harder to find a problem to suspect.

"This spring, though, the military began investigating civilian deaths not simply to assess culpability but to enhance effectiveness. This groundbreaking approach builds on efforts, begun last year, to track incidents involving civilian harm at checkpoints and during convoys. Commanders were told to investigate the most serious of these incidents.

"Why? To minimize civilian harm. The effort appears to have succeeded. Since January, Iraqi civilian deaths in these situations have been reduced from four to one per week. American forces have finally begun using meaningful metrics to improve their tactics and guard their professionalism.

"If Haditha spurs outrage, it should be directed in the right place. Determining culpability is the best we can do after the fact. But prevention is a far better goal. The military didn't start analyzing checkpoint shootings until well into the war. Had it acted sooner, arithmetic suggests we could have spared hundreds of Iraqi lives.

"This is why the coalition should broaden its inquiry of civilian deaths to include house raids and aerial bombings....

"To learn from Haditha is to learn to notice not just the alleged massacres but the steady stream of civilian deaths that for too much of this war have remained invisible."