Why not use tear gas in Fallujah?
And some thoughts about the intentional lethality of battle

Day before yesterday Michael Totten posted some thoughts about who "Ain't Studying War No More," and why they should. In the comment, Joel wrote,

After watching some news of the fighting in Fallujah, my reflexively pacifist wife ... asked why our soldiers couldn't use tear gas to clear enemy fighters out of buildings--so we wouldn't have to kill people who were trying to kill us. Seriously. I was dumbfounded.

I answered Joel in a comment, but I figured I'd address it here, too.

Actually, Joel's Mrs. didn't ask a stupid question at all. In World War II, American commanders considered using gas weapons against Japanese islands. When the casualty list at Iwo Jima grew shockingly long - a quarter of all Marine casualties in the war were suffered at Iwo - there was a brief but loud public demand that the Japanese be gassed to death to avoid such harsh fighting again.

There are several aspects to answering Mrs. Joel. One is that the Iraqi army had an abundance of gas masks. I am confident that the insurgents have some on hand or can get them fairly quickly.

The first is that she sees using tear gas as a way to take the terrorist fighters prisoner. But getting a lung full of tear gas doesn't drive soldiers to surrender; it drives them to go bonkers. They are just as liable to run out firing furiously as anything else. So no surrender is assured. However, it may have the benefit of driving them into the where our troops could kill them more easily.

Unfortunately, in close quarters urban combat, our troops would be sucking their own tear gas, too, meaning that our soldiers would have to fight gas-masked. That seriously degrades their effectiveness in endurance, visibility and hearing, not desirable.

No gas can distinguish between combatants and civilians. Its use would endanger noncombatants unacceptably. They would be probably more liable to be driven into lines of fire than the insurgents.

Finally, in 1997, the United States signed an international treaty banning wartime use of chemical weapons. Although tear gas is not classified as a chemical agent (it is a riot-control agent) the treaty we signed specifically forbids use on RCAs in battle: "Each state party undertakes not to use riot-control agents as a method of warfare."

The treaty does allow for RCA to be used for "law enforcement," but that is a huge can of definitional worms that no one wants to touch. And whatever is going on in Fallujah now, it isn't law enforcement by any stretch.

Finally, Mrs. Joel seems to have a mistaken idea of what we are fighting the battle to do. The cruel, hard fact is that we and our Iraqi allies are giving battle to the insurgents to kill them, not take them prisoner. It is their destruction, not their surrender, we are trying to accomplish. Certainly any of them who offer surrender, and some have, will be accepted and they'll be treated humanely. But we didn't begin the offensive for that purpose.

Not making a symbolic gesture.

Not understanding the intentional lethality of battle is a very common misperception among people of the comfortable classes such as Mrs. Joel - for example, the graduate students I had dinner with one night just after the air campaign began against the Afghan Taliban. They apparently thought that our bombing was a form of posturing, a symbolic display, intended to yield psychological, not lethal, effects on the enemy.

One guest said that the bombing "wouldn't intimidate" the Taliban.

"We're not trying to intimidate them," I said.

"Then why are we bombing them?" came the question.

"To kill them," I answered. There was a long silence at the table. The concept seemed not to have occurred to them.

On the one hand, quashing the insurgency requires killing as many of the insurgents as possible. On the other, it won't be possible to kill them all. At what point the insurgency will be unable to continue, or the remaining insurgents unable to continue, is very difficult to ascertain. The insurgency will likely wax and wane over a long time. Military force can take the counter-insurgency effort only so far. Its final elimination will not be won by battle but by the ascension of human rights, representative democracy, reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure and inculcating civil society - all daunting tasks at this stage of postwar Iraq.

Update: A Marine major fighting in Fallujah wrote on Nov. 10,

There is no negotiating or surrender for those guys. If we see the position and positively ID them as bad guys, we strike. When they run, we call it maneuver and we strike them too. Why? Yesterday the muj attacked an ambulance carrying our wounded. The attackers were hunted down and killed without quarter. These guys want to be martyrs.....we're helping.

Emphasis added. One of the natures of urban combat is that it becomes up close and personal much more quickly than open-area combat. Mini-vendettas such as the one the major described are not unusual.

by Donald Sensing, 11/15/2004 08:23:39 AM. Permalink |