US tried to napalm truth in justifying the Iraq war

The war was built on lies and the US has been exposed.

March 19, 2013

Pilots described how they had dropped massive fireballs they called napalm on Iraqi forces as marines battled towards Baghdad. Photo: Reuters

I was not aware the Pentagon had called me a liar.

I was sitting at the time in a knee-deep hole in the Iraq desert wearing a chemical warfare suit and flak jacket, helmet strapped on and gas mask within grasp.

An editor in Sydney took the call from the Pentagon’s Lieutenant-Commander Jeff Davies a day after the beginning of the ground war in Iraq 10 years ago today.

My report for Fairfax Media of the opening of hostilities, which referred to the use of Vietnam-era napalm, was ”patently false”, he said. All US stockpiles had been destroyed two years earlier and had not been used by US forces since the 1970s, he said.

Marine Cobra helicopter gun-ships firing Hellfire missiles had swept low from the south, I wrote. B52 bombers had screamed through the sky, dropping their devastating loads. By dawn, hours after the attack began, the top had been shaved off Safwan Hill and then aircraft swooped in to finish the job with napalm, I wrote. My report was based on briefings by US Marine officers I was embedded with for the war.

After I filed the story on March 21, 2003, Tom Hyland, my boss in Melbourne, rang my satellite telephone and queried the use of napalm, a devastating weapon that burns through human skin and can’t be removed.

Was I sure it was napalm?

Its use had been restricted by United Nations conventions since 1980 after America’s use of it in the Vietnam War had been widely condemned.

Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the world-famous napalm bombing survivor captured in an iconic photograph from the Vietnam War, once said: ”Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine.”

The senior officer in the artillery unit to which I was assigned was a decent man of few words who was sitting with me in a Humvee.

With Hyland listening I turned to him and asked whether there was any doubt napalm was used in the attack on Safwan Hill.

”Correct, napalm,” he replied.

I was deeply concerned by the Pentagon’s condemnation of my reporting: no one had ever called one of my stories ”patently false”, let alone the office of the world’s greatest military. The accusation hung over my head as US forces swept through the Iraq desert to Baghdad.

Only one other reporter, a CNN journalist who was also embedded with US forces, had reported the use of napalm on Safwan Hill.

The Pentagon had spoken and the rebuttal of my story was published in media outlets around the world.

It was not until US Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders started returning from the war zone later in 2003 that the Pentagon’s deceit was exposed in interviews conducted by the San Diego Union Tribune.

The pilots described how they had dropped massive fireballs they called napalm on Iraqi forces as marines battled towards Baghdad.

On August 4, 2003, a Pentagon spokesman admitted that ”Mark 77” incendiary devices were used by the US forces, which he acknowledged were ”remarkably similar” to napalm weapons.

The Mark 77s used a fuel-gel mixture that was similar to napalm, he conceded.

Asked about Safwan Hill, US Marine colonel Mike Daily said: ”I can confirm that Mark 77 firebombs were used in that general area.”

Incendiary bombs were also dropped in April 2003 near bridges over the Saddam Canal and Tigris River, returning officers revealed.

”We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches,” said Colonel Randolph Alles who commanded Marine Air Group 11 during the war.

”There were Iraqi soldiers there. It’s not a great way to die.”

Colonel Alles added that napalm had a ”big psychological effect” on an enemy. ”The generals love napalm,” he said.

John Pike, defence analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a US research group, said: ”You can call it something other than napalm, but it’s napalm.”

Robert Musil, the former executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a Washington group that opposes the use of weapons of mass destruction, described the Pentagon’s distinction between napalm and Mark 77 firebombs as ”pretty outrageous”.

”That’s clearly Orwellian,” he said.

A few weeks after the San Diego newspaper article was published, I received a message from the marine officer who had confirmed to me the use of napalm on Safwan Hill.

”I was pleased the lie was exposed,” he said.

We have known for a very long time there were no weapons of mass destruction. The war was built on lies.

Lindsay Murdoch was embedded with the US Marine Corps 1st Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Date

March 19, 2013

It’s hard to see how invading Iraq was good for Australia.

‘The only gain Howard can claim for joining the invasion was strengthening the US alliance.’ Photo: Reuters

John Howard has no regrets about Iraq. He maintains he was right to commit us to the invasion ten years ago today. But he takes a narrow view, asking only whether it was good for Australia – and for himself – at the time. But what if we take a wider view, and ask whether the invasion was good for Iraq, good for the Middle East, good for America and the world at large, and good for Australia in the long run?

For Howard these bigger questions seem irrelevant. He accepts no responsibility for the invasion or its aftermath, presumably because he thinks the invasion was going to happen whatever he did. So he only answers for the consequences of Australia’s small part in it.

For Howard those consequences were fine. Iraq destroyed the reputations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, but it strengthened Howard’s leadership. Even voters who disapproved of the war admired his toughness, and seemingly accepted that he was not responsible for what went wrong.

It helped a lot that none of our troops was killed in action. This was not just good luck or good soldiering. From the start Howard was determined to extract whatever benefits he could from Iraq at the minimum risk, and he seems to have understood those risks more clearly than either Bush or Blair. He pulled Australian troops out of Iraq just weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, and when they went back in 2005 Howard made sure they were deployed in a quiet sector, largely out of harm’s way.

And the bigger questions still remain to be answered. They are not so easy to brush aside, because Howard was not as powerless as he claims. He was a trusted and respected ally. His fervent support for the invasion helped sideline the key figures in Washington who had grave doubts, including then secretary of state Colin Powell. His support for them instead could well have helped stem the rush to war. As it was, by vocally supporting and then actively joining the invasion, Australia surely incurred a significant measure of responsibility for its wider outcomes.

Judging those outcomes calls for a sense of proportion. Ten years ago both sides of the bitter debate about the invasion saw it, either for good or ill, as epoch-making. We can now see that both hopes and fears were exaggerated, but the invasion nonetheless had important consequences in several ways.

First, the invasion didn’t herald a new age of US global primacy as its neo-con promoters hoped, but neither did it destroy America’s power. The cost was staggering, but not more than America’s huge economy could pay for – at least if Congress would vote the taxes. But invading Iraq, even more than 9/11 itself, undermined Americans’ post-Cold War confidence that they could reshape the world as they wished. This confidence was always going to be deflated, but in Iraq it was punctured in a particularly brutal way, leaving Americans uncertain about their power and place in the world, and making it harder for them work out what their real role should be. America’s muddled response to China today is one of the results, and it carries huge risks for Australia.

Second, invading Iraq did not immediately set the Middle East aflame as its critics expected, but nor did it spark the wave of pro-Western democratic revolutions so confidently predicted by the neo-cons. Instead, it destroyed Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, and eroded US standing in the region. That has made it harder for America to influence the revolutions – not always democratic and certainly not pro-Western – which have swept the region in the past two years. The Middle East today is less stable and Western influence there is weaker than it was because of the invasion.

Third, the invasion did get rid of Saddam Hussein, which was good. But in the civil war that followed perhaps 150,000 Iraqis died, and Iraq today remains a divided country with an increasingly authoritarian and sectarian government supported by repressive security forces. No one knows where this will end. It is far from clear that Iraqis would have suffered more if they had been left to deal with Saddam Hussein alone, and no one can be sure that they do not face a future as bleak as the one from which we rescued them at such terrible cost.

Finally, while it spared all but two of the Australian troops sent there by John Howard, the Iraq invasion cost the lives of almost 4500 American soldiers and more than 300 from other counties, including 179 British. These lives must weigh in the balance, too, when we judge the wisdom of the decision made a decade ago. These are the wider consequences as we can see them today, ten years later. They leave Australia, and rest of the world, very much worse off. And whatever Howard may think, Australians would be wrong to believe that he, and we, have no responsibility for them.

Hugh White is professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.