A Change in Script: From 'True' War to 'Real' War

On March 29 near Najaf, an Iraqi detonates a car bomb killing four American soldiers. On March 31, in the same area, a nervous driver accelerates past a checkpoint and jumpy American soldiers unleash a volley of shots, killing 10 civilians including women and children.
This is not the war that the US and UK had promised. They had billed theirs as a ''just'' war against an evil and repressive dictator, a ''true'' war that would use incredibly precise munitions that would spare civilian lives and infrastructure.
Yet, two weeks later it has become appa-rent that things are not going according to script and that civilians are dying in large numbers. The war has become a dialectic between those who promised a ''true'' war that would spare civilians, and their adversaries whose interest lay in its opposite. Given their 1991 experience, the Iraqis would have been foolish to confront coalition forces in an orthodox war, so they created a defensive plan of embedding their forces amidst civilians and within towns and cities. The result has been the ''real'' war with its death and destruction visiting innocents.
The somewhat invidious distinction bet-ween ''true'' and ''real'' war has originated in western culture. Technological advance in Europe, accompanied by principles of organisation of armies in the 17th and 18th centuries, made war incredibly intense and bloody. In the 19th century, Carl von Clausewitz, who had seen the revolutionary impact of Napoleonic wars, argued that while ''true'' war, fought by professional armies with their training, discipline and codes of honour were the ideal that western armies ought to pursue, they could only be won through the kind of violence that ''real'' war unleashed. Clausewitz is clearly the intellectual father of the ''shock and awe'' concept.
But the same western civilisation also gave the world modern democracy and, after the shock of another of Clausewitz''s progenies — World War I — the notion of ''civilised'' war that was incorporated in what are collectively called the Geneva Conventions. Beginning in the 1920s, a number of agreements and protocols have been ratified by almost all the countries of the world to ameliorate the effects of war. There are prohibitions against the use of poison gases, biological weapons, excessively injurious weapons, mines, booby traps and blinding laser weapons. There are rules for the correct treatment of prisoners of war.
In the last 50 years the bare bones of the conventions have been fleshed out, mainly in the West, by civil society-based organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and Medecins sans Frontieres who have sought to mitigate the horrors of war. Others have sought to ban landmines and outlaw nuclear weapons. The massive anti-war demonstrations testify to a growing humanitarian impulse that opposes all war.
These trends have, in turn, shaped the attitude of modern western armies who seek to fight wars with precision weapons and minimum collateral damage, both as a battle-winning factor as well as a ''humanitarian'' or honourable method of war. American leaders are correct when they say that the US armed forces do not deli- berately target civilians.
Over the years, the US and many western countries have established very high standards of human rights observance as compared to armies in other parts of the world. But this could well be because since Vietnam the US has not been involved in the kind of ''real'' war that many other armies have undertaken. Beginning as ''true'' warriors, the Indian army was compelled to fight the real war in Jaffna in 1987 with its attendant collateral damage and civilian deaths. The Russians have fought the ''real'' war in Chechnya and the Iraqis have revealed no special inclination towards differentiating between true and real war. In the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, besides devastating Khorramshahr and Abadan, they used chemical weapons against Iran. In 1990, they invaded and pillaged Kuwait.
The Iraqi resistance to the US has transformed Gulf War II scenario. From a ''true'' war it is becoming a ''real'' one. It is still possible at this stage in the war to see British tanks milling around a highway, across the river from Basra, on which civilian traffic is moving back and forth. Baghdad faces a daily dose of massive aerial bombardment yet it reports normal traffic, full restaurants and crowded markets.
The picture is slowly changing. Out of the sight of TV cameras, as coalition forces move into Iraqi cities they are compelled to undertake ''real'' war. Civilian cannot be distinguished from combatant and buildings are too closely interspersed to prevent collateral damage. It is unlikely that the air of normality that characterises Baghdad today will remain as the American ground forces reach its outskirts.
Even if it turns out to be a bloodier affair than anticipated, Gulf War II is not likely to be the last war fought on earth. Even when Saddam is removed, there will be people like Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong Il who are beyond the pale of any civilised restraint.
Not all wars are unjust, though few have been fought without a dismal toll of lives of non-combatants. America''s decisive participation in the two world wars, its role in bringing peace in Bosnia and in the liberation of Kuwait in 1990 are an outstanding example of such wars.
But the US venture in Iraq could turn out to be a major miscalculation not because US goals were incorrect, but because they''re being pursued the wrong way. No one seriously contemplates an American defeat, but almost everyone agrees that the world will not be quite the same again.