A problem that has come up repeatedly during the current Iraq war is distinguishing the threats. Comparisons to Vietnam abound – once again we are fighting a force that doesn’t play the war game like we do. They don’t wear uniforms, they don’t publicize the locations of their bases. This implicates the huge question of who is a “combatant” and who is a “civilian.” I plan to address this question in a later blog post.
The immediate impact is that our soldiers don’t know who is going to shoot at them, and so they end up detaining – or, in more disturbing situations, killing – people who were arguably innocent and not a threat.
In December, the Department of Defense posted a story that relates how “Moderate Muslims held in coalition detention centers in Iraq are turning in radical Muslim detainees on a daily basis . . . .” The article attributes this to a shift in attitudes, and quotes a Marine commander who “described several instances where middle-of-the-road Muslims actively repudiated Islamic extremism inside the walls of coalition compounds.”
This strikes me as a very odd situation, for several reasons. We are detaining civilians – albeit those who are considered to be a threat “to coalition forces, Iraqi Security Forces and stability in Iraq”fn1 – and we are detaining them without affording them a trial or any other kind of adversarial hearing.fn2 I think it is only reasonable to assume that a person in a position of indefinite detainment will try to figure out what he can do to get out – what do his captors want?
