Wikileaks and Iraq: Take 2, What's in a Number?

[Kouran]

I hesitate to get into the argument here since so many people seem to have such a vested interest in their point being the only one that matters. However, having said that I think people who don’t understand the reality of operational security, procedure and the impact of this sort of leak should conceder the impact before stating this leak is good etc.

With 400k documents to be released there will be contained in those documents the parts and pieces of American military operational procedure. Just like a great mosaic is built out of many tiny pieces, foreign intelligence services will be taking the fragments and pieces of leaked information and reconstructing the US military operational process. To the layman or civilian this might seem like a trivial issue, "oh surely by now they have changed how things are done", that argument holds no water.

When I was a soldier we knew what the operational procedures were, SOP, for any particular part of an operation. However, when change is introduced as this leak will require all bets are off. There will be cases where requested assets are not where they are supposed to be for example. I can assure you this will happen and men will be killed or wounded because we will have to change how we operate.

The person responsible for this leak will be the one with the blood of fallen soldiers and marines on his/her hands and for that I can never forgive them. While the goal of full accountability is laudable the fact that men and women will die for it is reprehensible.

[Alarich]

The person responsible for this leak will be the one with the blood of fallen soldiers and marines on his/her hands and for that I can never forgive them. While the goal of full accountability is laudable the fact that men and women will die for it is reprehensible.

Soldiers die - supposedly for a greater cause. Men and women died to bring "peace" to Iraq. You sent them there. So on your hands, dear Kouran, is the blood of all these soldiers who already died. On your hands is the blood of all those innocent victims of US warcrimes.

At least this leak does serve a laudable purpose. Can you say the same about the war that preceded it?

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

Soldiers die - supposedly for a greater cause. Men and women died to bring "peace" to Iraq. You sent them there. So on your hands, dear Kouran, is the blood of all these soldiers who already died. On your hands is the blood of all those innocent victims of US warcrimes.

At least this leak does serve a laudable purpose. Can you say the same about the war that preceded it?

:owned:

[S John]

ETA: Also, I seriously doubt that much of the Taliban or the remains of the baathist insurgency in Iraq (the only groups we are fighting using military tactics, AFAIK) have the internet to capitalize on anything they found in 400k documents. Or, I must not be buying into the vision of a global Islamic terrorist network that has lightning fast technology and an underground mountain fortress.

Others have covered this a bit, but both these groups are much more tech savvy than you're giving them credit for. Clearly, the technology at the disposal of the military dwarfs anything the insurgent groups have. But they are certainly quite a few steps above illiterate, sandal-clad cave dwellers. These are folks who figured out how to detonate a bomb with a cell phone. You could put me in a lab with all the required materials to do that, and I wouldn't be able to figure out how to do it. Translators and workers have been uncovered as Taliban and sent packing, so they definitely have quite a few English speakers too. You can buy a prepaid cell phone in Afghanistan that will work all over the country. They can and do network. They have plenty of folks whose job it is to study us. They watch our bases, even work on them, some of them are in the ANA, they pay attention to western news... anything that grabs our attention will also grab theirs. If there is one mistake I don't want to be guilty of, its underestimating someone who is determined and has all the time in the world.

In July there were 88 coalition casualties in Afghanistan. This month and last month there have been less than 60. It would seem that the Taliban has become less effective since the documents were released.

This is not a very good metric. There is always going to be some ebb and flow. And if my understanding is correct, the Taliban often lie low in the colder months and launch offensives when the snows melt and clear the mountain passes. Its getting to be that time of year. I wouldn't necessarily expect a calm few months ahead, but I wouldn't take a lull in the fighting or a drop in casualties as a sign that the Taliban is losing its grip on the country.

Thank you, for fucks sake. The short sightedness in this thread makes me want to smash my own face. Wikileaks has done much to prevent wars from being started under false pretenses in the future.

Are you Julian Assange? :P Have you not noticed all the bad press? That the war was (is?) wildly unpopular? Look, I hope that I've made clear that I don't think its necessarily a bad thing that some of the dirty laundry from the Iraq war gets aired. I think that there are many innocent Iraqi's scarred by the war that deserve to know what happened to their loved ones. At the least. Absolutely. That said, it has been pretty clear since, what '04? '05?, that there were no WMD's in Iraq. The false pretenses thing has been pretty much fact for several years now. Wikileaks changes nothing in this department. It is a pretty tragic series of events that led us there and then left us to try and fix what we broke. But thats not news, is it? That's all been known for quite some time.

I think the benefits outweigh the damage. Again, I point to the Iraqi civilians who will benefit from knowing why their pregnant wife was gunned down at a checkpoint, etc.

I also think that is a valid stance. But it really depends on where you're standing, doesn't it? If I'm a 19 year old grunt side-stepping rockets and IED'd 3 times a week I don't know if I would feel that way about something, anything, that might give the enemy a slightly better chance of taking me out. The situation has now evolved to the point where a (mostly) whole new set of people are dealing with the consequences of things done by those before them. The whole thing is pretty fucked, but thats how the world works. Its why I don't think wikileaks will ever change a damn thing for the better (and this coming from a self-proclaimed optimist! :laugh: ). The world is in a perpetual state of reaping what those before have sown, always has been. I don't see that changing. I do think (and hope) that we have learned a valuable lesson from the Iraq war, and hopefully will not repeat that mistake again. But I don't credit wikileaks for that.

[Lord O' Bones]

So, the rebuttal is that "People are too stupid to do anything good with this information, such as distrust their government, therefore it shouldn't be released"?

Well, you guys have one thing right: the press certainly hasn't changed anything they are doing in response to this. It's not like they are running out right now and reopening their Baghdad bureaus. The US coverage has almost solely been about whether or not Wikileaks is bad, not about the devastating truths revealed.

No. The too stupid people already knew this if they cared to. But they didn't care to or ignored it Whole different ball of suck.

I agree with this 100%. I'm just saying that it's arguable that dropping documents like this highlights that the government is too inept or evil to have a "just war", which most people thought Gulf I and II both were at the outset.

Public opinion is something that a democracy has to ration. Leaks like this help put off a new war, IMO, because they can demonstrate the idiocy of these conflicts. The last thing before Iraq that we had was, what, the Pentagon Papers?

I hope you're right and I'm wrong. But I doubt it. The US populace is by and large, a slobbering sucker.

Even the Pentagon itself hasn't demonstrated that anyone has died as a result of this drop.

Nor would they likely do. But aside from that, I'm tired of reminding people that the "immediacy" of the damage is so far from the point as to be on Neptune.

[Altherion]

The US coverage has almost solely been about whether or not Wikileaks is bad, not about the devastating truths revealed.

What devastating truths? A careful analysis of the entire volume of data will undoubtedly reveal some details about the US military that may be useful in acting against it, but there doesn't appear to be any data that is noteworthy in and of itself. It doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know or at least very strongly suspect.

Why did Manning want to drop these documents?

He could not have possibly read all of them. It's really hard to say because we have to judge by what the media tell us, but it looks like some mixture of wanting to stick it to the military and wanting attention and approval from his friends. Here is an article about it:

“He would get upset, slam books on the desk if people wouldn’t listen to him or understand his point of view,” said Chera Moore, who attended elementary and junior high school with him. “He would get really mad, and the teacher would say, ‘O.K., Bradley, get out.’ ”

...

He had been reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer. He wrote in e-mails that he felt “regularly ignored” by his superiors “except when I had something essential, then it was back to ‘Bring me coffee, then sweep the floor.’ ”

...

Then, after WikiLeaks released it in April, Private Manning hounded Mr. Watkins about whether there had been any public reaction. “That was one of his major concerns once he’d done this,” Mr. Watkins told Wired. “Was it really going to make a difference?”

...

And as he faces the possibility of a lifetime in prison, some of Private Manning’s remarks now seem somewhat prophetic.

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much,” he wrote, “if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press.”

[Lord O' Bones]

I would hope that this would go some ways to increasing war weariness.

Almost a full decade of a stupid war didn't do it. Not sure how this will. Again, hope you're right. Just not holding my breath.

[S John]

I understand where you're coming from.

Out of curiosity, where did they learn that? Were IEDs popular before the Iraq war started to ramp up?

(warning readers, if you are invested in this discussion you can skip this post... it is entirely off topic)

That's a good question, I don't know the answer to that. Though I would bet that a lot of the IED knowledge came from the foreign fighters that came to Iraq specifically to sow chaos. I doubt that the Iraqi's themselves were brimming with that sort of knowledge before the war. Anyway, through working with some people that have done multiple tours in Iraq with the Army I've pieced together a smattering of random knowledge about IED's. I guess the big thing at first was they'd use pressure plates as detonators. Simple enough, you drive over the plate, boom. But with the pressure plates you basically have to dig a big hole in the road and not get caught or ratted out while you are doing it. They are still around, though. So then came the remote detonators where you could basically hide a bomb anywhere. Under a pile of rocks, on the back side of a guard rail, in a pile of trash. Endless possibilities, really. To counter that, coalition forces started using jammers in the vehicles (this is commercially available so not giving anything away here : p) that would disrupt anything in the vicinity and prevent the detonator from properly relaying the signal. It would also cause you to drop your call if you were having a chat in the area, so that probably annoyed untold numbers of Iraqi businessmen. :uhoh:

There is also another type that could be detonated by the heat from the engine block, but I really don't know much about that other than that it exists and that our vehicles have a mechanism for countering them. In general, I think there has been a big reduction in IED deaths, in Iraq at least, since the MRAP came along. They aren't invincible, but I think it pretty much takes an armor piercing round or an anti-tank mine to penetrate the skin, and those aren't as readily available as old artillery shells, or home-made bombs and the like. If you do see those type things in Iraq, damn good chance it didn't originate there.

There's a lot of old dudes in the Taliban who have been blowing stuff up since they were shitting their diapers.

Haha definitely.

[litechick]

I think that Iraq has a right to explore, and will get a lot out of, evidence as to why over a one hundred thousand people died due to the US invasion.

Just take that number and swish it around in your mouth for a minute. If I was an Iraqi who had lost someone, knowing the truth would be more important to me than anything else.

Again, I point to the Iraqi civilians who will benefit from knowing why their pregnant wife was gunned down at a checkpoint, etc.

I always find this fascinating. All deaths in Iraq are the responsibility of the US because we started the war, we created the power vacuum which led to sectarian violence.

We are also responsible for the civilians killed at checkpoints. That's obvious, the person who pulled the trigger is responsible.

However, it's the logical inconsistency that gets me. The only reason a pregnant woman would be gunned down at a checkpoint is that she may actually be a suicide bomber with a fetus-shaped charge. Yet no responsibility is apportioned to the Suicide Bomber's Club.

I think you should decide whether it's always the responsibility of the person who pulled the trigger or whether it's always the responsibility of the people who created the situation and just stick with it.

Unfortunately, I suspect you are simply in the habit of considering the US to be the bad guy in all situations.

We deserve to be shamed.

Yep, that's probably it.

[Shryke]

(warning readers, if you are invested in this discussion you can skip this post... it is entirely off topic)

That's a good question, I don't know the answer to that. Though I would bet that a lot of the IED knowledge came from the foreign fighters that came to Iraq specifically to sow chaos. I doubt that the Iraqi's themselves were brimming with that sort of knowledge before the war. Anyway, through working with some people that have done multiple tours in Iraq with the Army I've pieced together a smattering of random knowledge about IED's. I guess the big thing at first was they'd use pressure plates as detonators. Simple enough, you drive over the plate, boom. But with the pressure plates you basically have to dig a big hole in the road and not get caught or ratted out while you are doing it. They are still around, though. So then came the remote detonators where you could basically hide a bomb anywhere. Under a pile of rocks, on the back side of a guard rail, in a pile of trash. Endless possibilities, really. To counter that, coalition forces started using jammers in the vehicles (this is commercially available so not giving anything away here : p) that would disrupt anything in the vicinity and prevent the detonator from properly relaying the signal. It would also cause you to drop your call if you were having a chat in the area, so that probably annoyed untold numbers of Iraqi businessmen. :uhoh:

There is also another type that could be detonated by the heat from the engine block, but I really don't know much about that other than that it exists and that our vehicles have a mechanism for countering them. In general, I think there has been a big reduction in IED deaths, in Iraq at least, since the MRAP came along. They aren't invincible, but I think it pretty much takes an armor piercing round or an anti-tank mine to penetrate the skin, and those aren't as readily available as old artillery shells, or home-made bombs and the like. If you do see those type things in Iraq, damn good chance it didn't originate there.

On the subject of those jammers, remember when Wikileaks posted a classified report on exactly how they work?

Good times!

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

Some folks it would seem could use a bit of reminding

We are the bad guy here

We are the ones who perpetrated an unprovoked, illegal, and idiotic invasion of a country that was not threatening us, or anyone else. We are the evil empire. Not them. US. If bad stuff happens to our troops in Iraq because of these documents (which I still do not believe will be the case), we deserve it. We could make it stop any time we felt like it by minding our own goddamn business and staying inside our own goddamn country.

[The Iceman of the North]

However, it's the logical inconsistency that gets me. The only reason a pregnant woman would be gunned down at a checkpoint is that she may actually be a suicide bomber with a fetus-shaped charge. Yet no responsibility is apportioned to the Suicide Bomber's Club.

If you guys hadn't invaded Iraq in the first place, there wouldn't be a check point to gun her down. Blaming it on the Suicide Bomber's Club is rather pointless.

[Shryke]

Some folks it would seem could use a bit of reminding

We are the bad guy here

We are the ones who perpetrated an unprovoked, illegal, and idiotic invasion of a country that was not threatening us, or anyone else. We are the evil empire. Not them. US. If bad stuff happens to our troops in Iraq because of these documents (which I still do not believe will be the case), we deserve it. We could make it stop any time we felt like it by minding our own goddamn business and staying inside our own goddamn country.

No, the troops there don't deserve it.

[Reek]

No, the troops there don't deserve it.

Because someone held a gun to their head and forced them to join the military?

[Kouran]

Soldiers die - supposedly for a greater cause. Men and women died to bring "peace" to Iraq. You sent them there. So on your hands, dear Kouran, is the blood of all these soldiers who already died. On your hands is the blood of all those innocent victims of US warcrimes.

At least this leak does serve a laudable purpose. Can you say the same about the war that preceded it?

Actually to be perfectly honest I don’t give a fart in a whirlwind about any of the people in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I do care about my friends and family members who serve. You say I am responsible? Do tell I must have missed the memo when I was made President of the US. Oh wait that’s right I wasn’t, I just happened to be in the service when the politicians decided this was a good course of action.

Oh and throwing the soldiers die in war crap is just about the lowest form of insult possible. At least in my country we understand that men and women who died in service to their country deserve to be honored.

[davos]

However, it's the logical inconsistency that gets me. The only reason a pregnant woman would be gunned down at a checkpoint is that she may actually be a suicide bomber with a fetus-shaped charge. Yet no responsibility is apportioned to the Suicide Bomber's Club.

I think you should decide whether it's always the responsibility of the person who pulled the trigger or whether it's always the responsibility of the people who created the situation and just stick with it.

Its a more complicated situation than that. The suicide bombers shouldn't be let off the hook by any means. They are murdering bastards who rightly deserve condemnation. The thing about it is that if the US hadn't invaded there wouldn't be any US soldiers at checkpoints to gun a woman who maybe pregnant or maybe a bomber in disguise and there wouldn't be any suicide bombers. These kind of situations were a predictable result of the invasion. I opposed it for a variety of reasons including the atrocities small and large that are an unavoidable part war and of occupying a country that doesn't want you there. Sure the Iraqis by and large didn't want that SOB Saddam running the place. They also didn't want to be invaded, have their infrastructure destroyed by prolonged armed conflict, and have to deal with whatever government the US imposes on them. So they fought back. Now only some of these were people fighting simply for their nations right of self-determination. Many were foreign nationals wanting to stir up trouble because they hate the US. Many were fighting over who is going to be top dog in the country once the US leaves and who is going to be on the bottom of the power structure getting kicked around. By and large they are bad people who embraced violence as a solution and as I said above are justly deserving of condemnation. The US created the situation though. It was a predictable result both of the invasion itself and the manner that it and its aftermath were conducted. The US isn't the only guilty party by far but the situation was a foreseeable, even likely result, of actions that it took. As such it deserves a preponderance of the blame. The choices the US made lead to this. We need to be made to see the full consequence of our actions.

[Kouran]

Some folks it would seem could use a bit of reminding

We are the bad guy here

We are the ones who perpetrated an unprovoked, illegal, and idiotic invasion of a country that was not threatening us, or anyone else. We are the evil empire. Not them. US. If bad stuff happens to our troops in Iraq because of these documents (which I still do not believe will be the case), we deserve it. We could make it stop any time we felt like it by minding our own goddamn business and staying inside our own goddamn country.

This is the sort of response that honestly makes me sick. How can you honestly believe that a soldier or marine who died in a theater of war deserved it becuase the fucking politicians who sent them to the theater of war are crooks? If anyone dereves to die in this mess it's the goddamn politicians.

If you want a change, then fucking vote for someone who has a spine and some integrity. Wishing for men and women who are only doing their duty to be killed in action is just disgusting.

[Ckrisz]

S John,

Thanks for the information. It's a crazy low tech method that we don't have many solutions for. In fact, I'm surprised it's only a problem now, in the last decade, you know?

IEDs have been around since the invention of chemical explosives. They were huge in Vietnam as well (except they were called 'booby traps' or 'mines') - the difference in Vietnam being that war also came with a even more serious direct fire threats from enemy infantry in complex actions, which are much less prevalent in Iraq and Afghanistan. The prominence of IEDs has come about because the U.S. military is much more mechanized than it used to be and because direct fire is a much lesser threat.

I read about the weird charges that were concave and turned into a projectile when they exploded (cannot remember the name now??), but from what I read they did not originate in Iraq. The wikileaks files indicates that armaments were coming in from Iran, so they could have come from there. Syria also had a porous border.

These are explosively-formed projectiles and were very prevalent in Baghdad, mostly used by the Mahdi Army and its offshoots. EFPs are really nothing more than a variant on the 'shaped charge' which has also been around forever. They are relatively easy to make if tough to actually emplace well.

Yep. Iraq had a backward, but relatively multicultural community before we arrived (as opposed to, say, Yemen). Chaldean Christians, Yazidis, Shia, Sunni, probably some Druze or seveners sprinkled in there. You are correct in your assessment, the catalyst for the sectarian strife is the United States.

I think you are being very Pollyanna-ish about prewar Iraq. This is much like saying that the catalyst for sectarian strife in the Reconstruction South was the Union Army.

[Shryke]

If you go into the military expecting not to be morally culpable when this or that politician sends you off to war, I don't know what to tell you.

Soldiers are not amoral tools.

Wait, so soldiers are now morally culpable for the wars they fight in? Seriously?

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

If you go into the military expecting not to be morally culpable when this or that politician sends you off to war, I don't know what to tell you.

Soldiers are not amoral tools.

Precisely this.