Hostages

Three excerpts from a Washington Post article about the tactics adopted by US forces in trying to quell resistance in “post-war” Iraq:

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later.

[…]

“I figure you can either sit barricaded in your base camp or take the fight to the enemy,” said Lt. Col. Larry “Pepper” Jackson, commander of an Army outpost on the outskirts of Bayji, which is still described as hostile by U.S. military intelligence analysts. “Our key to success is staying on the offense. But you don’t do it recklessly, because then you’d lose the people.”

[…]

After the fighting is over, U.S. military officials say, it becomes important to repair the damage — a door smashed, a wall breached, an irrigation culvert flattened by a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. Every U.S. brigade commander in Iraq has a “Commander’s Emergency Repair Fund” of $200,000 that is replenished as he spends it. Over the past six weeks of the U.S. offensive, commanders across Iraq dispensed $13 million to rebuild schools, clinics, water treatment plans and police stations, said Army Col. David MacEwen, who helps coordinate the civic works.

One of these quotes is not like the others. Isn’t taking hostages one of those things the “bad men” do?

To preempt the obvious response, no I don’t suppose that anything unpleasant would have befallen the family of the Iraqi officer hadn’t turned himself in. Which still doesn’t make hostage-taking right. (And calling it an “intelligence operation” instead of a “war” doesn’t excuse adopting tactics which, had they been adopted by the other side, would have been roundly condemned.)

[Via MetaFilter]