War is… never having to say you screwed up

Last week, there were explosions in two Baghdad markets. On Wednesday, the first bombing killed 14 civilians; the second, two days later, killed 62 Iraqis. The Independent’s reporter Robert Fisk arrived at the scene shortly after the second explosion and filed a graphic account of the carnage caused by the bomb. Almost immediately, the British tried to distance themselves from the explosions by implying that the civilian deaths were the fault of the Iraqis. A spokesman for the Prime Minister said:

A large number of surface-to-air missiles have been malfunctioning and many have failed to hit their targets and have fallen back on to Baghdad. We are not saying definitively that these explosions were caused by Iraqi missiles but people should approach this with due scepticism.

However, Fisk managed to collect shrapnel at the scene of the bombing:

The piece of metal is only a foot high, but the numbers on it hold the clue to the latest atrocity in Baghdad.

At least 62 civilians had died by yesterday afternoon, and the coding on that hunk of metal contains the identity of the culprit.

The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved only minutes after the missile exploded on Friday evening, by an old man whose home is only 100 yards from the 6ft crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists.

The bit of metal turned out to be a fragment of the missile, and the numbers a serial number. The Independent investigated and discovered that the number matched those of either a Harm missile, or a Paveway laser-guided bomb, sold by Raytheon to the procurement arm of the US Navy:

The American military has confirmed that a navy EA-6B “Prowler” jet, based on the USS Kittyhawk, was in action over the Iraqi capital on Friday and fired at least one Harm missile to protect two American fighters from a surface-to-air missile battery.

An online database of suppliers maintained by the Defence Logistics Information Service, part of the Department of Defence, showed that the reference MFR 96214 was the identification or “cage” number of a Raytheon plant in the city of McKinney, Texas.

The 30003 reference refers to the Naval Air Systems Command, the procurement agency responsible for furnishing the US Navy’s air force with its weaponry.

Defence experts said the damage caused at Shu’ale was consistent with that of Paveway or, more probably, a Harm weapon, which carries a warhead designed to explode into thousands of aluminium fragments and has a range of 80km.

Despite its manufacturer’s claims, it also has a record of unreliability when fired at a target which “disappears” if, as the Iraqi forces do, the target’s operators switch their radar signal rapidly on and off. Nick Cook, of Jane’s Defence Weekly, said: “The problem with Harms is that they can be seduced away from their targets by any sort of curious transmission. They are meant to have corrected that but there have been problems.”

Pretty clear evidence that the marketplace explosions were caused by an Allied missile, surely? After all, even the US military admits that about 10% of their precision weapons do not hit their targets (I mean, a few missiles haven’t even landed in the right country!). But no, Britain and America just can’t admit that their weapons were at fault. Tony Blair was still trying to put the blame on the Iraqis on Wednesday, telling the House of Commons:

“It is increasingly probable that that was not a coalition bomb,” Mr. Blair told the House of Commons. “It takes us time to investigate this, but there was no target near it, and we do not believe it was one of our bombs.”

He stopped short of blaming the Iraqis for the SARS virus currently sweeping the globe.

But Rob Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air Launched Weapons, seems to think that both incidents were probably caused by coalition missiles and has criticized U.S. and British officials for failing to make public any evidence that would make it possible to identify who is responsible.

Mr. Hewson said that coalition officials have refused to divulge basic information that could help clear them of blame. The coalition still has not made public the aircraft that were active in the area, the weapons used, whether all weapons are accounted for and all targets hit. Mr. Hewson said that information on the success of strikes could come from satellite or aerial surveillance or from special forces likely in Baghdad that help choose targets and report on the effectiveness of strikes.

“If one of your [targeted] buildings isn’t hit, it’s reasonable to say that your missile didn’t make it,” Mr. Hewson said. “They have chosen not to answer any of these questions, which certainly doesn’t help their case.”

Mr. Hewson is not swayed by reports that Musahim Saab Al-Tikriti was fired as Iraq’s air-defence chief despite being a cousin of Mr. Hussein. He believes Mr. Al-Tikriti was replaced before the first marketplace explosion last week.

Still, Geoff ‘Buff’ Hoon, the British Defence Secretary is still in full-on denial mode about the incidents (and the cluster bombings too):

“What is important about this is all of us should look very sceptically at these kinds of reports, relying only on known and agreed facts.” Mr Hoon repeatedly cast doubt on TV reports on Wednesday that Iraqi civilians had died from cluster bombs dropped near the village of Hillah. MPs and the public should “suspend their belief” because the graphic images were the product of Iraqi minders taking television crews to particular locations.

“known and agreed facts”… well we know the serial number of the missile that killed those people, but because ‘Buff’ doesn’t agree, it’s not a fact…? He also said that there was not “a shred of corroborating evidence”, other than that “supplied by Saddam Hussein’s regime”, that US forces were responsible for the two marketplace tragedies. Robert Fisk has reponded to ‘Buff’, saying:

Take the poor old man – far poorer in every way than Mr Hoon – who produced that telling scrap of fuselage at Shu’ala last week, proving that the missile which hit the dirt-poor Shia Muslim slums was made by Raytheon, manufacturers of the cruise missile.

The Iraqi intelligence service is a brutal, crude organisation, but subtlety and sophistication are not its strong points. To suggest that President Saddam’s goons could have turned up in the slums – amid a population known for its hatred of the Iraqi Baath party and possibly responsible for killing a number of its apparatchiks – and persuaded these largely illiterate people to tell a complicated lie to foreign journalists is beyond credibility. There were many bits of the same wretched missile all over Shu’ala. I collected five pieces myself, made of the same alloy, two of them dug out of the muck with my own hands.

These were not members of President Saddam’s regime, as Mr Hoon libels them; they were the very people indeed whom Mr. Hoon has sworn to “liberate” from the Iraqi leader. And the two explosions occurred exactly opposite each other, one on each side of the dual carriageway in Sha’ab. Does Mr Hoon think the Iraqis were able to stage two identical explosions – from the air – at exactly equidistant points in a street packed with cars, pedestrians, apartment doormen, restaurant workers and car repair boys?

How many times, I wonder, do ministers think they can con their electorate with this miserable routine?

The Independent has also responded in today’s leader, Geoff Hoon, Robert Fisk and reporting the truth:

Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, is a smooth politician who relies on nuance to do his dirty work. He did not say, in plain terms, that he disbelieves The Independent’s accounts of civilian casualties sustained in Iraq. He did not say that Robert Fisk, our award-winning reporter, is a willing dupe of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He simply allowed those suggestions to hang, unspoken, in the House of Commons chamber yesterday.

…

Any careful reader of [Fisk's] reports from Iraq would know that he holds no brief for the Saddam regime. Indeed, he was among the first journalists to report Saddam’s use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war.

…

Mr Hoon’s handling of the news from this war has been characterised by exaggeration, half-truth and backtracking. It was Mr Hoon who claimed on BBC Radio that local people had “certainly” risen up in Basra. When asked how he knew, he blustered. It does not seem to have been wholly true. It was Mr Hoon who claimed that chemical suits found by advancing coalition troops showed “categorically” that Saddam was preparing to use chemical weapons, to be contradicted by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, Chief of the Defence Staff, who warned against jumping to conclusions. Last night, the MoD was forced to concede that an estimate of PoW numbers given only hours earlier by Mr Hoon was wildly inaccurate.

Yesterday’s innuendo against this newspaper and our correspondent was a miserable attempt to brush aside unwelcome truths. This is no way to reassure a doubtful British public that the Government genuinely wants to minimise civilian casualties, rather than simply the reporting of them.

No one’s suggesting the military were deliberately trying to kill those Iraqi civilians, it was just one of those tragic accidents that are inevitable in any war. No matter what one’s stance on the war, only a complete moron would be surprised to learn that innocent people had been killed. So why the Hell can’t Britain and America just come clean and admit that it was their missile? “Yes, it was caused by one of our missiles malfunctioning, and we will hold a full investigation. We apologise to those affected by this tragedy… blah, blah, blah… try to ensure it doesn’t happen agin… however, it’s a war and inevitably…” Is that really so hard to say? Then again, perhaps the truth is just too much to expect from Blair’s government.

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