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From Wikileaks

By William M. Arkin (Washington Post)
Monday February 4, 2008

Leak: US Rules of Engagement for Iraq

Page 1 of the leaked document. See US Rules of Engagement for Iraq for the rest

Iraq Rules Need More Airing

The leaked "Rules of Engagement" for U.S. military forces in Iraq, revealed by the website WikiLeaks and reported today in the New York Times, is actually less interesting for the rules than for a mind-boggling and complex document that says a lot about the nature of the American way of war.

We don't hear much these days about micro-management from Washington or fighting with one hand tied behind our backs: the assumption is that the Bush administration, particularly post-Rumsfeld, has given free rein to the military and its commanders and that the niceties of former hesitant administrations has been swept aside to fight and win.

The leaked rules, though, are a complex maze of regulation and constraints, most of which are oriented towards safeguarding civilians and Iraqi civilian infrastructure. I have heard complaints in the past from military officers that the "collateral damage" restraints, as they're commonly referred to, have hampered operations. But no one in Iraq today seems to think that these now deeply embedded rules are anything more than the way to fight in the al Jazeera era.

The spokesmen for U.S. forces in Iraq told the Times that the release of this classified document "could put U.S. military personnel at risk," a kind of knee-jerk official reaction. I say instead that because the rules are clearly so meticulous and sensitive to civilians, quite the contrary should prevail: Publicize the rules as much as possible, show how careful U.S. forces really are. It's not like we're otherwise winning the battle of hearts and minds by hoarding our secrets.

The 2005 Rules of Engagement for Multi-National Division Baghdad, classified Secret, were leaked by a soldier and posted on the WikiLeaks website yesterday. The Rules lay out almost every aspect of do's and don'ts for conventional military forces, including who is the enemy, what are protected places, when deadly force can and cannot be used, and what authorities and procedures exist for use of force, ranging from what the "on-scene commander" can do either in self-defense or during the conduct of operations all the way to authorities retained by the Secretary of Defense for striking certain targets.

Most of the document is unclassified. Secret parts include the specific designation of elements of the former government of Saddam Hussein and specific terrorist organizations and insurgent groups as declared hostile forces. And there are some secret sections dealing with politically sensitive topics, like the employment of Claymore anti-personnel mines for perimeter defense and the use of "riot control agents" (that is, tear gas and the like that is not banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention) and riot control "means" in dealing with civil disturbances and detainees.

The guts of the rules though, and the repeated message, is about the extreme measures that are required to safeguard civilians in operations. Categories of targets, people and places, are discussed in detail, and levels of damage are designated, each demanding different considerations and approval authorities. "High collateral damage targets," that is, those targets that, if struck, have a ten percent probability of causing collateral damage through blast debris and fragmentation or could kill more than 30 civilians, even a terrorist target, requires approval of the Secretary of Defense.

This is not news to me, but most Americans, and probably a lot of critics of the war and the military, would find it interesting if not comforting that those are the rules. Last week I had a long conversation with Lt. Gen. Gary North, commander of the air component of U.S. Central Command and the coalition air combat commander, who told me that he reviews every single weapon that is delivered by an airplane to ensure that units are adhering to the proper rules of engagement.

Maybe that's not micro-management a la LBJ, but it is the product of an inherent prosecutorial environment that leans in the direction of finding fault. And it is incredibly time consuming, perhaps even unintentionally constraining of the pace of operations, because we have become so regulated - read paranoid. I'm not arguing for a minute that there shouldn't be rules or that those rules should be mindful of the bigger battle for hearts and minds. I just think that much more should be published about what the rules are so that we can ponder what they have done to the American military and to our war efforts.

Appearing in the Washington Post as http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2008/02/iraq_rules_need_more_airing_no.html?nav=rss_blog