by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
It seems that the rebels might actually be under the overall supervision of the international banking industry, rather than the oil majors. On March 19 they announced the “[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.’”
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Rear Admiral Russ Harding, a British officer, said: “It would appear that two of our strikes yesterday may have resulted in [rebel] deaths. I am not apologising. The situation on the ground was and remains extremely fluid and until yesterday we did not have information that [rebel] forces are using tanks.”
It turns out that ‘friendly fire’ is one of war’s really big killers. An amazing essay on ‘friendly fire by Lt Col Michael J. Davidson ran in the Naval War College Review this last winter. Davidson was chiefly concerned with the performance (lamentable) of the military justice system in connection with episodes of friendly fire, which he defines as the accidental killing in a combat setting of one soldier by another of the same or an allied force”.
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Davidson cites some numbers which could swiftly instruct the Libyan rebels that the deaths of their comrades at the hands of Nato planes is nothing out of the ordinary: “The number of casualties [ie. killed and wounded] associated with friendly fire has often been stunning. One French general estimated that approximately 75,000 French casualties in World War I were caused by French artillery fire.
“An estimated five per cent of [US] Vietnam casualties were attributed to friendly fire. During the first Persian Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, 23–24 per cent of US fatalities and 77 per cent of American vehicle losses were attributed to friendly fire.”
Another military military scholar, Kenneth K. Steinweg, wrote a paper, Dealing Realistically with Fratricide (Parameters, Spring 1995), estimating that 10 to 15 per cent of US casualties during the 20th century were caused by friendly fire, which equates to between 177,000 and 250,000 casualties.
Historical examples of friendly fire are so prevalent as to be characterized as normal rather than exceptional. In some cases, friendly fire was the result of inexperience and inadequate training.
For example, in 1643, during the English Civil War, poorly trained and inexperienced parliamentary infantry organised in three lines attacked a heavily fortified building held by royalist troops. Instead of the forward line firing first and then retiring to the rear to re-load while the next line in turn fired, all three fired simultaneously, effectively eliminating the front rank.
A particularly bitter case came right at the end of World War Two when RAF pilots flying Typhoons attacked four German ships in the Bay of Lubeck in the Baltic Sea, believing them to be carrying escaping SS officers.
The Typhoons sank the ships and then, under orders to spare no one, spent an hour strafing the survivors in the water, only to find later that they had machine-gunned about 10,000 Jews from the Neuengamme Camp in northern Germany.
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