For weeks, the U.S. military has denied charges that its Aug. 22 attack on Azizabad, Afghanistan killed scores of civilians, despite the fact that Afghan witnesses, the United Nations, and other human rights and international officials all say roughly 90 villagers were killed. Yesterday, the military reversed course and requested an investigation into the strike in light of “emerging evidence.” Part of that evidence is cellphone images showing “at least 11 dead children,” according to the New York Times.

As Firedoglake points out, the Times of London revealed that the U.S. had been relying on accounts from an embedded journalist: Fox News’s Oliver North:

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

Relying on North for a “fair and balanced” view is a major mistake. Even leaving aside his past as a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan, North routinely makes biased and unsourced claims:

– “There is no such thing as an Islamic moderate.” [LINK]

– “Every terrorist out there is hoping John Kerry Is the next president of the United States.” [LINK]

– Politicians who raise the issue of Abu Ghraib “have blood on their hands.” [LINK]

– Abuse of Iraqi prisoners is “the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus.” [LINK]

Dismissing accounts about the attack from witnesses, such as a village doctor who “said he counted 50 to 60 bodies of civilians, most of them women and children,” the U.S. military repeatedly “accused the villagers of spreading Taliban propaganda.”

Today, Human Rights Watch warned that by continuing air strikes and killing civilians, the U.S. risked a public backlash in Afghanistan. Seeming to codify the report, Azizabad’s district chief told the Times, “If they continue like this, they will lose the people’s confidence in the government and the coalition forces.”

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Bob Woodward has an item this morning explaining more fully his book’s assertion that the 2007 troop surge “was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.” Woodward notes the importance of the Sunni awakenings and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia “freeze,” but stresses the innovative new counter-insurgency tactics employed by General David Petraeus, termed “‘collaborative warfare,’ using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.”

While the new tactics are indeed impressive, a few of Woodward’s comments last night on 60 Minutes raised some troubling questions.

Asked to describe these new tactics in more detail, Woodward said “I’d love to go through the details, but I’m not going to.” Woodward couldn’t hide how impressed he was with what the U.S. military has been able to do in Iraq, though, calling it “the stuff of which military novels are written”:

WOODWARD: From what I know about it, it’s one of those things that go back to any war, World War I, World War II, the role of the tank, and the airplane.

Q: Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?

WOODWARD: Yeah…if you were an al Qaeda leader or part of the insurgency in Iraq, or one of these renegade militias, and you knew about what they were able to do, you’d get your ass outta town.

Back before the Iraq invasion, air power was all the rage. In the wake of the Kosovo intervention, advocates of invasion were celebrating “one of the great revolutions in military history: the revolution of air power,” and suggesting that, America having thus mastered the art of war, toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing democracy in Iraq would not be difficult. It didn’t quite work out that way.

While it’s a positive thing that such a prominent figure as Bob Woodward is attempting to correct the record on the surge, pushing back on the simplistic establishment consensus which holds that “we were losing, then Bush sent more troops, and now we’re winning,” Woodward’s heavy breathing over “collaborative warfare” is distinctly evocative of the previous heavy breathing over bombs that can go down chimneys.

As with the national security establishment’s erstwhile romance with air power, the idea that we’ve discovered the “key” to counterinsurgency brings with it the possibility that, armed with a shiny new doctrine, U.S. policymakers will feel emboldened to propose and undertake — and media elites will be induced to support — all kinds of new and inherently unpredictable military interventions against various and sundry future new Hitlers, forgetting the most important lesson of counterinsurgency: Don’t get in situations where you have to engage in counterinsurgency.

Last night on 60 Minutes, host Scott Pelley interviewed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to discuss his new book “The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008.” Pelley noted that one part of the story Woodward tells is President Bush’s “frustration with the attitude of the Iraqi people”:

WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberated them.

PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?

WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.

Watch it:

Nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives since 2003 (maybe more) and around 2 million have either fled the country or are internally displaced. For many years, ordinary Iraqis have had to deal with car bombs, suicide bombs, and other routine violence that ultimately resulted in civil war and the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. Why wouldn’t Iraqis be grateful for all that?

Woodward also revealed during the interview that the “secret behind the success of the surge” was not the U.S. troop build-up but a “breakthrough” in “secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders.” Woodward would not provide any further details of the secret plan.

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