It’s not freedom that’s on the march

June 2, 2006

The tragedies and the incidents of violence against civilians in [tag]Iraq[/tag] are nothing short of breathtaking. Consider these news items, just from the last 48 hours:

[tag]Ishaqi[/tag]: “The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may have been responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent Iraqi civilians…. According to the Americans, the building collapsed under heavy fire killing four people – a suspect, two women and a child. But a report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, including five children and four women, before blowing up the building.”

[tag]Haditha[/tag]: “Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki upbraided the U.S. military over allegations that Marines killed two dozen unarmed civilians in Haditha, calling the killings “a horrible crime” in his strongest public comments on the subject since his government was sworn in last month.”

[tag]Hamandiya[/tag]: “The Marine Corps will file criminal charges, including some murder counts, against several enlisted Marines and a Navy corpsman in the fatal shooting of an Iraqi civilian in April, officials close to the investigation said Thursday.”

[tag]Samarra[/tag]: “Pregnant Iraqi Woman Shot Near Security Checkpoint… One of the survivors of this incident says they were rushing the pregnant woman to the hospital, because she was about to give birth and didn’t know the road was blocked.”

Iraqi officials want answers. No one can blame them.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-[tag]Maliki[/tag] lashed out at the American military on Thursday, denouncing what he characterized as habitual [tag]attacks[/tag] by troops against Iraqi [tag]civilians[/tag].

As outrage over reports that American marines killed 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha last year continued to shake the new government, the country’s senior leaders said that they would demand that American officials turn over their investigative files on the killings and that the Iraqi government would conduct its own inquiry.

In his comments, Mr. Maliki said violence against civilians had become a “[tag]daily[/tag] phenomenon” by many troops in the American-led coalition who “do not respect the Iraqi people.”

“They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion,” he said. “This is completely unacceptable.” Attacks on civilians will play a role in future decisions on how long to ask American forces to remain in Iraq, the prime minister added.

Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie also told the NYT, “As you know, this is not the only [tag]massacre[/tag], and there are a lot.”

We really need to leave.

Still, I suspect the Marines and Soldiers are showing a lot more “respect” for Iraqi civilians than the Iraqi Militias, Insurgents and the foreign terrorists.

That said, I wish we would be a little more visible in pursuing and punishing those responsible. Seems no effort is too much to get gays out of the military, but any effort is too much to punish murderers.

  • I never supported this insane war. That said, once Bush launched it, I pretty much agreed with Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule – We broke it. We fix it. Through all of it, I was afraid we were creating new ‘terrorists’ faster than we were catching the old ones. No recipe for success, that.
    With this latest barrage of atrocities, on top of ‘old news’ like Abu Ghraib, Bush’s war of whim is lost. It’s over, and there’s no chance of fixing a god damned thing.
    We have to get out now, before we make matters even worse. Because sadly, those seem to be our only 2 options.

    One last thing. Why does Rummy still have a job? It’s incomprehensible.

  • Maybe this is the super secret Bush plan. Get all teh Iraqi people to rally behind the new government by creating an evil to align against. In this case the US Marine Corps appears to be the evil. Interesting choice.

  • The actions of American soldiers in these cases are not excusable, but they are understandable. If you put people in stressful, ambiguous, frustrating, life-and-death situations over which they have very little control, and leave them there long enough, they will start to crack. It doesn’t matter how well trained or how moral the soldiers are, these type of events are bound to happen.

  • As I recall, one of the many reasons Bush came up with for our presence in Iraq was that a Sadaam-free Iraq would provide an example that other countries in the region would want to emulate. How’s that going, George?

  • Can you say “Lidice”? Can you say “Wehrmacht”? Can you say “Einsatzgruppen”???

    I knew this was going to happen the day they changed the Steel Pot of Liberation for the kevlar copy of the old Nazi coal scuttle.

    Goddamn that Texass sonofabitch! Not only does he manage to “invade Poland,” he’s turned the American armed forces into the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

    Well, not really. They aren’t even close to their record one-time kill of 30,000 innocents on Panay Island in 1900 when they “turned the island into a howling wilderness” in the words of their proud commander, General Jacob Devers. And they’re not in the same universe the 15 million over six generations their ancestors (such as one of my great-grandfathers) proudly killed in North America.

    Fine American Boys operating in Fine American traditions: The Trail of Tears, Custer’s Dakota Territory Campaign, The Sand Creek Masscre, Wounded Knee, Panay Island… the list goes on and on and on and on.

  • Hey Dillon:

    During the Vietnam War, my retired career-Marine father-in-law and I (an antiwar Vietnam vet) had our first agreement about what was going wrong
    there when the My Lai Massacre was made public. My father-in-law
    was a man who had seen some of the worst combat of the Second World War in the Pacific, and had survived the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War during his 20 years in the Corps, during which he had risen from Private to Captain. He was absolutely outraged that American soldiers could have committed this massacre.

    He once told me an interesting story during our conversations about this, that has stuck in my mind over the years. He was one of the original Marines to land on Guadalcanal. The event he spoke of happened during the Battle of Bloody Ridge in November 1942, when the Japanese made their nearly-successful attempt to boot the Americans off the island.
    Bloody Ridge was as close as they got to overrunning Henderson
    Field and wiping out the Marines – it was truly a battle of life or death. At the height of combat, my father-in-law’s squad captured a Japanese soldier. The American officer in charge ordered him to take the man to the rear, and “be back in ten minutes.” It was a good 30 minute one-way hike through the jungle, back the one mile to headquarters at the airfield. My
    father-in-law realized he had been ordered to kill the prisoner. He looked the officer in the eye and said, “Are you sure about that, sir?” Confronted by my father-in-law, the officer recoiled from his first act, saying “get him back to headquarters.”

    To my father-in-law, the point of the story was that, at the height of a life or death battle, with the outcome in serious doubt, one still did not violate the laws of war and American morality. That’s the way Marines are supposed to be.

    For me personally, this stuff in Iraq demonstrates what happens when you have a volunteer army that has no leavening of the middle classes in it. Turning the semi-educated halfwit victims of American miseducation who grew up on first-person-shooter video games loose with real guns in an environment like this, the only question to me is why it took as long as it did for this stuff to start happening.

    And it makes me mad as hell that I think like that.

  • Wasn’t Hitler ultimately responsible also for ALL war crimes committed by his military in his war? I have heard that there is no direct paper trail between Hitler and those war crimes. We still hold him responsible for all those deaths, including the holocaust. As I understand it, the act of initiating a war or attacking another country is a war crime. Our own laws are such that If I were to commit a robbery and someone died during the robbery, even if not directly caused by my actions, I would still be charged with their deaths. My long drawn out rambling was to draw some parallels between Hitler and our Fuhrer, Herr Shrub. Americans should never again wonder how the Germans were led down that road to all the atrocities committed by them during WWII. We have experienced it first hand. We are well down that same road ourselves. A little bit at a time, like the boiling the frog in water analogy. Kofi Annan must be our Neville Chamberlain, impotent and in power. Bolton is preventing that singlehandedly. The UN should have charges against the US and Bush for his attack of Iraq as their foremost issue but it has never even been an issue.

    Our troop’s war crimes are acts of fear(every car or person a potential IED), desperation (3 and 4 tours in Iraq and Afghanistan) and anger from loss of fellow soldiers in front of their eyes in the most traumatic ways possible. This is why we didn’t go back to Somalia, but then they didn’t have oil. The military leadershit (specifically Rumsfeld) has twisted the military policies to make anything acceptable if it “may” achieve results in line with their goals. To intentionally create such a situation is beyond stupid.

    Our Congress, after the November elections and the Repiglicans are no longer in control of every goddamn thing, should pass a bill urging our leader, El Corrupto, to resolve the Iraq conflict in a manner as befitting George Washington, a front line (way out in front) commander. We could continue this bill down the chain of command at a pretty good rate with the Iraqi’s cooperation. I don’t think they would object.

  • Children + guns = tragedy. Powerful psychological forces are at work: fear, groupthink, etc. and they’ve witnessed unpunished criminal behavior by the federal government.

    Of course they don’t feel like they will be held accountable. Accountability is dead in America. Responsibility and consequence are antiquated relics of the past. They’ve been replaced by blame and lies.

  • Tom,
    it’s not so much the “the semi-educated halfwit victims of American miseducation who grew up on first-person-shooter video games loose with real guns in an environment like this (that was me two months out of high school)”, it will always come down to leadership, whether in preventing actions such as this, or ensuring that the crime and it’s perpetrators are brought to justice.
    This is a case that involves several factors:
    1) Leadership that is micromanaged from the office of SectDef, who put unrealistic expectations on the troops in the field;
    2) Leadership that tries to fight a “kill-’em-all, let-God-sort-’em-out” war of occupation and conquest
    3) Leadership that either intentionally or indirectly instills in the minds of the troops that:
    a) Iraq is responsible for 9/11;
    b) the Iraqis are in need of America’s “superior morality and leadership”, creating a new White Man’s Burden mentality; and
    c) any Iraqi can or is either a member of the groups fighting the US and Baghdad government, or they support those groups, regardless of sex or age.

    It’s in this kind of atmosphere that atrocities like this occur.

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