(This story is also discussed in this diary by Arminius)
I guess our worst fears are coming to pass. In Haditha, the Iraq war now has its Mi Lai incident:
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon report on an incident in which U.S. Marines shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November will show that those killings were deliberate and worse than initially reported, a Pennsylvania congressman said Wednesday.
“There was no firefight. There was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed those innocent people,” Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said during a news conference on Iraq. “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell.” […]
U.S. military authorities in Iraq initially reported that one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians in a bus were killed by a roadside bomb in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha. They said eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.
Subsequent reporting by Time and Knight Ridder revealed a still different account of events, with survivors describing Marines breaking down the door of a house and shooting the occupants.
Twenty-three people were killed, relatives of the dead told Knight Ridder.
This is beyond sad, beyond outrage, beyond simple tragedy. I would hope that all Americans, regardless of political affiliation will feel the same way about this atrocity, for that is what it is. I also hope that in the future we all become less dismissive of reports in the Arab media which had this story correctly reported early on.
More importantly, I hope that the greatest blame gets apportioned on those who placed our soldiers in this situation in the first place. In all wars, atrocities occur, and especially so in guerilla wars like the one we are fighting in Iraq. No army, no matter how well trained, can avoid them. In war, they are as inevitable as the sun rising each day.
(Continued below the fold)
This is not to deny or diminish the crime these soldiers committed, but to suggest that they are the sole villains here would be ludicrous. It is Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and a host of lesser lights inside and outside the official corridors of power who are far more to blame than these soldiers. They did not ask to be put in this horrible situation, where the enemy cannot be determined easily, and where the constant stress of fighting against an insurgency that can literally blend into the population cannot be underestimated. And no one can say what he or she would do in a similar situation where day after day you run the risk of death, where day after day you do not know which of your friends will meet extinction. I certainly cannot know what I would do, and I will not judge those who have endured such a terrible burden.
No, the ones who deserve our greatest scorn are President Bush and his coterie of warmongers, in and out of this Administration. They were the ones who chose this war for no other reason than their own grandiose dreams of conquest. They lied and distorted the facts about the threat Iraq posed, and happily exploited the fears of ordinary Americans, until far too many, in the media and in the general populace were all too eager to demand a crusade against Saddam. What they accomplished was the far greater crime: the prosecution of aggressive war. Literally the worst of all of the crimes against humanity first enunciated at the Nuremberg Tribunals, since what flows from its commission are the host of so many other crimes, of which Haditha is now only the most recent example.
No one will prosecute the war criminals in the White House, or those who willingly led the war cheers for them in the halls of Congress, on television and on the editorial pages of our newspapers. But their guilt far exceeds that of the soldiers who murdered these poor men, women and children in Haditha, a murder committed in fear and rage, out of a misplaced notion of vengeance. In a just world, Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and all the other architects of this dark design would stand in the dock before the International Criminal Court to answer for all the atrocities that flowed from their “war of liberation.” That will not happen, but it should.
It truly should.
War Crimes of the Bush Administration
