I am beyond frustrated to read the New York Times account of what some of our Marines did in Haditha. Summarily executing women, an old man in a wheelchair, and young children is not what we sent our troops to do. I am hopeful that the investigation will be vigorous, exhaustive, and will punish the officers that tried to cover it up by paying the the surviving families $2,500 per victim.
I know that it is hard to serve in Iraq in constant fear of being blown up or dismembered by a roadside bomb. I know that it’s traumatic to watch one of your buddies die in such an attack. I understand that soldiers under that kind of pressure can lose their judgment, their training, and their moral bearings and seek blind revenge. These are mitigating factors. But, they cannot excuse what happened.
We must consider this further proof that our continued presence in Iraq is unlikely to be productive. We are becoming what we came to defeat. We can’t police a country when our soldiers are this alienated from the population. One atrocity like the one in Haditha can and will wipe out thousands of acts of kindness and generosity. We have lost control of the situation and we have lost our bearings. Our mission in Iraq is irredeemable.
Saying now that our mission is irredeemable would require the mission to have been worthy in the first place. And after all, what was the mission? WMD? Iraqi freedom? Bullshit. The mission can’t fail, because it was a failed ideology that set in motion to begin with. Where it is failing now is in it’s continuance.
I know. But, the plan envisioned a vibrant economy and grateful Iraqis, and Americans working together with Iraqis to rebuild their country, and oh so many other sweet dreams. We can’t accomplish those things. Nothing is going to change that now. Haditha and Abu Ghraib are just jarring lessons on how far from the plan we’ve veered.
We can all argue about what went wrong, and whether any plan could have done better. But, regardless, it’s time to pull the plug.
You do not try to nation-build in an area where the people either hate you for what you are or what you want to do, OR hate each other because of a centuries old religious hatred!
Even if we failed to see the first criteria, we surely should have known the second. Either we should have left a strongman rule there or divided up the country along religious lines should have been our strategy options from day one! Why wasn’t it?
I have a hard time believing that they envisioned holding hands with Iraqi’s, and all that being greeted as liberators bullshit. They (Cheney and the neocons) may be evil, but they aren’t that ignorant. If they really believed that nonsense, then why was the oil ministry building one of the very few sites that they chose to protect when they entered Baghdad? Oh, they knew alright. They are continuing ahead as planned, despite the setbacks, and despite the rise of some popular resistance. The permanent bases are evidence of that. They intend to drag us head long, whether we like it or not, into a wider global conflict that will, they hope, require us to set aside our opposition to the war(s) in the region, and defend ourselves against the inevitable rise, militarily, and economically, of worldwide resistance to our imperialist plans.
We are fucked…and good.
Completely agreed, supersoling.
However: with ideologues of this nature, I wonder at any concern about either domestic or international opposition to the agenda, which is simply world domination.
You said it for me, supersoling!
I think the free-market purists (which overlaps with the neo-cons but also represents a distinct group) were hoping that the Iraqis would be so happy to be free of 30 years of oppressive subjugation that they wouldn’t mind that we were economically raping their country while rebuilding it. And maybe they wouldn’t have, if we had given them something to do. But a completely free market like Brehmer implemented doesn’t allow for make-work jobs to keep people happy, and 75%+ unemployment provides a lot of people with a lot of free time to get pissed about the state of their country. I’m actually surprised there isn’t more violence.
But they would have had to have been blind not to foresee the sectarian monster they would unleash by removing Saddam from control. Saddam, for all his evil, was the only thing holding that place together. I’m not saying that his continued power over the Iraqi’s was a good thing, but what we have done is far worse, as far as I’m concerned. They knew, but it was a chance they had to take because they saw Iraq as the first, best, logical place to get their foot in the door of the Middle East. Maybe they didn’t see it going as bad as it has, but I’m sure they foresaw some of this.
I don’t know, I mostly agree. Cheney and company clearly aren’t that stupid but they could be arrogant enough to think they could control whatever happened.
The one thing I’m reasonably sure of, it’s pretty clear from their reactions that they clearly didn’t think there would be this much successful violence against american soldiers. The use of i.e.d.s is probably on a level hundreds of times what they expected.
I go back and forth on the planned destruction vs. blinded by ideology vs. total incompetence theories of Iraq.
In the end, I don’t think any one of these categories can explain what has happened by itself.
I can see elements of all three at work.
For example, it’s quite possible that they were surprised at the complete breakdown of the police after the capture of Baghdad, that they didn’t even know who Sistani was and how difficult it would be to ignore his moral and political authority, that they were shocked at the poor state of Iraq’s infrastucture, and that they didn’t realize that disbanding the army would lead directly to an armed insurgency.
That’s a combo of incompetence and ideological blindness, because the intelligence community did predict at least some of these things.
On the other hand, it could be that disbanding the army was done in large part in order to leave a security vacuum so bad that the Iraqis would be forced to submit to our extended presence, and that we have acted with the intention of keeping Iraq divided, unable to reconstitute an army, and thus, unable to project force across their borders for generations.
It’s just hard to discern how much is by design and how much is by chance.
I hear you Booman.
But on the point of Iraq’s infrastructure, after 12 or so years of sanctions that were bleeding the Iraqi population, and knowing that Saddam wasn’t spending what money he did have, including proceeds from the UN oil for food and medicine program, on his citizens and infrastructure, how could they not also see this as a problem? It’s not like they’re weren’t American eyes inside the country.
I dunno. I’m no expert on electrical grids and the like. So, I can’t say what we knew or should have known about things like that.
Even Flow: They are continuing ahead as planned, despite the setbacks, and despite the rise of some popular resistance.
Huh?
That make zero sense.
The fathering of a burgeoning fundamentalist republic with extremely close and long standing ties to Iran is exactly the opposite of what was planned.
As you may or may not know, there are two primary powers in Iraq which are based in Iran, the Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq.
During the twenty plus years prior to the deposing of Saddam Hussein, Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq have been trying to make Iraq a Shiite fundamentalist Islamic republic.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 destroyed all the obstacles that were before them.
Al-Dawa party is a well-known Shiite fundamentalist Islamic faction.
E.g.:
A `suicider’ (one of the very first ever) from the Al-Dawa party bombed the US embassy in Kuwait in 1983.
In 1984, four men from Al Dawa highjacked a Kuwait airbus travelling from Kuwait to Pakistan.
They held the plane for six days.
During this time, these four men from Al Dawa shot and killed two Americans: Mr Charles Hegna and Mr William Stanford.
Makes zero sense unless you’re planning to bomb the fuck out of Iran.
The plan was to destroy everything in Iraq and start from scratch building a free market wet dream, with the vast majority of the rebuilding profits going to foreigners. Who could have guessed that Iraqis would object to being used as a demonstration country in a voodoo economics experiment?
What was the mission? The mission was wining re-election.
Mission accomplished!
Alsso heard that three CBS crew members were blown up in a car bomb today. Both sides should leave the civilians alone!
The mission has always been irredeemable. That is the true tragedy of the war.
I was warching FoxNews earlier, and they answered your question from yesterday re: John Warner during Shep Smith’s program. Shep’s fill-in referred to Murtha as a congressman and war hero (as if everyone who watches doesn’t already know he’s a democrat) and didn’t mention Warner at all. The lt. colonel they used as a military advisor did though, saying that Warner and Murtha were ex-marines who would get to the bottom of what happened because it would be a stain on Corps honor otherwise. I assume they chose this colonel from the dozens of military advisors they have available because his opinion was the one that fit their new narrative.
Which means that Warner and Murtha are now patriots fighting to weed out the bad apples, who miraculously will all turn out to be captains and below. Sit down and try not to think about the hypocrisy if you start feeling dizzy from the spin.
P.s. President Bush apparently is making the case today that we invaded Iraq to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East. CNN somehow thinks this is news, as if he has never made this dumb argument before. Next up: bringing democracy to Iran by bombing the shit out of them, which seems to be Bush’s foreign policy trademark.
It may have been coldly calculated to send a message: When a roadside bomb kills one of our guys, we’re gonna kill everyone in the neighborhood so you better make sure no one lays a bomb near your house.
I’m really not sure which case is the more horrifying — losing control and going berserk or methodically killing for effect. Either way it’s a war crime. But in the former case, the Marines are granted some sympathy for being under pressure and losing their judgement. In the latter, they have become killing machines who no longer recognize the humanity of the civilians around them.
Having typed that out, I now feel the latter is more damning. When they come to trial, for their sakes and the sake of the miliatry, they’ll claim crazed revenge.
I don’t know how it all went down. I just read that they lost a friend that morning and then went and did this. In my mind, they were clearly acting in revenge. Does it send a message? Yeah, it does. That could be part of their thinking. But my bet is that they were just furious that they lost their buddy.
Like you said, it’s a horrific crime either way.
This wasn’t a “heat of battle” atrocity or a “split-second decision” atrocity or even a “bad intelligence” atrocity. They deliberately went to private homes and massacred families, including children who cowered and wept while their parents begged for their lives.
The marines make me sick and semper fidelis is just another way of saying heil hitler.
I do not know the exact circumstances about the incident in Haditha, and I hope that the Marines will investigate the incident and hold those involved properly accountable.
I hope we remember this Memorial Day that of all those who choose to serve, most serve honorably. That all who have served in Iraq carry scars, seen and unseen, for the rest of their lives, and that many, TOO MANY, did not come home. That our military has been asked repeatedly to perform above and beyond what they can do and they have done the best they can in a bad situation.
The REAL CRIME committed here is that our Commander in Chief and those who work directly for him, has shown over and over that THEY are unfit for command, and do not deserve to lead our military.
America is a nation which MUST BE dedicated to peace and freedom. We recognize that there are evil people in the world, but we will not overcome evil by becoming evil. We go to war when we must, but we KNOW war is evil and must be avoided.
Iraq is a tragic mistake by a misguided Commander in Chief. We need this war over NOW. No more Hadithas, no more death, no more blood.
glenj, I respect your sentiments here, but I need to say that what the Marines did was a “real crime,” too, and it does no soldier a favor to think otherwise. It was not just any crime, either; it was really really bad crime. Mass murder of a family they didn’t even know. The murder of children. Crimes don’t get much worse than that. And we don’t actually know anything about the men who did it. They could turn out to be ordinary people driven nuts by this war, or they could turn out to be as bad as the crime they committed. We can reserve our judgment about them, but I don’t think we can hesitate to label their actions criminal. At least, that’s how I see it. Yes, war is evil and must be avoided, but so is murder commmitted by individuals.
Sadly, I have to agree. All that I have read lead me to conclude that Haditha is a war crime and I expect those accountable to be tried and punished. But this crime is not a root cause, but a symptom of a bigger sickness and we can only expect more Hadithas until we fix what really ails our country.
Unfortunately, we have slid down the slippery slope of torture, occupation and civil war. Nobody except for a handful of people in the Whitehouse and the Pentagon wanted to invade Iraq after 9/11. Now we reap the poison fruits we have sown. This sickness came from the very top and will only be fixed when we have those at the top leave office and our country gets a new direction and a chance to heal.
Some words from almost a half century ago that seem appropriate today – Sartre writes this about the French occupation of Algeria (at the time still a French colony):
Cited in Sartre (2006), Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 84.
Footnote: any typos are solely my fault. One of the joys of watching a toddler and typing at the same time.
The book that I cited from is a collection of Sarte’s essays that was recently re-issued on Routledge Classics.
read the crook and liars link.
.
Thu Nov 24th, 2005 at 10:06:45 AM PST
BAGHDAD, November 24, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Residents of Haditha, western Iraq, are being massacred by the Iraqi national forces and US occupation troops, according to the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), Iraqi’s highest Sunni authority.
Orders to Kill
Qubaissi further cited another “horrible massacre” committed by US troops in the city.
“US forces ordered a vehicle carrying 11 Iraqis to stop and ordered them out for claims of being ‘terrorists’,” he said, citing one of the survivors. “The men denied the claims, but a US commander ordered gunning them down.”
…
An Iraqi source in the city said US forces banned residents from moving with their cars.
“They also threatened to kill citizens if US forces came under attacks from the resistance groups,” the source was quoted as saying by Al-Quds Press.
It added that US occupation forces also banned food and fuel into the city, the move which aggravated the already difficult humanitarian situation in the city.
● U.S. Forces Destroy Eight Bridges over Euphrates
Sat Oct 8th, 2005 at 02:17:23 AM PST
WASHINGTON D.C. (NYT) May 27 — Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.
Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.
That evidence, described by Congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one Congressional official that the killings were “methodical in nature.”
≈ Cross-posted from my diary —
‘Haditha’ Will Become Synonymous With ‘My Lai’ ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Doesn’t this sound a little like what the Germans did to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto? Too much like it.
I was thinking Berlin Airlift, similar situation different dictator. Our military seems to think Haditha is an enemy stronghold. Hopefully, they have some tenable justification for distinguishing it from the rest of the Sunni areas of Iraq.
Shalimar: Our military seems to think Haditha is an enemy stronghold.
What part of Iraq or the ME is not an enemy stronghold for Americans?
There is no place where Americans are `sucking down chili-dogs outside the Tastee Freeze’, not one.
Yeah, but I haven’t read anything about limiting food supplies to other areas. For some reason, they seem to think Haditha is exceptional. Since this is an operational issue rather than spin to keep the rubes back home in line, I trust for now that their intelligence is accurate. It’s the PR aspect of the military (i.e. the constant lying to minimize the horror of war) that pisses me off, not the operational capability.
Welcome to war folks. Almost all of the Americans in service are good people just like you and me. In that context the atrocities at Haditha are an aberration, but unfortunately, not an isolated one. If you think this is the worst that has happened, I’m afraid you’re very wrong. Many, many psychological studies, Stanford’s famous fake prison simulation for one, have shown that ordinary people in stressful situations, especially when they feel at risk, are capable of the most inhumane abominable behavior. War is the essence of a stressful at risk situation. There have undoubtedly been other Hadithas in Iraq that were small or thorough enough to be successfully swept under the rug. This is what happens in wars. There were atrocities committed by our troops in every war we’ve ever fought though its never taught in schools. Remember the Indian wars that established our country? There were many bloodthirsty palefaces involved in them. War creates monsters from normal people. This is why it is the absolute last resort of civilized people. If you have any thoughts that Iran is a viable threat to the US and needs to be dealt with in a military manner this is the evil Pandora’s Box you are willing to open. If you help us get into it you are responsible. You don’t think this is true? I’d suggest you take a close look at the shiny faces in the crowds in the photos of lynchings from the American south. That isn’t a small evil, bad apple slice of society as those who lead us to violent actions would have us believe, that’s all of us…. Your neighbors, friends and family. You and me.
http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/
http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/lynching.htm
http://tqnyc.org/NYC030395/DorotheaLange/postcards.htm
BooMan, I understand the sentiment, but I hafta respectfully say I have a problem with the following statement:
“We must consider this further proof that our continued presence in Iraq is unlikely to be productive….”
My problem is twofold. First, atrocities happen in every war. It’s the nature of war. Counter-insurgency wars are especially nasty. Incidents like this have been reported fairly regularly in the Arabic press for the last three years; this one seems to have flared up into visibility only because it was relatively well-documented and caught the attention of Time, and thus the U.S. military and the rest of mainstream media. But one should expect bad things to happen when one makes a decision to go to war. If this “proves” that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq in the future is “unlikely to be productive,” then what it proves is that there was never any chance our soldiers’ presence would be productive in the first place, because atrocities were all but inevitable. Which, I suspect, is not what you were trying to say, although it may well be true.
Secondly, I’m having a hard time understanding why the average Iraqi should care about the cold-blooded murders of a couple of dozen more civilians when somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 civilians have already died as a result of this war. In modern warfare, 90% of casualties are civilian, and Iraq appears no different. Since U.S. soldiers and bombers have been responsible for a significant number of those deaths already — and through our launching of the war we’re responsible for all of them — what’s the difference between cold-blooded executions (if that in fact is what happened here) and soldiers that proceed anyway despite the statistical certainty of massive “collateral damage”? The “oops, we weren’t really aiming for them” defense might make our soldiers and a queasy American public feel better about civilian deaths we’ve caused halfway around the world, but to survivors, loved ones, and the Iraqi countrymen who will be the judges of whether U.S. soldiers’ presence is “unlikely to be productive,” I doubt it makes much difference at all. Dead is dead. If it’s at the hands of a foreign occupier, how inclined would you be to either take a claim of “that was an accident” at face value, or to forgive the perpetrators?
Should Iraqis be angry, and will they be angry, about what happened at Haditha? Of course. But I very much doubt they are surprised, and we shouldn’t be, either. This is what war smells like.
Well, I think I may not have expressed myself all that well. I think Haditha has a psychic power in the same way Abu Ghraib did. What it does is horrify those that are not already horrified. It is crippling to our credibility and to our morale, and it galvanizes those that oppose our presence in Iraq and who disbelieve our good intentions.
It’s the event itself, including it’s wide reportage, that is the proof, not that it happened.
So, I don’t disagree with you. But I do think Haditha represents a final fatal blow. It’s just not worth staying and this is further proof of it.
The Haditha atrocity, like Abu Ghraib or My Lai, became a story because of the pictorial evidence, the scalps, the Marines took home with them. The people in Haditha who were witness to the incident have been speaking publicly about it since it occurred in the Arab and world press. The stories were routinely discounted as propaganda by the US and British media. Hopefully this will become a turning point in Americans’ understanding of the war that we all share responsibility for. Once we’ve decided that using predator drones to kill women and children in hopes of blowing up a knot of conspiring ‘insurgents’ as we do regularly in western Iraq and Afghanistan, it is just more collateral damage. You win a war by any means necessary. War justifies the massacres, torture, secret prisons, killing, maiming destruction and death. That’s why they called it ‘The War On Terror’ and we let them do it. In the context of American politics Haditha can be seen as a watershed ‘tipping point’, in the wider world it is only another atrocity to add to an ever growing total.
It is imperative that a proper investigation of all involved in this is carried out with the heaviest punishments for all found guilty being meted out. This should not just be restricted to those that committed the alleged murders, but to those who attempted to cover the incident up; to those who destroyed evidence; to those who failed in their oversight of their troops; to those who failed to impress the importance of international laws.
All we can do now is make a statement that the US military as an institute does respect civilian life and will not tolerate abuses. It is time for the military to do the right thing. For too long we have allowed abuses and murders to go unpunished or lightly punished. Now we have military totally discreddited worldwide and seen as an out of contol torture and murder machine with no oversight. We should take an opportunity to at least slighty cleanse this image. A proper investigation with severe punishment would also enable good officers and men doing their duty within limits to be no longer tarred with the same brush as murderers and their apologists or co-conspirators.
“an old man in a wheelchair”!!
This is at the level of the Palestinians who killed Klinghofer.