That was Rumsfeld’s comment about the looting US troops allowed to happen after taking Baghdad. Then came Abu Ghraib and now, Haditha. And those are only the things we know about because their coverups by the administration and military were blown. Stuff is still happening, and it’s getting worse. Here are two British views on what’s happened, what’s happening and what it’s all doing to us as a people.
[…]In scale the two tragedies {My Lai in Viet Nam and Haditha in Iraq] are barely comparable, but the American military was supposed to have learnt its lesson. Most of the My Lai soldiers had been drafted in and were scared and inexperienced.
Today the army is a professional, all-volunteer force. Marines are trained to kill, but only under orders in a disciplined fashion. At Haditha, a desert town riddled with insurgents on the edge of the Euphrates, they cracked.
An American government official has admitted the marines “suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership.” Disturbingly, the incident may not be an isolated one.”
[…]
This is grist to the mill for the anti-war lobby. “Tell you what, let’s not use the “stress of combat” excuse this time,” wrote left-wing commentator Molly Ivins. “What are they going to say? ‘Under stress of combat, we thought the (one-year-old) baby was two?’ “
The horrors really are your America, Mr Bush
[…]When I have brought up the question of these atrocities in front of senators and senior administration officials in private, I have noticed something. Their eyes flicker down or away. Some refuse to discuss the matter, as if it is too much to contemplate that the US has become a country that detains people without trial or due process, and reserves the right to torture them.
Or they tell me that however grotesque the charges Bush would never approve of them. It’s always someone else’s responsibility. “This is not who American servicemen are,” Richard Armitage, the then deputy secretary of state, insisted after Abu Ghraib. Or in the words of the secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with Al Arabiya: “Americans do not do this to other people.”
I know what these people are saying or trying to say. The vast majority of American soldiers are decent, brave, honourable professionals. The America I love and the Americans I know are among the most admirable and open-hearted people on the planet.
But this much must also be said: the words of Bush and Rice and Armitage are still untruths. That much we know. And last week, we had to absorb another dark truth: that in a town called Haditha, US Marines appear to have murdered women and children in cold blood and covered it up.
In searching for a photo, I ran across an article titled, “Haditha massacre: America’s allies shocked, but no longer surprised.” Kinda says it for Americans, too.
I presume one can be a liberal and yet still have the sense to understand that American soldiers are not committing war crimes against the Iraqi people. The military is embarassed when any small number of soliders violate their duty and does seek to uncover and punish them. I don’t hear the liberal critics bemoaning the terriorist acts that result in the daily killings of scores of innocient people in Iraq. No, in fact liberal critics often refer to those terriorists as “freedom fighters”. They liken them to America’s Revolutionary War fighters who were fighting for freedom and democracy and were sucessful in setting up the Republic we live in today. You can disagree about America being involved in Iraq but the fact is we are there and we are trying to help establish a democracy there. Is that a bad thing to liberals? Or do they routinely love to compliment the governments of countries like Cuba, Venezuela, old Iraq, Vietnam, etc.
Sometimes, reality has to intervene in politics. Fox Snooze may exist to support the self-consuming, hell-fire and patriotism set — but, timesonline, the Times and the Sunday Times [this Post’s source] are also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.. Of couse, they exist within a context of demographics requiring a semblance of accurate news — unlike many other of his properties.
The downward spiral of discipline and standards among American troops isn’t dissimilar to what happened in VietNam towards the end. Military commentators are fond of saying, “There are no bad soldiers or bad units — just bad leaders.” That’s true until something criminal happens. Then the “leaders” wash their hands in traditional fashion.
Just thought the comparison to Pontius Pilate and his efforts to put down insurgencies was worth pointing out to our religious brethren, this Sunday morning.
Ho-hum. I see we have a Konservative arriving to “defend” our troops with the usual assortment of lies and straw men arguments. Sir, your kind of “defense” is what put our troops in harm’s way in the first place.
Try accepting responsibility for your own brand of politics.
Does anyone think these are the first Iraqi innocent women and children killed? This is the least of it. There have been tens of thousands of civilians kiled in this war.
For Americans to be suddenly outraged about Haditha is somewhat hypocritical. This is what you get in war. You get lots of damage, lots of civilian deaths, and the longer it goes, the more chances for bad judgment. That’s why you go into war only reluctantly, not like we did under the “leadership” of the self-deluded, unthinking twit in the White House. That’s where the outrage should be directed.
1. “I don’t hear the liberal critics bemoaning the terriorist acts that result in the daily killings of scores of innocient people in Iraq. No, in fact liberal critics often refer to those terriorists as “freedom fighters”. They liken them to America’s Revolutionary War fighters who were fighting for freedom and democracy and were sucessful in setting up the Republic we live in today.”
who are these liberals who say such dastardly things, or is this a straw man argument? I don’t think even Michael Moore has called the insurgents freedom fighters. And one would go horse condemning the atrocities by the terrorists, since they are a daily occurrence. But googling for 2 seconds I could probably find condemnation of these acts by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
“You can disagree about America being involved in Iraq but the fact is we are there and we are trying to help establish a democracy there. Is that a bad thing to liberals?”
it is not our business to be spending the blood of our young men and women to set up democracies in other countries. if a country truly wants democracy, it will set it up itself, without our help. I don’t believe any post-WW2 comparison to Japan and Germany is apt either – both of those countries had parliamentary traditions until they were hijacked by fascists.
and in this case it is being so criminally mismanaged that a stable democratic government seems very unlikely. the endgame is likely to be some weak central government with an Iran-aligned Shiite theocracy in the south and a quasi-independent Kurdish territory in the north.
Democracy certainly does not mean that the government will be pro-US and anti-terrorism. give the Palestinians the vote and they elect Hamas. a few years back in Algeria, when it looked like islamists would win the next election, it was called off. and our most important Muslim allies in the region (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan) are manifestly not democracies, and the opposition in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group which goes back and forth about whether violence is justified.
in a nutshell just as the WMD premise was flawed, the late-arrived “democracy” rationale is flawed as well. no American interests were at stake when we went into Iraq and none will be served by continuing to stay there. we are making more enemies, not less, and we should get the heck out ASAP.
ROE’s can get murky in combat. Unless you’re been shot at and witness the violent death of comrades I doubt you need to make severe comments in this thread. People are people, and angry scared people with considerable fire power can act on that anger. It was common in the days following D-day, that any German soldier surrendering, out of ammo was executed on the spot. Things get goddamn crazy in combat.
I can back up RTaylor on that…and something no one seems to be asking is to what level those women & children are involved, because if you think a woman in Iraq hasn’t picked up a weapon, or that an insurgent firing a weapon hasn’t hidden behind kids, you’re wrong. The insurgents are wrong, and the civilians are too, for letting – yes letting – themselves be used as human shields. It happened in Somalia and Vietnam. An uncooperative populace is only a few steps shy of being an enemy force, and as unfortunate as it is when kids die, it’s gonna happen when the people choose not to tell US forces who the insurgents are (and they damn well know). I’m not some armchair tactics type…I did two tours in Iraq, including the invasion and many months attached to the 2 MEU, as well as alot of time in other regions of the gulf. I don’t know the specific facts about what happened in this incident in Haditha, though I was nearby at the time and remember our translator talking to an Iraqi man who said his sister was killed by Marines. I just hope that there is a thourough investigation, and that if people are guilty, they are punished. Let’s just not jump to conclusions, and immediatly take the word of Iraqi civilians over our own soldiers.
Sometimes some of you people make me sick. You defend criminals you *like* with the concept of innocent until proven guilty, but here you are hanging a group of Marines with no actual evidence.
God help you if you ever need the benefit of due process someday.
Straw men arguments make me sick too, oh well.
8. Malren – nobody likes innocent until proven guilty better than me, but it is a legal concept, not a factual one. For example, I personally believed that OJ murdered two people, both before and after the criminal verdict.
I think it is a sound personal judgment to wait until you have an abundance of facts before making up your mind, but since you are not on a jury, you don’t need to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt before making up your mind about something.
It’s a tough question – whether there is any justification in militarily supporting some other country’s inherent democratic rights. Especially when not doing so means continuing deaths and extreme oppression in the long run. But I can understand not wanting to get involved.
How about for preventing genocide? Would that make things easier for you? Would you support unilaterally moving into countries like Rwanda and the Congo in attempting to prevent millions of deaths – especially when no one is offering help? If it were in your power would you send in some kind of desperate invasion force to prevent something like the Jewish Holocaust? How about if it were for the benefit of the lives of Kurds? No? So what we are talking about here is a “magic number” of innocent deaths before you would support military action and everything that that entails.
Could you guarantee such direct military action in a wild country would not come with its own occasional atrocity? Of course you couldn’t. All you could do is the “right” thing after the fact.
So, if anybody has something concrete to support the assertion “Stuff is still happening, and it’s getting worse”, please do the right thing and expose each one on these pages or with the press or the authorities.
RBG
11. would I support short-haul intervention to prevent or stop genocide? possibly, but as you note, there is a slippery slope here – when does a massacre get bad enough to justify military intervention which, in and of itself, could cause further destruction and death. however, it is much less an intangible goal than intervening to set up a democracy somewhere.
also, we would not be in the uncomfortable situation of trumpeting “democracy now!” in Baghdad while, whispering, gently “democracy, please? eventually?” in Riyadh or Cairo.
I agree with MattH…..
Doug, nice arguments, but check your history…..Japan was an absolute monarchy prior to WWII…..controlled by the military. The Parliment was just an illusion. Germany was an absolute monarchy from the mid 1800’s until 1918, then barely a *democracy* for 13 years before WWII.
There is no cover up by the military of these events. They are investigated and the facts do come out. I agree that the higher ups usually get little if any punishment when these thing happen, but in operations like this, the highest ranking officer may only be a LT..
Men get stressed in war, especially when they can’t rely upon anyone around them to be on their side but their fellow soldiers. ALL of us here (or 99%) have no idea what these men and woman must go through each and everyday just to stay alive and hopefully go home one day to their families. They didn’t ask for this war, but they do their best to do their jobs. The referance to O.J. is just BS……these people are entitled to the presumption of innocence, the hypocritcal media and anti-war hysteria isn’t based on outrage, it’s based on politics.
We don’t know the particular facts of this incident, but we do know that the insurgants have no qualms about using the civilian population as cover for their activities, so lets wait and see what happens. The fact that the DOD has already said that it is likely that muder charges will be brought against some of the soldiers at this incident, shows that no cover up is being attempted, contrary to what some think.
A lot of people in here are very quick to condem. But it would be interesting to see how they would react in these type of situations if they were actually living this at the scene and not pontificating from their comfy homes on their computors.
Molly Ivins us a left wing commentator??
Strike up the Internationale! Criticizing Bush and Texas is now pinko! March, Gospazha, to the Song of the Revolutionary Workers’ Paradise!
This is the victory of right wing semantic warfare on the English Language. Just criticizing right wing radicals is now “left wing”. My goodness.
13. sorry, Josh – Germany had a parliament even prior to unification – the executive, not the legislative, was monarchical. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire
Japan _immediately_ before WW2 had a military dictatorship, but had a functioning parliament before that. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Japan#History
neither state was particularly ‘democratic’ before the world wars but then, in its early days, the US was not in a position to point fingers …
From The Last Marine
Several Humvees first drove over the bomb, but the triggerman in the distance apparently waited for a vehicle with more troops.
Then, as the clanking sound of their armored vehicles neared, a massive blast erupted, caused by explosives weighing hundreds of pounds.
It threw a 26-ton Amphibious Assault Vehicle into the air, leaving it burning upside-down.
The blast was so large that Toland and his radioman, Williams — traveling two vehicles ahead and not injured — thought their vehicle had been hit by a bomb.
They scrambled out to inspect the damage, but instead found the blazing carnage several yards down the road.
A total of 14 Marines and one Iraqi interpreter were killed.
There was no time for grieving — not at first. There was only sudden devastation, then intense anger as the Marines pulled the remains of their friends from the vehicle.
Then there was frustration, as they fanned out to find the triggerman. Instead, they found only Iraqis either too sympathetic toward the insurgency, or too afraid, to talk.
Although the bomb had been planted in clear view of their homes, residents claimed they had seen nothing of the men who had spent hours digging a large hole several feet deep and concealing the bomb.
It was a familiar — and frustrating — problem.
“They are totally complacent with what’s going on here,” said Maj. Steve Lawson of Columbus, Ohio, who commands Lima Company. “The average citizen in Haditha either wants a handout, or wants us to die or go away.”
>I don’t think even Michael Moore has called the insurgents freedom fighters.
He called them minutemen. I think I agree with the rest of your post.
>Molly Ivins us a left wing commentator??
You don’t think so? I’m not sure if she’s ever agreed with conservatives on anything.
17. thanks. do you have a link for the “minutemen” quote. I would like to know the context. I mean if he was talking about them picking up and putting away guns on an as-needed basis, that is a comparison in tactics, not moral equivalency. but I don’t know, since I haven’t seen the quote.
17. googled for a second, and I found it:
Mike’s letter from April of last year:
“The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”
OK. Michael Moore is a jackass, part of the paranoid, conspiracy-theory left fringe, and certainly no more representative of anti-war opinion than, say, Pat Robertson is of pro-war opinion.
#13 ALL of us here (or 99%) have no idea what these men and woman must go through each and everyday just to stay alive…
#16 Instead, they found only Iraqis either too sympathetic toward the insurgency, or too afraid to talk.
There are at least two sides to every story.
We don’t know what our troops are going through – every day – to stay alive.
We also don’t know what Iraqi civilians are going through – every day – to stay alive.
We want Iraqis to finger the insurgents, but are we around to protect them when the insurgents come for the “collaborators”?
What kind of “Witness Protection Plan” do we have in Iraq?
It stands to reason that if the bombers were digging that hole “in clear view” of houses, said bombers would know exactly who to come visit if our troops were given any information.