Haditha

[Note: This post represents my knowledge of the facts as of today. The investigation is still on-going and the facts are still dribbling out. It is very possible that in the coming days or weeks we may learn something which changes my opinion. I'm okay with that, far from being a "flip flopper", I like the fact that I'm open minded enough to change my opinion when I learn new facts. -- Liam]

OK, it's finally time for me to stop putting it off and discuss the issue of Haditha. By now, we've probably all seen the news about Haditha, and the fact that it's pretty conclusive that a batch of marines, angered at the death of one of their own, executed up to 24 civilian Iraqi bystanders in retaliation.

And this is a horrid, horrid thing, please do not take anything I say herein to mean otherwise. I feel nothing but sorrow for the slain innocents and their families. I am angered that American troops would behave this way, wearing a uniform that identifies them as someone acting in my name.

But...

I think most people are missing the point in their outrage towards the Administration and the leaders of the Iraq war.

This is not an Abu Ghraib situation, where a few low level lackeys are going to take a fall for what seems pretty clear was a policy of “softening” detainees that came down from on high. Although Abu Ghraib is the only one of which we have footage, there are certainly stories of similar situations elsewhere that seem to show a pattern of detainee treatment that could not have been a mere coincidence. No, the current situation is most likely is a case of one batch of war-weary marines, exhausted, shell shocked, and finally unable to take it any more. It is probably also a case of some people so angry and so tired that they didn't fully realize the extent of their atrocity, perhaps even convincing themselves as they did these things that the people they were shooting were complicit in the death of their comrade.

I have heard a number of people find fault with the superior officers who didn't closely examine the initial report claiming that the civilians had died in an IED explosion, but I can't find that fault. We are talking about war time, and we're talking about people who receive these sorts of reports on a regular basis. In hindsight, it's easy to say “This should have raised lots of red flags”, but it seems to me as though in that situation, one report in among many might not cause much notice.

The cover up is the other aspect that I keep hearing about, but to be honest, although I don't like it, I can understand it. If the military had taken care of the problem, but quietly and while covering up the situation, I could understand that as well. From a military standpoint, there was little to be gained by publicizing this horrid event. It would only serve to increase the will of the opposition forces. From the Administration's standpoint, it stood to lose them even more support and popularity over something that, honestly, was out of their control.

Let's face it, there are many thousands of our troops in Iraq (150,000, if I remember correctly). These are predominantly young men and women, trained to fight and kill, and hopped up on patriotism (because how else can you risk your life for your country, without believing it to be great and worth dying for?). In among any group that large, there are bound to be some who are not sane, or whose grip on sanity is more tenuous than is immediately obvious, who may snap under the pressure. As much as it pains me to say this (because I know someone is going to say that I'm excusing it, which I absolutely am not), in any conflict this size or larger, with this many troops involved and this much death and violence, instances like this are bound to happen.

The fact is, I can understand the cover up of this in the same way that I don't particularly fault President Clinton for trying to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Some (like my wife) find it abhorrent that the former President would look directly at us (through the camera) and lie, but I see it as a case where there was no good option. I don't think most of us can say with any certainty that, put in a situation where our boss is asking us questions about our personal life that don't affect our job, but which might make him fire us, we wouldn't lie. Particularly if it felt like the person leveling the charge was just out to get us, come hell or high water.

Neither that nor this current cover up was a lie that hurt anyone. It was a lie, to be sure, and it was a self-serving one, but no one else died because of either one (indeed, if the incident had never come to light, it might ultimately have saved lives, since publicity only serves to put fuel on the fire).

No, the part of all of this that really sets my blood to boiling (again, beyond the fact that it happened, which makes me want to throw up) is that in with the cover up, it appears as though the guilty were not punished, that nothing was done to prevent that same group from going back out and doing it again. That's the main thing in all of this that I can fault the military and the Administration for. According to Rep. Jack Murtha, it's been a pretty open secret for months that this cover up was happening. Which means that while it may honestly not have been brought to the President's attention (at least, the deniability is plausible), Donald Rumsfeld almost certainly knew about it. And yet nothing was apparently done to rectify the situation, identify the guilty, punish appropriately, and change the training procedures to prevent it from happening again.

That's the part that makes an otherwise singularly horrible event into a scandal of large proportions. Today there are more reports of additional similar situations. Eleven gunned down in March in a town whose name I can't spell. A pregnant woman on her way to the hospital gunned down earlier this week. And on and on.

To finish with an analogy, I don't (necessarily) find fault with the parents of the two mad teens at Columbine for that tragic day. And I wouldn't have blamed them if (were it possible) they had tried to cover up the facts, knowing that some would not be so charitable. But if it had turned out that their children had previously shot up another school, and they kept it quiet AND did nothing to prevent it from happening again, that's the point at which the parents would have become criminal. (For reference, I don't recall the details of the Columbine gunmen, so it's possible that they had abusive childhoods and their parents then do carry some of the blame. For the purposes of this analogy, let's assume that is not so, just like for the purposes of this argument, I'm willing to believe that the massacre of innocent civilians is not top-down military policy.)

So, to sum up. The event is horrible. It is tragic. It is disgusting. And since I never supported this war nor believed it was the right thing to do (especially with the unfinished and much more supportable business in Afghanistan still going on), it's easy to point to this as one more reason to believe I was right and the Administration was wrong. But as to the specific case, clean up the mess, learn the facts, punish the guilty, and I, for one, am willing to forgive the cover up.

Liam.