Last November, there was an incident in the western-Iraq town of Haditha in which one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. The next day, the New York Times reported this:
- “The Marine Corps said Sunday that 15 Iraqi civilians and a marine were killed Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad….The bombing on Saturday in Haditha, on the Euphrates in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, was aimed at a convoy of American marines and Iraqi Army soldiers, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman. After the explosion, gunmen opened fire on the convoy. At least eight insurgents were killed in the firefight, the captain said.”
That story from Capt. Pool was not challenged in the US MSM until March, when Time magazine ran a story– based on video footage shot by a local journalism student and testimony from the townspeople– that said that most or all of the Iraqi casualties had been killed in cold blood, and that none of them were “insurgents”.
The Time story provoked a serious investigation of the incident by the Marine Corps command. Today, Ellen Knickmeyer writes in the WaPo that,
- Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation..
An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.
“Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.
I agree with AP’s Robert H. Reidwho today wrote that the charges likely to be brought against the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre, “could threaten President Bush’s effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.”
A number of commentators are comparing the expected effect of the full revelation of what happened in haditha to either the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, or the revelations about the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse in Iraq. However, in May-June 2006, the Bush administration starts out with the domestic and global assessments of its project in Iraq already far more negative than they were at the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004.
Therefore, the Haditha revelations, as they are fully made, could well turn out to be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” of US resolve to stay in Iraq. This, even though it is not clear to me that what happened in Haditha that day is necessarily the worst atrocity committed by the US forces in Iraq. How about the actions committed in Fallujah, or Ramadi, or Tel Afar?
The Haditha massacre seems to have had the same psychological dynamic as the Jenin Camp massacre committed by the IOF in April 2002. In both cases, the occupation force had suffered some casualties at the hands of resisters and then went on a rampage of bloody retribution against the local population. Military forces that go on rampages are generally something commanders want to avoid– not only because it riles the local public and helps keep the flames of resistance burning, but also because such incidents signal a dangerous lack of discipline among the troops.
That AP piece reports that, “U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force ‘only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful.'”
Isn’t it about 38 months too late to deliver that message at this point?
Anyway, huge kudos to John Murtha and to all who have worked hard to uncover the facts about Haditha, to keep this issue alive, and to hold accountable those responsible… Perhaps in this case, as at Abu Ghraib, “those responsible” should include an American political leadership that used an inappropriately composed and inadequately trained military force to launch a gratuitous aggression against a foreign country, and then left those soldiers and Marines there for three-plus years without generating any effective plan for how to deal with the predictable local opposition to the occupation, or how to change the political dynamic and get the troops out.
No wonder some of those Marines were pissed-off, or just plain flat-out scared. If I were under the orders of this Commander-in-Chief I would be really scared, too.
Every month the occupation force stays will see the chance of another one, or two, or three Hadithas.
How can we risk that?
Get out now, before the rot sets in even deeper!
The Bush administration should announce immediately that it intends to have all US and “coalition” forces out of Iraq by the end of October. Then the planning and negotiation for that necessary step can begin in earnest.