Why Haditha Matters

From the Nation:

Enough details have emerged from survivors and military personnel to conclude that in the town of Haditha last November, members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre. The killings may have been in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal, but this was not the work of soldiers gone berserk. The targets (children from 3 to 14, an old man in a wheelchair, taxi passengers), the hours-long duration of killings, the number of Marines involved, the careful mop-up--all amount to willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis. As Representative John Murtha has pointed out, the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors imply a cover-up that may extend far up the chain of command.

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So there were literally hours for cooler heads to prevail, but they did not. In other words, this was no freak-out. Murtha connects the killings to the extraordinarily high amount of stress our service personnel have been under for years now in Iraq, and he's probably right about that, but, on the other hand, this was very clearly not a case of psycho bloodlust revenge. It was just too systematic for that. Certainly, it's scary and depressing to think of our troops being so mentally disturbed by the insanity over there that they would go over the edge into some kind of Apocalypse Now style of brutality, but it is far more frightening, I think, to ponder the notion that these murders might be a part of Pentagon policy in Iraq.

This is not the first time that this concept has been raised. Longtime British Middle East reporter Robert Fisk has asserted for over a year now that US counter-insurgency policy has been much less about actually taking down combatants than it has been about using extreme violence to scare the Iraqis out of supporting the insurgency. Essentially, the whole Fallujah operation was exactly that. The number of insurgents apprehended or killed was minimal, but the damage done to the city, including, of course, its thousands of non-military inhabitants, was enormous. Christ, we used fucking napalm and white phosphorous there, for God's sake! Chemical weapons of mass destruction that don't give a shit who's a terrorist or civilian. There is a very strong case to be made that the real US policy in Iraq is one of widespread terror disguised as "collateral damage." It would not be surprising if that were the case: it would follow a pattern used by Republican White Houses in Central America back in the 80s, and many of the architects of that plan, "The Salvador Option," are currently serving in the Bush administration.

The long and the short of all this is that the United States may very well be the worst terrorist nation on the entire planet. In history. Truly frightening.

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