Maureen Dowd on Haditha

Many of the stories I post on I know in depth. Occassionally, I turn to newer stories. Some of the newer stories are straightforward and I post on them and either move deeper into an evolving story or I move on. But with other new stories, I circle around them reluctantly, not quite knowing what to do with them. Haditha is one of those stories and more. For those of us who respect the military, who have had many relatives and friends in the military, it's a painful story to read. War crimes are nothing new but each and every one of them has to be confronted no matter who was responsible. I'm knowledgeable about World War II and I know of war crimes that are still not fully documented in the history books (as an example, massacres of civilians occurred in China but because suspicion fell on the Chinese Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek and because the situation was considered 'politically sensitive,' these war crimes were never pursued though photographs existed).

Haditha is a story any number of us could see coming. Even in the summer of 2003, there was some concern about breakdowns in discipline, though later stories attributed some of the problems to paramilitary contractors. Those responsible at Haditha will have to be held accountable but accountability must also include a White House and Pentagon that misled us into this war and have allowed this war to go on too long and allowed things I frankly don't understand such as Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.

Maureen Dowd has a thoughtful piece that is republished in Truthout:

So I felt sickened to hear about the marines who allegedly snapped in Haditha, Iraq, and wantonly killed two dozen civilians - including two families full of women and children, among them a 3-year-old girl. Nine-year-old Eman Waleed told Time that she'd watched the marines go in to execute her father as he read the Koran, and then shoot her grandfather and grandmother, still in their nightclothes. Other members of her family, including her mother, were shot dead; she said that she and her younger brother had been wounded but survived because they were shielded by adults who died.

It's a My Lai acid flashback. The force that sacked Saddam to stop him from killing innocents is now accused of killing innocents. Under pressure from the president to restore law, but making little progress, marines from Camp Pendleton, many deployed in Iraq for the third time, reportedly resorted to lawlessness themselves.

...many deployed in Iraq for the third time. That's a lot to demand from volunteers. While our president tells our nation to go about its business and demands almost nothing by way of sacrifice...

The overwhelming majority of men and women who serve in the military are good, hardworking people willing to put themselves on the line to do a job. If we set aside for the moment an Iraq policy that was highly flawed in its conception, the reality is that we have a military that is not designed to stay in the field year after year, that never initially had the resources it needed and that was never fully trained in peacekeeping or dealing with insurgencies. The problems of this day can be traced to the civilian leadership in the offices of the Pentagon and White House thousands of miles from Iraq. I fear we may hear more stories in time to come.