Empire Notes

One day in November 2005, Marines in Haditha decided to take revenge for the death of one of their comrades from an IED by deliberately murdering 23 innocent, unarmed men, women, and children. They went into their houses and shot them at close range. Adults begged and pleaded and attempted to save their children by shielding them with their bodies, praying to the same god the soldiers pray to.

Afterward, the Marines lied to cover up their actions. The eight helpless men they slaughtered became “insurgents.” The other 15, necessarily “civilians” because of age or sex, they first claimed were also victims of the same IED; later, some were supposed to have been “collateral damage” of a supposed “exchange of gunfire” with said “insurgents.”

Unluckily for them, a journalism student had taken video of the bodies in the Haditha morgue, with images that showed victims shot in the head from close range in execution-style killings. According to Rep. John Murtha, speaking last week to the press and on Hardball with Chris Matthews, the military investigation of the incident will uphold the above claims.

Although Murtha was much more interested in making excuses for the Marines because of the stressful nature of the situation they were being put in than in talking about the actual incident, the old militarist deserves credit. When Matthews tried to spin the incident, Murtha calmly corrected him and said, no, there was no battle, no exchange of gunfire, no explosion – the troops killed 23 people “in cold blood.” When Matthews asked him if this was like My Lai, Murtha quite honestly said it was.

Indeed, the parallel to the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War, where American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 Vietnamese civilians, lining men, women, and children up to be machine-gunned, is inescapable. The scale is smaller and most likely no women were raped this time, but the bestiality of the Haditha massacre is equivalent.

Now is not the time to bleat about our “support” for “the troops.” These particular depraved murderers deserve the best of medical care when they get home – but they should get it in prison.

Although for most Americans My Lai has somehow become a metonym for all American crimes in Vietnam, the truth is that My Lai was simply the tip of the iceberg. Smaller-scale massacres were common; in some areas, the indiscriminate killing of Vietnamese was standard operating procedure.

Haditha is also the tip of an iceberg. Two aspects of the incident suggest the possibility that there have been many more just like it. First, the attempted coverup, with stories about a firefight and collateral damage. Had it not been for video evidence that contradicted this, it’s very unlikely a military investigation would have been anything more than a rubber stamp.

Second, the attempt to pass off the eight men as insurgents. This, of course, encapsulates the logic of the U.S. military in the worst areas. During the second assault on Fallujah, for example, the operative principle was that any “military age male” in the city was presumptively a fighter and thus subject to attack. Plant a gun on a man you’ve killed, or, for that matter, a shovel, and instantly he’s an “insurgent.”

Haditha also connects organically to a whole series of different ways to kill civilians – checkpoint killings by trigger-happy soldiers, indiscriminate return fire in crowded civilian areas, use of area weapons like 2000-pound bombs on “suspected insurgents,” and a general “shoot first ask questions later” policy – that frequently amounts to, if not deliberate murder, a depraved indifference to Iraqi life. Then add on to that incidents like the two 2004 assaults on Fallujah, where civilian “collateral damage” is so widespread as to be a feature rather than a bug.

An innumerate and unempathetic American public was never able to comprehend the enormity of the crime that was the Vietnam War. To this day, people estimate that perhaps 100,000 Vietnamese – 3 to 5% of the actual number – were killed. While it was going on, the massive bombardment, the devastation of the ecosystem, the systematic destruction of life in certain rural areas, did not fully register with the vast majority of Americans. It was only the My Lai massacre that brought home to them the savage immorality of the war. Although Tet marked a turning point regarding winnability of the war, it was My Lai that turned the public morally against the war.

The time is ripe for a similar transformation regarding Iraq. So far, the brutality of parts of the insurgency on the one hand and the valorization of the troops on the other have made it difficult for any moral case against the war to be made (it’s hard mentally or emotionally to associate immoral acts with heroes and choirboys, let alone the heroic choirboys who are constantly presented to us). That must change now, and the Haditha massacre shows the way. Haditha is, indeed, Arabic for My Lai.