Empire Notes

In the past several days, the Haditha massacre has been covered in depth by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and TIME magazine, as well as garnering some network news coverage. So far, local and regional papers have not followed suit.

When the results of the military investigation are released, supposedly next week, the level of media coverage should increase further.

John Murtha and even Republican John Warner of the Senate Armed Services Committee say that there was a coverup of the incident that quite clearly involved higher-up officers in the Marines. According to Murtha, “Until March, there was no serious investigation. There was an investigation right afterward, but then it was stifled.” Had it not been for the Iraqi journalism student’s video of the bodies, turned over by TIME magazine to military authorities, there would have been no investigation at all. Without further video evidence, like a Marine’s cell-phone picture of Iraqis kneeling before they were shot, the initial conclusion of the investigators, that the incident was a mere example of “collateral damage,” would likely have been sustained.

The U.S. news media effectively helped to keep the story under wraps. Although TIME, the Independent, and other foreign media had covered it months earlier, until Murtha spoke up at a May 17 press conference, essentially nobody else had picked up the story – even though a massacre of civilians by U.S. troops is unquestionably newsworthy.

Despite some consternation within official ranks over this story, there are already signs that an American public conditioned by longstanding prejudices to see the Iraq occupation as a savage bellum omnium contra omnes involving senseless Iraqis, with American troops trying vainly to impose order, will find it hard to process a story about atrocities committed by those same U.S. troops, much less one that suggests what an atrocity the whole occupation is. The predictable reprise of the Abu Ghraib “a few rotten apples” spin from the right wing, along with denunciations of John Murtha and others for attacking the troops will not help; neither, in turn, will Murtha’s and others’ constant protestations that they are not attacking the troops but supporting them nor their invocations of the great stress the Marines were under that forced them to go and shoot small children at point-blank range.

To understand the kind of intellectual and moral culture these revelations will fall into, one need look no further than Maureen Dowd’s last column. A sensitive humanist and liberal, she is clearly disturbed by the killings. And yet the upshot of her piece is this: the occupation of Iraq is making us become like them. We should not allow our contact with this particular heart of darkness to make us into them.

It is true that there are groups in Iraq that have distinguished themselves by phenomenal, senseless brutality. Even so, it is galling for America to invade a country, occupy it, destroy its social structures, cause the death of hundreds of thousands, kill tens of thousands itself, permanently destabilize the country, and even, occasionally, deliberately murder civilians, and have the only lesson be that we shouldn’t let Iraqi brutality contaminate us.

Two other stories will have to be covered in order for the American public to make sense of this story – in addition to the obvious one that Haditha is the tip of the iceberg. First, it is not true, as Murtha suggested, that lack of training has anything to do with this. On the contrary, U.S. military training makes such incidents inevitable. Soldiers march to chants like “Kill! Kill! Kill! Blood makes the grass grow.” This is not mindless sadism, but rather a specifically developed regimen designed to overcome the natural human aversion to killing another human. Soldiers are made into killing machines; a culture that will do this on the one hand and on the other constantly tout “humanitarian intervention,” where soldiers are supposed to safeguard the interests of a civilian population, is a culture in deep denial.

Second, racism and the peculiar brew of racialized militant nationalism and religion in the wake of 9/11. British officers have remarked numerous times on how U.S. interaction with Iraqis is characterized by racism. Remarking on the propensity of U.S. troops to use massive return fire in civilian areas, something it’s hard to imagine them doing in, say, Europe, one British officer said, “They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen.” This component has been ignored for too long.

Even My Lai, unfortunately, did not teach Americans lasting lessons of the kind they really need to learn. It is unquestionably up to the antiwar movement to try to ensure that Haditha does.