Empire Notes

The ice is starting to break. Coverage of the Haditha massacre has really taken off. Reporters have gone back, interviewed family members of victims, interviewed the journalism student who documented the atrocity, and looked seriously at the Marines’ lack of response to the whole thing – Marine officers knew within two days that the victims had died of gunshots, not an explosion, and yet there wasn’t an investigation until March.

Most notably, Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson did a long and excellent piece in Newsweek that went back to the November 2004 assault on Fallujah and looked at what they call the “liberal” rules of engagement there – one commander they quote said (supposedly half-jokingly), “If you see someone with a cell-phone, blow his f-ing head off” – and then connected that with incidents like the Haditha massacre. The piece went so far as to mention the obvious possibility that the massacre was motivated at least in part by the Marines’ desire to put up a signpost for other Iraqis pointing to the consequences of hosting an insurgency.

Charles Hanley of the AP decided to dig further about an incident in the Korean War, at a place called No Gun Ri, where American soldiers massacred up to 400 civilians.

Although the Pentagon concluded that the shootings, which lasted three days, were merely an “unfortunate tragedy” and not “deliberate killing,” a new book out this spring mentions a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Korea to the Secretary of State which details that the killing of civilians in certain situations was an explicitly decided policy. Hanley and others turned up 19 other declassified documents indicating that commanders either ordered or authorized the killing of civilians.

Investigators are starting to take seriously other Iraqi claims of murdering civilians. The possible murder of up to 11 in the town of Ishaqi has, unfortunately, been declared by military investigators to be legitimate even though there is video evidence that contradicts American soldiers’ accounts of what happened, but there are others going on, like that of an incident in Hamdania where U.S. forces, who had repeatedly pressured a lame Iraqi man in his 50’s to become a collaborator and finally, when he refused, dragged him out of his house, murdered him, and planted a shovel and an AK-47 on him, claiming that they caught him trying to plant an improvised explosive device.

It’s increasingly hard or impossible for the right wing to play the Abu Ghraib game, of pretending that this is an isolated incident. Indeed, they’re going the opposite way, admitting that such incidents happen all the time. The strategy there is to dredge up such incidents from the “Good War,” World War 2, and then say World War 2 still should have been fought because it was a good cause and so should Iraq because it is too. Bill O’Reilly went so far that he took an incident at Malmedy, where German forces shot surrendered American prisoners and rewrote it, to make it one of American forces shooting surrendered Germans.

Even the Marines are forced to review their rules of engagement and talk about training in the proper “warrior culture,” with much greater respect for legal and ethical requirements.

In this whole proliferation of talk, the antiwar movement and progressives have been, not absent, but relatively muted. Part of that is beyond our control – we all depend on the mainstream media for news about Iraq. Part of that is not.

On community radio, as you know, we don’t make calls for action. If we did, though, here’s what I would suggest for the antiwar movement:

• Put out a call for other Iraq veterans and Iraqis who witnessed such war crimes to step forward – and call for the U.S. military to do the same in Iraq.
• Renew the effort to uncover the rules of engagement in the second assault on Fallujah, where there is evidence to believe that parts of the Geneva Convention were explicitly disavowed. There is one Freedom of Information Act request out there, but otherwise there is little followup.
• Take action again. Demonstrate at recruiting centers, pressure political representatives, push your newspaper if they haven’t covered the story; don’t wait for the next big demonstration in New York or Washington to do something.

This is a real chance to capitalize on the growing discontent with the war -- 60% believe it was a mistake -- and turn it into an ethical revulsion, a key step toward building effective opposition. Whether that happens is largely up to us.