10 Lessons of the Haditha Massacre

Five fewer Iraqi hearts and minds win over

I have dialed way back on blogging about abuses committed by U.S. soldiers on Iraqi civilians after beating that drum pretty hard as details of the Mahmudiya and Haditha massacres leaked out last summer.

For one thing, these crimes are being committed by a small handful of otherwise honorable troopers. For another, I don't want Kiko's House to be portrayed as an angry left-wing blog. You know, the image thing. For yet another, the Iraq war has spiraled so far out of control that there is a numbing sameness about blogging on individual events, so I've tried to stay above the fray and focus on the big picture.

All that said, it's time to break my own rules of engagement rules because of a gruesome Washington Post story on the opening act of the Haditha massacre, a horrid incident on November 19, 2005 that left 24 unarmed Iraqis dead, many of them women and children. (Sorry, but repeated efforts to link to the story were unsuccessful.)

According to a lengthy Marine Corps investigative report obtained by the Post that included eyewitness accounts, Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the squad's leader, shot five Iraqi men one by one after Marines ordered them out of a taxi (see photo) in the moments following a roadside bombing that killed one Marine and injured two others. Another Marine fired rounds into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

Says the Post:

"One of the witnesses, Sgt. Asad Amer Mashoot, a 26-year-old Iraqi soldier who was in the Marine convoy, told investigators he watched in horror as the four students and the taxi driver fell. 'They didn't even try to run away,' he said. 'We were afraid from Marines and we saw them behaving like crazy. They were yelling and screaming.'

". . . The report, which relied on hundreds of interviews with Marines, Iraqi soldiers and civilian survivors conducted months after the incident, presents a fragmented and sometimes conflicting chronicle of the violence that day. But taken together, the accounts provide evidence that as the Marines came under attack, they responded in ways that are difficult to reconcile with their rules of engagement."

Wuterich and three other Marines have been charged with murder. Each faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted. Through their lawyers, three have argued that they behaved appropriately while taking fire on a chaotic battlefield, and that the civilian deaths were a regrettable but unavoidable part of warfare in an especially dangerous area.

Four officers, including a lieutenant colonel, are charged with failing to investigate and fully report the slayings. No higher ups have been charged, but the investigation continues.

There are lessons to be learned from what happened in Haditha. None of them forgive what happened. But they do help explain why it did happen:

LESSON ONE: It's a War

As a veteran myself and as a journalist who has covered a war or three, I have no illusions that Americans can be as barbaric as anyone. There also were atrocities committed by Uncle Sam's finest in both world wars, as well as in Korea and Vietnam.

But unlike some other societies, we are able to recognize our occasional barbarity, as painful as that can be, and we have a free press (in this case Time magazine, which broken the Haditha story and the story of the cover-up) to let us know when things go awry.

LESSON TWO: It's a Different Kind of War

This is a war in which the enemy does not wear uniforms or fight in any traditional sense. It is not unlike the Vietnam War, but the lessons that should have been learned from the Big Muddy do not seem to have been applied in Iraq.

The cardinal rule of counterinsurgency warfare is to separate enemy combatants from the general population, but it seems clear that some -- and perhaps many -- American troops have come to see Iraqis themselves as the enemy and a consequence is a predictable uptick in brutality that can lead to incidents like Haditha.

And for every Iraqi who is killed, justifiably or not, the American mission is further set back.

LESSON THREE: It's a Disproprtionately Fought War

Of all the armed services, the Marines have always been the most disciplined and had the strongest sense of comradiere. They also have done the brunt of the dirty work in Iraq -- and suffered a disproportionately higher number of casualties.

Roughly 40 percent of the 3,000-plus American troops killed and 25,000-plus wounded are Marines, who at no time have comprised more than 25 percent of the total number of American troops.

Additionally, the Marines are being asked to fight a kind of war -- involving insurgents and urban combat -- that was never intended to be their primary mission.

LESSON FOUR: It's an Immoral War

We are asking young men and women -- actually, many of them are kids -- to stay within moral bounds in an immoral war.

President Bush and his neocon brain trust made the chances of a Haditha massacre occuring greater by deliberately blurring the rules of conduct. Under the Bush calculus, torture is officially sanctioned and the Geneva Conventions are treated with disdain.

LESSON FIVE: It's a Failed Occupation

Haditha is a vivid example of an occupation gone horribly wrong. The lid stayed on the city of 70,000 after the March 2003 invasion. Marines initially patrolled on foot and used a velvet glove approach with the locals. But U.S. promises to rebuild the region's infrastructure were never fulfilled, fueling a growing anger at the occupation as a whole that helped turn Haditha into a Sunni insurgent stronghold. This pattern has been repeated many other places in Iraq.

Marines responded to the insurgency by abandoning their make-nice strategy in Haditha. They isolated the city and blew up most of its bridges. They were driven out of Haditha, but later retook it. Haditha's only hospital was destroyed in the fighting. Some 20 Marines have been killed in and near the city in insurgent attacks primarily launched from mosques, including a Marine whose disemboweling was videotaped. Copies of the tape can be bought at Haditha's central market.

As a result of the occupation, Haditha is in worse shape today than it was when the newly martyred Saddam Hussein was still in power.

LESSON SIX: It's a Failed Presidency

George Bush was elected to do a job. That job was being president of the United States. Unfortunately for him and us, there was a little dustup called 9/11. Instead of responding by putting the full weight of the U.S. behind a mission in Afghanistan, then the epicenter of radical Islamic terrorism and by far the greatest threat to America, he invaded Iraq.

The invasion went like clockwork. Mission Accomplished! But what has happened since has been an unrelenting nightmare in large part because the White House and Pentagon spent 59 minutes planning the war and 1 minute, if that, on planning the occupation. There is no more damning indictment of Bush's lack of leadership -- as president and commander in chief -- than the mess he has made in Iraq. He has failed America and he has failed our troops.

Bush has all but said that he will dump that mess on the next president, and was an open secret through 2006 that the administration's top priority was not to try to redeem its failed Iraq policy, let alone cobble together an exit strategy, but to retain power in Congress. Yet again, politics trumped policy.

LESSON SEVEN: The Iraqis Are to Blame, Too

The Iraqi people and their so-called leaders do not get a free pass. Righteously fanatical Iraqis routinely use women and children as human shields to prey on American troops. And don't forget that the Haditha massacre did not happen in a vacuum. It followed the death of a Marine -- Lance Corporal Terrazas -- in that roadside bombing.

Imposing democratic values at point of gun on a society where many people devalue human life and covet martyrdom was going to be problematic, so there is a hollowness to Iraqi leaders' condemnations of the Haditha massacre.

These leaders are complicitous in the massacre. They are good at nothing except bickering. They still have not been able to form a government with teeth. They have been incapable of pushing back against the orgy of sectarian violence that has overrun the country.

LESSON EIGHT: At Home, It's a War Unlike Any Other

The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to mouth platitudes about Americans making sacrifices for the war while sanitizing its true impact. Other than the troops and their families and friends, no one is making any sacrifice. Except losing their civil liberties.

Times like these demand belt tightening, but Americans have been urged to spend and there have been tax cuts -- at least for the wealthy -- despite a war costing hundreds of billions of dollars that is feeding an enormous budget deficit that future generations will have to pay for.

LESSON NINE: It's a Cover-Up Culture

There has never been an administration more obsessed by secrecy and covering up its failures and bad behavior: The torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, constitutional abuses at Guantánamo Bay, the so-called extraordinary renditions of suspected terrorists from U.S. custody to countries that employ brutal interrogation techniques.

Following the Haditha massacre, a Marine spokesman said that 15 Iraqis had been killed in the roadside bombing and that the others who died were insurgents caught up in a subsequent firefight. There was no significant challenge to that account within the military until Time magazine broke the story.

The White House claims that even the most senior military ranks will not be protected in the Haditha investigation, but it is difficult to take that assertion seriously when the president and his own advisors refuse to be accountable themselves.

LESSON TEN: It's a Clueless Left Wing

The antiwar left, with a pathetic puppet by the name of Cindy Sheehan as its poster girl, has been inept at fashioning a coherent message about the war. It certainly isn't one that I can grasp, let alone support.

The triumphalism and "baby killer" rhetoric of some of its members concerning the war in general and Haditha massacre in particular is deeply offensive. The war may be wrong, but blaming the kids sent to fight it is obscene.