Hell And Haditha - Understanding War [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

06-05-06, 07:49 PM

Given to me by Hubby.....fontman..

I'm Back....from a so-called vacation...LOL

Ellie

The Hell of War - Why Haditha isn't My Lai
By Christopher Hitchens
June 5, 2006

Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that the
Marines of Kilo Company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha
that day. Something like this has
certainly been waiting to happen. I wrote in this space almost a year
ago about a warning delivered to the U.S. commanders in Iraq by their
British counterpart Gen. Michael
Jackson. He told them that their "zero tolerance" force-protection
measures, which allow for the use of deadly fire if anyone comes too close,
ran a serious risk of losing Iraq.
(Recent clumsy skirmishes in Kabul, though they do not involve any
allegation of deliberate murder, make the same point in a different way.)

It's thus a bit harder than one might like to argue that a Haditha-type
incident would have been an "isolated" one. The combat in Iraq and
Afghanistan is overwhelmingly political,
and there is no soldier who doesn't know that it's imperative for this
reason-to say nothing of any moral objections-to use his or her
firepower with exact discrimination. If this
principle is not being meticulously observed, then it means that there
is a rupture in training and discipline, which would be a serious
enough story in its own right.

However, all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot
air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an
atrocity-the slaughter of the My Lai
villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few
minutes-overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer
who prepared his chopper-gunner
to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but
there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual
incitements to psycho officers such as Capt.
Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My
Lai-"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"-has
been in use for U.S. soldiers for some
time.

The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the
United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the
captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese
militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were
vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army with a high morale and exalted
standards. I, for one, will not have
them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen
Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These
depraved elements are the Iraqi
Khmer Rouge. They have two methods of warfare. One is the use of random
murder to create a sectarian and ethnic civil war-perhaps the most evil
combination of tactics and
strategy it is possible to imagine. The other is the attempt to
alienate coalition soldiers from the population.

Even before the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Saddam's foreign minister,
Naji Sabry, wrote a memo about how to combat the increasing fraternization
between advancing Americans
and Iraqi civilians. Send some suicide bombers to the scene, he
recommended, and force a wedge between the two. The Americans would then learn
to distrust anyone who
approached. As with the foul policy above, the awful thing about this
charming policy is that it works. Which leads us to one very important
conclusion: Any coalition soldier who
relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by definition doing
Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his orders. If anything
justifies a court-martial, then surely that does.

It's not amusing to see fascist killers hiding behind human shields and
then releasing obscene videos of the work that they do. Nor is it
rewarding to clean up the remains of a
comrade who has been charred and shredded by a roadside bomb. To be
taunted while doing so must be unbearable. The humane George Orwell,
writing of his life as a colonial
policeman in Burma in Shooting an Elephant, told his readers that there
were days when "I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be
to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist
priest's guts." But he did not, in fact, succumb to this temptation.
And the British were unwanted colonial occupiers in Burma, while the
coalition forces are-until further notice-the
guests of Iraq's first-ever elected government and the executors of a
U.N.-mandated plan for the salvage and reconstruction of the country.

There is no respectable way of having this both ways. Those who say
that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down
more forcefully are accepting the
chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National
Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also
demanding that there should have
been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who
refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar's fleeing convoy in
Afghanistan-lest it by any chance
be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover
of night-are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan
teachers and international aid
workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get
away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD warehouses and stiff with
al-Qaida training camps, there would
still have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists-not those who compare the
Iraqi killers to the Minutemen-have the right to object to every
casualty of war. And if the pacifists had been
heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would
all still be in power-hardly a humanitarian outcome. People like to go
on about the "fog" of war as well
as the "hell" of it. Hell it most certainly is-but not always so foggy.
Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly clarifying,
once the tone of righteous
sententiousness is dropped.

--- Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most
recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent
collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty,
and War.

Semper Fidelis,
Mark