The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.

This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.

So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.

These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.


New York Times

Now here's Allapundit's response:

They can't have it be an isolated incident, they can't allow for the possibility that it's limited to a few bad apples and some midlevel commanders because then the blame falls squarely on the guilty parties themselves. Which leaves the Times and its constituents double-bound: not only does it force them to acknowledge that American soldiers (volunteers, no less) do in fact have moral agency and therefore are partly responsible for the war the left hates so much, but it offers them no way to exploit the incident for political purposes. How can they call for a pullout if the plague of renegade soldiers going berserk from exhaustion isn't a plague? How can they blame Bush or Rumsfeld for creating a "climate of impunity" (in the Nation's words) if there's no climate of impunity? The actions of the other 99.9% of U.S. forces in Iraq should count as evidence on that point, no?

My ignorance of military culture prevents me from answering the following myself so I'll throw it open to milbloggers and our readers in the armed forces. Have you "gotten the message" that you should feel free to shoot Iraqi infants in the head if it pleases you to do so? Has the torture at Abu Ghraib created a "climate of impunity" in your mind that leads you to believe gunning down Arab civilians in cold blood is appropriate, and will result in no adverse consequences to yourself? Let me know in the comments or by e-mail and I'll print the responses, because I have a crazy hunch this "green light" argument is so much bullshit manufactured by Bush-haters as cover for their agenda.

Now I just have a couple of things to say about all this. Let's wait until the investigation is over, before we decide who is to blame.... But signs are pointing towards a cover-up. Bush loves to wear the Commander in Chief hat. For someone who avoided the dangers of Vietnam, playing GI Joe must be fun. I can wear military jackets, drop gloriously onto the deck of American Aircraft Carriers and make speeches to those who walk the walk.. But I can't take responsibility when things go bad.... What happened to "The Buck Stops Here?" Right Wingers like to make hay about the guilty being punished in the Abu Ghraib case, but no officers were charged in that case. None to my knowledge have been charged in any of the other cases. It has been enlisted men and women, who granted, carried out the attrocities, but for a President who suppossedly demands accountablity, it seems strange that no one in the upper chain of command has been charged. Sure there have been some shuffling of command structures, but no one has seriously been held accountable above the pay grade of Sargeant.

So my question to Allahpundit and others is, "WHY NOT." What kind of hypocrisy drives Right Wing thinking, that it's fine to bask in glory.... what little there has been, for the senior administrators of this war. But when it comes to accountability for these events, the leaders should get a pass.... This is something those on the Right need to seriously think about.

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.grupo-utopia.com/blog/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2153

Posted by: S. K. at June 5, 2006 02:51 AM