New York Times Editorial - A tough inquiry into Haditha
New York Times Editorial - A tough inquiry into Haditha
Copyright by The New York Times
SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 2006
The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. marines at Haditha, Iraq, 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 George W. 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 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 U.S. 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.
What we now know about the events last Nov. 19 in Haditha, a town in Anbar province in western Iraq, the violent epicenter of the Sunni Arab insurgency, essentially boils down to this: A roadside bomb struck a Humvee traveling in the vicinity, killing one of the Marines on board, and sometime later 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down, many in their homes. The victims included women, children and grandparents. We know this not through the original Marine Corps report on the incident, which claimed that all the Iraqi deaths resulted from the bomb and an exchange of gunfire with insurgents. We know it because reporters from Time magazine began challenging inconsistencies between eyewitness Iraqi accounts and the Marine Corps version.
We still do not know how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the original coverup went, nor do we know how the president, the defense secretary and other top officials responded when they first learned of the false reporting. The world needs to be told what steps are now being taken, besides remedial ethics training, to make sure that such crimes against
civilians and such deliberate falsifications of the record do not recur.
It should not surprise anyone that this war - launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results - is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.
Copyright by The New York Times
SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 2006
The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. marines at Haditha, Iraq, 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 George W. 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 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 U.S. 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.
What we now know about the events last Nov. 19 in Haditha, a town in Anbar province in western Iraq, the violent epicenter of the Sunni Arab insurgency, essentially boils down to this: A roadside bomb struck a Humvee traveling in the vicinity, killing one of the Marines on board, and sometime later 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down, many in their homes. The victims included women, children and grandparents. We know this not through the original Marine Corps report on the incident, which claimed that all the Iraqi deaths resulted from the bomb and an exchange of gunfire with insurgents. We know it because reporters from Time magazine began challenging inconsistencies between eyewitness Iraqi accounts and the Marine Corps version.
We still do not know how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the original coverup went, nor do we know how the president, the defense secretary and other top officials responded when they first learned of the false reporting. The world needs to be told what steps are now being taken, besides remedial ethics training, to make sure that such crimes against
civilians and such deliberate falsifications of the record do not recur.
It should not surprise anyone that this war - launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results - is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.
posted by Carlos T Mock at 8:51 PM
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