ORIGINAL POST: As if pouring through floodgates, more accounts of the Marine atrocity at Haditha:

After the roadside bombing, the Marines arrived first at the door of Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali, 89, an amputee who used a wheelchair. They shot him, then turned their guns on his three sons and their families, survivors said.

Waleed Abdul Hameed, a 48-year-old worker in Al Anbar's religious affairs office, was among the first of the family members to be gunned down. His 9-year-old daughter, Eman, said she was still wearing her pajamas when the Marines arrived. Her 7-year-old brother, Abdul Rahman, said he hid his face with a blanket when his father was shot.

A few minutes later, the boy saw his mother fall to the ground, dying. I saw her while she was crying," he said. "She fell down on the floor bleeding." Speaking days ago in Haditha, months after the attacks, the boy broke into tears, covered his eyes with his hands, and began to mutter to himself.

At his side, his elder sister began to speak again. Eman described how the two had waited for help, the bodies of their family members sprawled on the floor. We were scared," she said. "I tried to hide under the bed." With shrapnel injuries to her legs, she lay still for two hours.

When the shooting began, Eman's aunt, Hibba Abdullah snatched her 5-month-old niece off the floor. The baby's mother had dropped her in shock after seeing her husband gunned down. Clutching the child, Abdullah ran out of the house. She and the baby, Aasiya, survived. The baby's mother "completely collapsed when they killed her husband in front of her," Abdullah said. "I ran away carrying Aasiya outside the house, but when the Americans returned they killed Asma, the mother of the child."

For much more, read this article in today's Los Angeles Times.

No doubt, many find these stories unpleasant and disturbing, even repellant, but there is a moral imperative associated with the publication of these Iraqi accounts of the slaughter at Haditha. One of the most troubling aspects of the media coverage of the war, and the response of many Americans to it, has been the refusal to acknowledge individual Iraqis when they describe what they have experienced. Usually, as with checkpoint shootings, Abu Ghraib, air strikes and, now, Haditha, Iraqi acccounts are only accepted once corroborated by the US military. Otherwise, they are ignored, or, if published, followed with a disclaimer rarely, if ever, attached to the statements of the US military: it could not be independently verified.

Am I the only person who recognizes the richness of the irony here? The US military launches an invasion of Iraq based upon false information about Saddam, al-Qaeda, and the presence of WMDs, and frequently attempts to justify the occupation by exaggerating the presence of "foreign fighters" (other Arabs, not US, UK and other military participants in the coalition), while paying to plant stories about the purported positive aspects of the occupation in the Iraqi media, but it is the accounts of Iraqis themselves that must be subject to independent confirmation.

Even Americans opposed to the war find it difficult to emphathize with Iraqis as victims of this conflict. On this site, and others, such as Eli Stephens' Left I on the News, I have frequently encountered the troubling tendency of evading the enormity of the violence inflicted upon Iraqis by making it general, and detached from any American responsibility by rendering it as some kind of objective, elemental condition, while the numerically much lesser brutalities inflicted upon American troops receives a heartfelt, specific response.

It commonly goes something like this (after a comment or post describing a detailed episode of brutality inflicted upon Iraqis by US troops): yes, war is a terrible thing, and innocents are invaribly killed and maimed, and it is horrible that our troops are over there, and find themselves inevitably caught up in such situations.

Get it? The Iraqis aren't being killed by Americans, they are being killed by that awful, perpetual condition known as war, analoguous to being killed in an earthquake or a hurricane, while war is simultanously victimizing our troops by involuntarily compelling them to commit such appalling acts. In other words, "they were just following orders" has been dressed in the clothes of metaphysics, the loss of free will when confronted with the day to day reality of combat. War is apparently the violent, deranged mythic brother of Adam Smith's invisible hand that controls the economic universe, too powerful for humans to resist.

Perhaps, the massacre at Haditha (and the other ones that we will soon discover) will shatter this moral myopia. The media now has the opportunity to relate to Iraqis as fully engaged participants in their own lives, with a valid perspective that must be told, free of the filters of cultural bias.

Meanwhile, we, as individuals, likewise have an opportunity to escape the comfortable allure of the "Good German" defense, as translated into the "Support the Troops" mantra which releases our troops from responsibility for their actions. No longer will the deaths and injuries of the relative few substitute for the death and destruction inflicted upon the many. Both stories can be told with a more appropriate context that recognizes the incomprehensible consequences of the war for Iraqis. If we seize these opportunities, it creates the prospect of a psychological transformation that will more rapidly facilitate the end of the occupation.

UPDATE: Eli Stephens over at Left I on the News provides a chilling example of how the media celebrates the callousness of the US military towards Iraqis as "restraint". He concludes:

The "rules of engagement" of the U.S. military, as illustrated by this episode, last week's massacre in Kandahar, or countless other examples, couldn't be clearer. If the U.S. military even thinks that a suspected enemy fighter is inside a building, they consider that they have the right to simply destroy that building, without even asking the question of who might be inside, much less actually attempting to find out. This is because the slightest risk to the life of one American soldier is evidently considered to outweigh a much more concrete risk to almost any number of innocent civilians.

Yes, this has been an essential feature of the conflict since its inception. And, with the intensification of resistance, it may well get worse before it gets better:

The Pentagon reported yesterday that the frequency of insurgent attacks against troops and civilians is at its highest level since American commanders began tracking such figures two years ago, an ominous sign that, despite three years of combat, the US-led coalition forces haven't significantly weakened the Iraq insurgency.In its quarterly update to Congress, the Pentagon reported that from Feb. 11 to May 12, as the new Iraqi unity government was being established, insurgents staged an average of more than 600 attacks per week nationwide. From August 2005 to early February, when Iraqis elected a parliament, insurgent attacks averaged about 550 per week; at its lowest point, before the United States handed over sovereignty in the spring of 2004, the attacks averaged about 400 per week.

The vast majority of the attacks -- from crude bombing attempts and shootings to more sophisticated, military-style assaults and suicide attacks -- were targeted at US-led coalition military forces, but the majority of deaths have been of civilians, who are far more vulnerable to insurgent tactics.

``Overall, average weekly attacks during this `Government Transition' period were higher than any of the previous periods," the report states. ``Reasons for the high level of attacks may include terrorist and insurgent attempts to exploit a perceived inability of the Iraqi government to constitute itself effectively, the rise of ethno sectarian attacks . . . and enemy efforts to derail the political process leading to a new government."

Note the major concession by the US military here, artfully presented by the Boston Globe as a mundane sort of throwaway line: The vast majority of the attacks -- from crude bombing attempts and shootings to more sophisticated, military-style assaults and suicide attacks -- were targeted at US-led coalition military forces, but the majority of deaths have been of civilians, who are far more vulnerable to insurgent tactics. Read that again carefully. The vast majority of the attacks are being directed, not towards Iraqi civilians, but towards the occupying army, predominately resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths. So, that recurrent, seemingly unanswerable, question remains: why are US troops still in Iraq?

Labels: Haditha, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism