Haditha Details Emerge

Haditha appears to have been a case of overreaction to a terrorist attack, where civilians were killed indiscriminately by a squad of Marines out of a combination of rage, fear, confusion, and combat stress. This situation is different from Hamdania, where a premeditated killing of a single Iraqi to “make an example” to others was undertaken in cold blood outside the stress of a firefight.

I have not commented the Haditha case in any depth other than to criticize bloggers who reflexively criticized prosecutors, because the details have been hard to come by.

A telling and disturbing detail emerges in the Washington Post’s report, namely:

Col. Stephen W. Davis: “‘There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of this, including the number of civilian dead, that would have triggered anything in my mind that was out of the norm,’ Davis told military investigators, according to a transcript. ‘There is nothing about this incident that jumped out at any point to us.’”

Far from vindicating the accused, the failure of the killing of 20+ civilians by US forces to raise eyebrows suggests a pervasively casual attitude about civilian casualties. This casualness is underscored by the paltry sentences that have been handed out by court martial panels in the cases of unlawful killings by Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The experienced reality of Iraq, and of every war, depends a great deal on perspective; the Iraqis are experiencing a different war than Americans, and it is naive for us to think their hostility (or ambivalence) about American forces stems solely from their hard-heartedness.