US Loses Heart and Minds with Haditha Massacre

Lance Corporal Miguel “TJ” Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, was a member of Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. On November 19, 2005, an “improvised explosive device,” in the town of Haditha, Anbar Province, Iraq, killed him. According to press reports and the initial findings of a Pentagon investigation, four to eight of his buddies shot 24 civilians in retaliation, frustration and/or rage. Why these 24 are more important than the other 30,000 Iraqi civilians who have died since they were “liberated” is unclear, but Haditha isn’t going away.

Part of the problem with the Haditha issue is inherent in the way war has been fought for the last several decades, and part is inherent in war period. Civilians make up about 90% of the casualties now. In the days of Frederick the Great, it was the professional soldiers who did the dying, and certainly not in the hundreds of thousands. War, though, is mass murder with the sanction of the state. Regardless of the technology, training and leadership, somebody at sometime in a conflict is going to make a mistake; he’ll lose his self-control, he’ll mistake a civilian for a combatant, he’ll miss a target and hit an innocent bystander.

What appears to have happened in Haditha is more deceitful. Four to eight buddies of Lance Corporal Terrazas allegedly shot 24 people at close range, one an alleged girl allegedly of 4 (anyone remember “baby-killers” from the Vietnam era?) and another an alleged senior in an alleged wheelchair. That’s an alleged atrocity (or 24) and clearly a war crime in the “Nuremberg-Hang-the-Bastards” sense if it goes beyond “alleged.” But that isn’t all. There also appears to have been a cover-up attempted. Had the perpetrators been placed under arrest on the 19th of November, the dishonor would have been contained. As it now stands, the rot rises up from Kilo Company by way of this alleged cover-up.

As this investigation proceeds, the US will find that there is a significant body of Iraqi opinion that simply will not accept any result at all. The entire Marine Corps could be jailed, and still, it would not be enough to satisfy certain (largely Sunni Arab) segments of Iraqi society. As far as these folks are concerned, the American presence in Iraq is the biggest problem Iraq faces. That may not be objectively true, but no amount of arguing and no amount of evidence will change the perception. Hearts and minds have been irrevocably lost, and the military’s decision to add “values” training is a bit late (and probably should have been taught to recruits in civilian life long before they enlisted).

Former Marine Congressman John Murtha (D-Pa) said the allegations, if true, may cause more harm in the war effort than the Abu Ghraib prison disaster. “We are supposed to be fighting this war for democracy and yet, something like this happens to set us back,” he said. “There is no question the chain of command tried to stifle this story. I can understand why, but that doesn't excuse it. Something like this has to be brought out to the public and the people have to be punished. This thing has been going on for six months - they knew the day afterwards.”

Meanwhile, Iraq’s new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said to the Associate Press through a government translator, “We emphasize that our forces, that multinational forces, will respect human rights, the rights of the Iraqi citizen. It is not justifiable that a family is killed because someone is fighting terrorists. We have to be more specific and more careful.” Unfortunately, war is democratic only in the sense that the killing doesn’t discriminate much.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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