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Try as they might, apologists for the war in Iraq won’t be convincing when they insist that, at worst, the Haditha “incident” (or was it a mishap?) was the unfortunate work of a few bad Marines. It was something much worse.
When men trained to kill on a battlefield — this wasn’t the Salvation Army, after all — are ordered into civilian areas where many residents see the troops as an occupying force rather than as liberators, what would you expect to happen? We hear war defenders complain that “the enemy” doesn’t identify itself. Why should it? In the eyes of the “insurgents” they are resisting an army of occupation. That Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn’t foresee this resistance doesn’t mean it was unforeseeable.
So who is ultimately responsible for the massacre of the 24 unarmed Iraqis at Haditha? The one who put the Marines there: President George W. Bush.
Here is a Marine's account of what happened at Haditha. I submit that even if this is entirely accurate, the perpetrators are guilty of atrocities for the reason stated in my article. The higher-ups are no less to blame.
Robert Higgs -
6/7/2006
Must not have made myself clear, Aeon. Those aren't scare quotes; they are quotes--the exact words being used to excuse the actions of nearly all the U.S. forces in Iraq.
However, I do hold that all the U.S. government's military and other agents in Iraq are engaged in an evil enterprise and therefore bear some moral culpability for their participation. That does not mean that the man who shoots a baby point blank is no more guilty than the man who drives a supply truck or fills up the Coke machine, but all are guilty to some degree.
I don't put any weight on the "laws of war" or "what the soldiers were taught" about refraining from murder and so forth. Committing a wrong is committing a wrong, whether in Iraq or in Indianapolis, whether someone waves the wand of "war" over the crime or not.
Yes, George Bush told them to go, but they chose to obey. Perhaps those who merely tagged along ought to be seen as less culpable than the Big Chief--I'm not sure, I'm not God. But I do not see that anybody involved in this huge crime is entitled to a clean bill of moral health.
Aeon J. Skoble -
6/7/2006
But Bob, when you put "bad apples" in scare quotes, you're implying either that they're _all_ bad, which isn't true (many, I'd argue most, of them try to conduct themselves according to the laws of warfare and higher moral standards), or that none of them are, inasmuch as there's no such thing, since they're carrying out inherently evil directives from Bush and Rumsfeld. This produces the same effect as I was commenting on above, viz., to unwittingly mitigatw what is a _real_ moral failing on the part of _individual_ soldiers who do not hold themselves to the standards they have been taught to uphold and which are in fact their legal obligation.
Here's another way for me to go at this: people who opposed this war from the get-go may be tempted to see these crimes as part and parcel of something that was a bad idea in the first place. But these acts would be crimes even in entirely justfied wars. That's why traditional just-war theory differentiates the macro arguments about whether the war is justified as a matter of national policy, from the micro arguments about how this or that soldier fights. Mistakes in the first realm are clealy assignable to top govt leaders, esp. the president, but mistakes in the latter -- war crimes -- are always the individual responsibility of the perpetrator, even if the war is legit at the macro level. My original comment to Sheldon was that, out of the context of his full essay, which I liked, the L&P excerpt could be taken as _excusing_ individual soldiers from their culpability for crimes (which I'm sure wasn't Sheldon's intention!).
Robert Higgs -
6/7/2006
Owing to the surfacing of hard-to-dismiss photographic and video-taped evidence, certain "incidents," such as the massacre at Haditha or the fun and games at Abu Ghraib, find their way into the U.S. media from time to time. Always the reaction is predictable: officials cover up and obfuscate; they blame "a few bad apples" and insist that we take the time to "find out the facts before leaping to conclusions"; then, they bury the whole matter in an interminable procedure by which the military investigates and, for the most part, exculpates itself, while the general public loses interest in the matter and shifts its attention to the lastest story of a vanished coed.
What goes generally unremarked, however, is the great extent to which, quite apart from infantrymen going postal and prison guards acting out their sadistic fantasies, atrocities are built into the way in which the war is being conducted, namely, against a civilian population by extensive use of aerial bombardment, tank and artillery fire, heavy firepower (warheads of 500, 1,000, and even more pounds of high explosive), big guns (.50-caliber machine guns, routinely), often in densely inhabited urban areas. Countless thousands of innocent persons then automatically suffer death, personal injury, or destruction of their homes and other property. Oops, didn't mean to hurt THEM; only the "bad guys."
This whole endeavor is so shockingly pervaded by the most blatant moral hypocrisy that one scarcely knows where to begin an indictment, except perhaps at the moment George W. Bush ordered the invasion to begin. All the rest followed naturally and might well have been--indeed, was in fact, by me as well as many others--fully foreseen.
Yet, at this late date, we are still suffering though mock-shocked media reports and make-believe discussions of "bad apples" and all the rest of the public-relations cover for the ongoing mass murder.
Aeon J. Skoble -
6/7/2006
Sheldon, I like the full essay, which you link to, but the excerpt posted here at L&P might be seen as excusing the immoral acts of individual soldiers -- if Bush is the one who is responsible, then Joe War Criminal's responsibility is mitigated somewhat, and that's an implication I'd resist. All soldiers are trained in the laws of warfare, and they know better than to kill unarmed noncombatants. Any time this happens, it is the _personal moral failure_ of the individual. Often we can also blame the immediate superior if he has created an atmosphere in which this moral failure is encouraged or abetted, but the higher up the chain of command we go, the more it diminishes, or might be seen as diminishing, the culpability of the individual criminal.
Otto M. Kerner -
6/6/2006
This is the kind of thing that has always made me appreciate FFF editorials. Clear and to the point.
