Who Put the Guns in Their Hands and to What End?

[Guest guest]

i apologize for some of the off color language and such in this post..

 

 

 

 

 

June 5, 2006

 

Who Put the Guns in Their Hands and to What End?

Why Haditha Happened

By BRUCE JACKSON

 

Army spokesmen are saying that the murders of 24 Iraqi civilians, most

of them women and young children, at Haditha last November took place

because the troops just weren't well enough trained.

 

I don't believe that, and neither should you.

 

The Defense Department is saying that it is going to initiate a huge

training program that will keep such incidents from happening in the

future.

 

I don't believe that either, and neither should you.

 

It has been, admittedly, a long time, but I do not remember anyone ever

during the whole time I was in the Marines telling us " It is a bad

thing to shoot to death unarmed men, women and children who pose no

threat to you and who have not done or even seemed to want to do you

any harm. " Neither do I remember anybody ever during the whole time I

was in the Marines telling us, " It is not okay to kill innocent

civilians because you are pissed off because one of your guys got hurt

earlier in the day someplace else. "

 

I do remember them telling us to keep mud out of the muzzles of our

weapons, to take care of our feet, and not to salute indoors.

 

I remember lots of things from those years. But I cannot remember

anyone of any rank telling us that we shouldn't shoot to death unarmed

little kids and women and working stiffs and old guys.

 

If anybody had said anything that stupid to us someone surely would

have said what someone always said when somebody said something really,

really, really stupid: " No shit? "

 

None of the interviewers on network and cable stations these past few

weeks, however, has said that or anything close like it to any of the

generals and Defense Department officials they've had on the air doing

the administration's damage control. Again and again, the brasshats or

suits have talked about training failed or training needed, and not one

interviewer from " Newshour " to the flacks at Fox has said, " No shit? "

 

The White House and Pentagon love the excuse of " inadequate training "

because it makes atrocities the result of innocent procedural

negligence or " a few bad apples " rather than the result and

acknowledgement of the administration's basic policy.

 

The excuse of " inadequate training " came up after Lt. William Calley's

platoon murdered as many as 500 old men, women and children in the

Vietnamese village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. There are other

similarities in My Lai and Haditha. The secondary excuse for My Lai was

that the platoon had earlier lost some members and the soldiers were

pissed off; the Haditha Marines were, it is said, enraged because

they'd lost a buddy some time earlier. The My Lai story only came out

because it appeared on CBS and in the New Yorker, up to which time the

military was doing everything it could to cover the murders up; the

Haditha story came out because somebody leaked it to Time, which

published a scathing article. Before the Time article, DoD had no

public interest in the murders at Haditha at all.

 

" Inadequate training " was also the Defense Department's primary excuse

for its torture program at Abu Ghraib. That ugliness went public only

because some idiot with a digital camera and laptop posted some of the

atrocity photos on a website. The Defense Department worked very hard

to play that one down, and it fought very hard to keep any more of the

hundreds of other digital photographs from coming out, as if the evil

we did not get to see would therefore be evil that never happened. (DoD

continues to be, according to Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib

story, successful in suppressing videos which are far more awful than

any of the digital photographs.)

 

But Haditha was no more a function of " inadequate training " than was My

Lai or Abu Ghraib. Each of them was a direct consequence of US policies

at the highest levels, policies that said the US had the right to apply

deadly force halfway around the world in pursuit of what its leaders

had decided in secret were the country's national interest. All three

atrocities happened because the presidential administrations in power

declared the lives of distant individuals trivial, disposable,

theoretical.

 

In each of those events, the troops scorned for atrocities (Calley was

the only one who got a sentence out of My Lai, and that was only house

arrest for a few months; no officer went into the dock for Abu Ghraib,

just a few enlisted losers) were in fact carrying out US policy without

the window-dressing, without the bullshit. They performed what was in

America's heart of darkness. In My Lai, they were in a script written

for them by Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara; in Iraq it has been a

script crafted by George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

 

Those dumb bastards at My Lai and Haitha pulled the triggers, but who

put those guns in their hands, and to what end? Those thugs at Abu

Ghraib performed those abominations, but who were their spiritual and

moral leaders?

 

Were they evil, those torturers and murderers? What about the leaders

who sent them there and who wrote their scripts? Who told Calley's

thugs that we had more right to tell Vietnamese what to do with their

country than the Vietnamese? Who told the torturers at Abu Ghraib and

the murderers at Haditha (and the killers and torturers at all those

other places where the cover-ups worked as they were supposed to) we

had more right to tell Iraqis what to do with their country than

Iraqis? Who stood on the deck of a carrier in a flight suit with a

padded crotch and told the world that our power was given to us by God

but comes out of the muzzle of a gun and if you don't like it watch

what we do next?

 

Calley's platoon of murderers, the torturers at Abu Ghraib, the Haditha

killers who, in one family alone gunned down children of 14, 10, 5, 3

and 1: the problem isn't that they weren't sufficiently trained. The

problem is that they were trained far too well.

 

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor at University at Buffalo

and editor of the web journal BuffaloReport.com. Temple University

Press will publish his book " Telling Stories " early next year.