Before War....Expect Haditha

The recent revelations about the actions of marines in haditha are tragic on so many levels and will certainly harm our objectives there. One cannot imagine justifying or condoning such behavior. There have been parallels drawn to atrocities in other wars. In news stories one sees haditha now commonly referred to as “Iraq’s My Lei” in reference to the massacre of hundreds of villagers in Vietnam.

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I started with an assertion that there can be no justifying the purposeful killing of civilians because the most important lesson, I believe, that should be learned from this is not about the nature of the soldiers who committed this crime, but on the nature of war itself and I want to stress that this is not an acceptance of the soldiers behavior. I do not, however, believe that we can underestimate how often war results in such tragedies. War is brutal. And in all wars terrible things happen to innocent people.

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And this is precisely the reason that war, in every case, should be a last resort. When war is undertaken it should be because the brutality and atrocities that will certainly ensue as a result of war will be less brutal than what will certainly ensue if war is not undertaken. Preemptive war can never meet this criterion. Consider iraq: it is now clear that the death and destruction resulting from the war in iraq is far greater than any harm saddam could have inflicted on the US if even the most modest of precautions were undertaken.

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How could the makers of our war Iraq ever have been certain that the brutality it created would be less than were saddam contained some other way? The makers of this war needed to have assumed that such acts would occur, as they always have, and that this was necessary to prevent what is CERTAIN to have been far worse.

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What kind of “culture of life” is this? I marvel at how much Bush has damaged our country, its people, and its perception abroad. It truly is astounding.