- NEW YORK -- Months after Time magazine reported that U.S. Marines had
carried out a My Lai-style massacre of at least two dozen innocent Iraqi
civilians, the average "support our troops" American is waking
up and smelling the butchery.
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- As usual, the U.S. government tried to
cover up the mass murder--it initially claimed that the victims were blown
up by an insurgent IED. But, as Time reported in March, the "civilians
who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by
the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the
attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women
and three children." As at My Lai, the bloodlust was not easily sated.
"The raids took five hours and left at least 23 people dead."
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- Jane and Joe Sixpack are shocked. Congressional
Democrats are calling for an investigation and, for once, will probably
get one. Political analysts worry that the Haditha massacre could hurt
U.S. propaganda efforts even more than the infamous photos of torture at
its Abu Ghraib concentration camp.
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- So far reaction to Haditha has been the
reverse of what you might expect. Republicans and other pro-war types are
running around like it's the end of the world. Meanwhile the streets of
Arab capitals, recently ablaze over the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy,
are quiet.
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- The reason is simple: For Iraqis, American
atrocities are old news, dating back to the invasion in March 2003 and
a full decade earlier. (U.S. planes dropped so many bombs on Iraqi schools,
hospitals and power plants during the 1990s that they ran out of targets.)
So are the boulevards of New York, San Francisco and other cities where
hundreds of thousands of American lefties once marched against the invasion
of Iraq.
-
- "As the war in Iraq rages on,"
CBS News' Dotty Lynch asks, "Where are the young people this time
around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns
and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?"
Well, Chomsky's still around. Over a million young Americans, many of them
college students, protested Iraq. They certainly had allies in the media.
(Hi.)
-
- But The System is even less responsive
to protest now than it was during Vietnam. State-run media made fun of
antiwar activists as tattooed neo-hippies, called them treasonous and refused
airtime to Administration critics. When is the last time a hard-hitting
opponent of the Iraq war showed his or her face on national TV? Those of
us who raised our voices against this war from the start, having fruitlessly
complained about stories of battlefield abuse reported by the European
media, are suffering from marginalization fatigue.
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- Meanwhile, in the "new" Iraq,
Abdel Salam al-Qubaisy of Iraq's Sunni Muslim Scholars Association says,
U.S. massacres of civilians occur routinely. "The American soldier
has become an expert in killing," he shrugs. Like many Iraqis, Baghdad
shopkeeper Mohammed Jawdaat says that U.S. troops have never shown respect
for the lives of Iraqi civilians. "Six months ago," remembers
Jawdaat, "a car pulled out of a street towards an American convoy
and a soldier just opened fire. The driver was shot in the head. There
were no warning shots and the Americans didn't even stop."
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- Abd Mohammed Falah, a Ramadi attorney,
says: "U.S. forces have committed more crimes against the Iraqi people
than appears in the media. The U.S. defense secretary and his generals
should be sent to court instead of two or three soldiers who will be scapegoats."
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- Newspapers don't bother to report when
the sun rises in the east nor do they assign reporters to cover when dogs
bite men. Likewise, says Baghdad newspaper boy Imad Mohammed, Iraqi newspapers
haven't mentioned Haditha. Same-old, same-old massacres of Iraqis by American
forces are no longer news: "The Americans see a Muslim go into a mosque
and just assume he is a terrorist. They either arrest him or blow it up."
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- Rami Khouri, editor at The Daily Star
in Lebanon tells NPR that Haditha is "not a huge story [in the Middle
East]. It's getting a lot of coverage in the United States, obviously,
but most people in the Arab world are against what the United States did
in Iraq...They say look, this was a catastrophe from the beginning and
they're not surprised that this is happening. They kind of take it in stride
because everything the United States is doing in Iraq is seen as morally
and politically unacceptable."
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- Most of the world's population--including
virtually every Muslim and about a third Americans--always believed that
the war against Iraq was a genocidal attempt to intimidate the Muslim world
and extort its oil at gunpoint. They don't see a difference between Haditha
and the thousands of other Iraqis killed by U.S. forces since 2003. Because
the entire exercise was morally bankrupt from the outset, sold and perpetuated
with countless lies, all of the 200,000-plus civilians and Iraqi soldiers
who have died--whether by bomb or by bullet--were effectively murdered
by the U.S. military.
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- Haditha, where two dozen were executed,
was merely the 10,000th Haditha.
-
- The morality-come-latelies still don't
understand that nothing good will ever come out of the U.S. war against
Iraq. Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
says that massacres of civilians by U.S. soldiers do "not happen very
frequently, so there's no way to say historically why something like this
might have happened." Actually, similar incidents have taken place
in every war, including World War II. Pace's statement is either a dazzling
display of ahistorical ignorance or a bald-faced lie--take your pick. Pace
adds that if some of his men committed an atrocity at Haditha, they "have
not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines
have."
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- That's not what the Iraqis say.
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- Ted Rall is the editor of "Attitude
3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists," a new anthology of webcartoons.
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