Slouching Toward Haditha

For an intelligent take on the massacre in Haditha, it makes sense to quote Justin Raimondo, one who has been consistently right about the situation in Iraq from Day One.

Raimondo, editorial director for the libertarian Antiwar.com site, reported last year about the administration's "El Salvador Strategy," a plan to ratchet up the brutality in Iraq similar to force used in Latin America in the 1980s.

Says Raimondo: "We are now seeing the results of this policy of desperation in practice. Haditha is not just an "isolated incident," but evidence of a new strategic orientation by the U.S. military – a scorched-earth policy designed to stave off the humiliating prospect of impending defeat ...

A pattern emerges: Haditha, Abu Sifa, Abu Ghraib, and all the others now bound to come out in horrifying detail. These place names will become the new slogans of the Iraqi insurgency, which will be fueled as never before – and perhaps immeasurably strengthened by rising Shi'ite anger. As we said in the beginning – nay, before the beginning – the occupation of Iraq will soon take on all the familiar earmarks of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Both Iraqis and Americans will be locked in a deadly embrace of indignities that will soon escalate into everyday atrocities. The Iraqis, like the Palestinians, will become captives in their own land, and their jailers will get progressively more abusive and cruel as a matter of sheer necessity."

Fact is that the debate over the moral quality of the troops is besides the point. The real culprits are the people who put the troops in a situation that had little chance of success and an excellent chance of quagmire. Putting troops in a strange country amongst people who don't want them there with no plan to win them over, and little effort to provide for the population's basic needs, it's a tinderbox waiting to explode that should be obvious to people who have ever read history.

It is difficult enough for a benevolent empire to control a conquered nation let alone one that has imprisoned and tortured large swatches of innocents whose hearts and minds we were supposed to be winning. The problem with Haditha is that it demonstrates an escalation in violence that is inevitable, unless U.S. policy changes dramatically. Unfortunately, George W. Bush doesn't do change, which means bloodshed is likely to get worse.