5/6/06:AMERICAN ATROCITIES WIDESPREAD IN IRAQ






[ADDED NOTE: Since the horrible siege of Falluja in 2004, there
appears to be widespread and unreported American troops commiting
atrocities throughout Iraq over the period.

Isn't that a pathetic neocon excuse the American troops killed
bystanders in Haditha because of "stress"? Why shoot the civilians? If
stressed, why not call a quit, or shoot themselves ? Make no sense at
all. -- U Ne Oo.]


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June 5, 2006

OUR TERRORISM, AND THEIRS


Liberal apologetics for American atrocities

by Justin Raimondo

We expected Bill Kristol and the usual neocon suspects to dismiss the
atrocities committed by U.S. troops at Haditha as nothing to get too
excited about. After all, these guys don't believe in any morality but
that which comes out of the barrel of a gun. So what else is new? Yet
there are, perhaps, a few among us -- not me, however -- who somehow
expected a little less knee-jerk defensiveness from the likes of
liberal Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic. Alas, no:

"This horrible story from Haditha powerfully underscores the liberal
vision, which is this. We are not angels: without sufficient moral and
legal restrictions, and under conditions of extreme stress, Americans
can be as barbaric as anyone. What's makes us an exceptional nation
with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very
recognition of that fact. We are capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so
is everyone. But few societies are capable of acknowledging what
happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes
that make it less likely to happen again. That's how we show we are
different from the jihadists. We don't just assert it. We prove
it. That's the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it's
what we need right now in response to this horror."

To begin with, all meaningful moral and legal restrictions on American
behavior were swept aside with the illegal and immoral invasion and
occupation of a country that had never attacked the United States, and
represented no threat to us. Having embarked on a war of aggression,
it wasn't too long before we began to slide down the slippery slope
all the way to the bottom, wherein dwelled the subterranean horrors of
Abu Ghraib [pdf].

Now more monsters from the American id are uncoiling, and we stand,
aghast, in horror. All except Beinart, who sees this as the perfect
occasion for a little self-congratulation. Certainly his sense of
timing is off. He comes off as almost a caricature of the archetypal
Ugly American, a poster boy for the unselfconscious display of
American arrogance.

Secondly, I see that we're running up against the "extreme stress"
exculpatory syndrome again, one first given voice by Rep. John Murtha
as he sought to explain -- although not excuse -- the Haditha
massacre. What is it about the word "stress" that gives it -- for
Americans, at least -- a magical power of absolution? A postal worker
goes ballistic, kills a dozen people, and the whole thing is
"explained" by "stress." A mother of five drowns her children in the
bathtub, and, again, we hear about the debilitating effects of
"stress" from her defense lawyer. I'm sure if Lee Harvey Oswald had
survived to face trial, we would have heard the same B.S. -- "stress"
made me do it! I have news for the stress-ophobes -- most of life in
the rest of the world take place under extremely "stressful"
conditions. Imagine having an income of a few hundred dollars a year,
no access to medical care, and little prospect that your children will
escape a legacy of grinding poverty and hopelessness. Now that's
stressful!

But I digress. Let us get to the core argument of the liberal
apologetics for American terrorism in Iraq: the loopy idea that
American atrocities are somehow different in kind from those routinely
committed by the Osama bin Ladens of this world. American bombers
strafe the Iraqi countryside, killing hundreds of innocents in the
course of the war; U.S. soldiers routinely fire on Iraqi civilians
with little or no provocation, they drown them, they torture them --
and yet, our atrocities are somehow different. Nobler. They even
"underscore the liberal vision"!

Jeezy-peezy, you can't make this stuff up. What the heck is Beinart
babbling about? He is wrong when it comes to the facts. His contention
that the U.S. government is freely "acknowledging what happened,
bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it
less likely to happen again" is simply not true. If it weren't for
Iraqi human rights activist Taher Thabet, who videotaped the immediate
aftermath of the Haditha atrocities, the cover-up engineered by local
commanders (and possibly others higher up the chain of command) would
have succeeded. When Marine units arrived at Haditha in the wake of
the massacre, they found women, children, and an old man, shot dead --
not victims of a roadside bomb, which was and still is the official
story. As Tom Ricks points out in the Washington Post,

"Despite what Marine witnesses saw when they arrived, that official
version has been allowed to stand for six months. Who lied about the
killings, who knew the truth and what, if anything, they did about it
is at the core of one of the potentially most damaging events of the
Iraq war, one that some say may surpass the abuse scandal at Abu
Ghraib prison."

And now we have these reports:

"Marine commanders in Iraq knew within two days of the killings in
Haditha in November that gunfire, not a roadside bomb, had killed
Iraqi civilians but they saw no reason to investigate further, The New
York Times reported on Saturday."

The first response from U.S. military authorities was denial -- and
cover-up. And it was only by the grace of outside investigators --
meaning outside the U.S. -- that the horrors of Haditha came to
light. And it isn't just Haditha. In Hamandiya, U.S. Marines stand
accused of kidnapping and murdering an unarmed Iraqi civilian, and
planting an AK-47 and a shovel near him to make it look like he was an
insurgent planting a bomb: and in Ishaqi, 11 villagers were
slaughtered after American troops packed them into a small room,
burned three vehicles, killed a herd of livestock, and then ordered an
air strike on the house so as to bury all evidence of their crime. The
military has just announced their "exoneration." This "underscores the
liberal vision," all right -- but only in the Bizarro World of Beinart
and his neocon buddies.

The big debate between Beinart and the neocons is over what
constitutes the true "American exceptionalism." What "proves it," says
Beinart, is that we move quickly to punish evildoers in uniform, and
make sure that "justice" is done. Except when it isn't, in Ishaqi, for
instance -- and even if the eventual triumph of truth is made possible
by non-American investigators, such as the heroic Mr. Thabet. For
Kristol, however, all this is irrelevant:

"What makes us exceptional is that we stand for liberty, and that we
are willing to fight for liberty. We don't need to 'prove' we are
different from the jihadists by bringing our own soldiers, if they
have done something wrong, to justice. Of course we must and will do
this. But our doing this 'proves' nothing. Even if there were ten
Hadithas, we would still not have to 'prove' that we are 'different
from the jihadists.' The idea would be offensive if it were not
ludicrous."

Here the essentially Soviet flavor of neocon ideology comes to the
fore. According to the old Commie view, actions were to be judged not
by some objective code of morality, but according to a "class-based"
criteria. Mass murder committed by the evil capitalist top-hat-wearing
West was "terrorism," whilst the "liquidation" of the kulaks and
others by the millions was winked at. This "revolutionary morality"
was defended by Leon Trotsky, in his mildly famous essay, "Their
Morals, and Ours," who denounced as "moralizing Philistines" anyone
who considered Lenin's crimes equivalent to the czar's. Then all is
permitted?, asked the "petit bourgeois moralizers." We stand for
liberty, brayed the founder of the Red Army -- or, in his exact words,
"That is permissible, we answer, which really leads to the liberation
of mankind."

The Red Army didn't have to "prove" anything, according to the
Trotskyists of old: the "proof" was in their sheer firepower. Today's
neocons -- who count, among their earliest intellectual ancestors,
more than a few Trots -- have merely transplanted their "revolutionary
morality" to the "right" side of the political spectrum.

Our reaction to the recent revelations of widespread atrocities
committed by U.S. troops in Iraq must not -- I quite agree with
Kristol on this -- lead to a bout of what he calls "liberal
hand-wringing." Beinart's sappy ode to "American exceptionalism" is a
conceit that will soon be dissipated by the sheer brutality of the
shocking details, as the story of what happened one bloody day in
Haditha comes out. It will shortly become readily apparent that that
we don't need to institute sensitivity training for occupation forces:
the problem goes deeper.

The problem isn't a lack of "sensitivity," a blindness to the
subtleties of the "battle for hearts and minds," or a lack of
oversight by commanders in the field: the problem is the
occupation. It must end.

Popular sentiment in favor of a withdrawal from Iraq has been building
for quite some time, and the Haditha massacre may be the tipping point
that translates poll numbers into policy. As news of one horrendous
atrocity after another leaks out of Iraq, the suspicion that this
couldn't have been any other kind of war -- that U.S. soldiers are
being asked to do the impossible: "liberate" a people against their
will and do it in a humane manner -- will ultimately defeat the War
Party, and bring our troops home. The question is: will it happen in
time, that is, before the neocons get us started on the next episode
of their continuing series on the "liberation" of the Middle East?

It looks like that, but looks can -- and often are -- deceiving. That,
however, is a subject for a future column.

--

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the
author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
(Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an
Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies,
1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against
U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior
Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with
the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles:
A Magazine of American Culture.

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