Haditha

I subscribe to Time magazine, but I also like to make fun of it, particularly around Easter when every year without fail, they put out their usual Jesus and Mary-related cover stories. It always makes me laugh. If it’s April it must be time to talk about Jesus.

This being said, last March, I read the initial report on the “alleged” Haditha massacre, and I thought, yikes, why is this not a bigger story?

Now I’m very grateful to Time for reporting this story and for their reporters to have kept digging at it even when the military tried to cover it up and steer them away. What if they hadn’t kept going? What if they’d dropped it? This is what journalists are supposed to be doing, so why does it not happen more often?

This can’t be the only incident of this kind. It now seems clear that, like Abu Ghraib, the military covers these things up as long as no journalists get word of them. But the Iraqi people know about them. So is it not obvious that “winning hearts and minds” is impossible if US troops slaughter civilians and the administration does nothing about it if the media do not catch wind of it?

As usual, I’m feeling very ambiguous about this story. What to do? You can’t train soldiers to be nice. That’s not their job. They have to be tough or else they will die. All that testosterone. And they have to work as teams and put their lives in each other’s hands. Occasionally, in the heat of things, someone’s going to lose it and go mental. Maybe a whole group of them will go mental with rage. Yes, they have to be relieved of duty and punished. These are war crimes. But at the same time, don’t we all have to get used to the idea that these things are bound to happen. The majority, the vast, vast majority, of troops will see their buddies blown up and will not react by going on a killing rampage. But a small number will. What to do?

Now the military says all troops will have to take “values” training. What a lame gesture. This is a case of having to be seen to be doing something, anything. Do they really believe the troops don’t know right from wrong. Of course they do. They don’t need values training. They need leadership. Leaders who will stop them from losing their minds in a war zone. I’m sure the majority of the leaders in the field are exactly that kind of person, but they need each and every one of them to be like that, at all times. A soldier who is beside himself with rage isn’t going to consult the values manual to see how to deal with his anger, but he will listen to his commander.