Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

But the report of the killings in the Abu Sifa area of Ishaqi, eight miles north of the city of Balad, is unusual because it originated with Iraqi police and because Iraqi police were willing to attach their names to it.

Of course, just having the police back up this statement doesn't make it a certainty.  There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of incidencts in Iraq in which the police themselves have become tangled in factional violence.  This could well be a case of the police using the US forces as a scapegoat for the death of these Iraqis.  

Only thing is, the US agrees: we killed them.

The case involves a U.S. raid conducted, according to the official U.S. account, in response to a tip that a member of Al-Qaida in Iraq was at the house.

According to the U.S. account, when forces searched the rubble they found one man, the Al-Qaida suspect, alive. He was arrested. They also found a dead man they believed to be connected to Al-Qaida, two dead women and a dead child.

So the US says we blew up a house and just happened to kill two women and a child.  But hey, there was a bad guy inside, so it's okay.  By contrast, the policemen claim US forces rounded up several survivors from the firefight and executed them all in a scene that, for anyone who lived through Viet Nam, has chilling overtones of Mai Lai.

Mentioned in the same article is an incident that occured in November.

Navy investigators announced last week that they were looking into whether Marines intentionally killed 15 Iraqi civilians -- four of them women and five of them children -- during fighting in November.

A Washington Post on that incident indicates that the original military statement blamed the death of the civilians on a explosive device left by insurgents.  However, it appears that a Reuters cameraman was on hand to photograph at least the aftermath, if not the deaths themselves.  At the moment, it's hard to say what happened, but certainly the military's statement is in doubt.

From these incidents come not only the gut-wrenching possibility that some American forces, many of whom are now on at least their third tour in Iraq, are becoming so exhausted, so battle-worn, so frightened by the constant state of danger, that they view all Iraqis as the enemy.  Such a position would certainly make "building up Iraq" problematic, and might well lead to disasters like that described in the Knight-Ridder story.

Even more distressing is how increasingly easy it is to dismiss the statements coming from military officials.  This war has put them into the ludicrous position of having to mouth administration platitudes no matter what the situation on the ground.  And the result is no one believes our military press office.  No one.  Not even Americans.   After having given voice to lies again, and again, and again, they're not trusted to say what happened, who was involved, the outcome, the instigation... they're not trusted on any point.  Even in terms of propaganda value, they've become completely ineffective.  

Want to get some troops home from Iraq?  We might as well start with the press operation, because the only thing they're doing is hurting the credibility of our own forces.

Finally, perhaps the most alarming point of either article is what they say about the nature of this war.  According to our own military, killing ten civilians because someone was shooting at you is okay.  How many of these stories do we have to see?  Whether it's wedding parties being bombed or civilians being gunned down at checkpoints, this war has us in the position where killing civilians is accepted as part of day to day operations.  Shooting a mother and child is just dandy -- so long as it was done remotely from a helicopter, and not face to face.

Those who have no problem with this will be quick to point out the fire-bombing of Dresden, or even the atomic bombs used in Japan, as examples of how the death of civilians has always been acceptable in war.  However, there's a big difference between what's happening now and what was happening then.

We're not facing an enemy that has the largest or most powerful military on earth.  We're not facing an enemy that had taken over thousands of square miles of terrain, smashed other militaries in its wake.  We are not fighting for our survival.

We're running an experiment.  For all intents and purposes, we're treating Iraq like a giant ant farm, a real time strategy game in which the goal is to see if we can impose our form of government on a people who do not want us there.  

Political expediency is not an excuse for shooting a six-month old child -- no matter how far away the muzzle of the gun was located.  Shooting up an entire house to get at a bad guy would not be acceptable in New York, why is it acceptable in Iraq?  Dropping a bomb on a home we thought held the FBI's #1 most wanted would not be acceptable in Omaha.  Why is it all right in Pakistan?

The treatment of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan speaks louder than all the words coming from the administration and the Pentagon combined: we think these people are less than human.