The Haditha incident of 19 November 2005, when twenty-four Iraqi civilians appear to have been massacred by a United States marine-corps unit in the immediate aftermath of a bomb attack in which one of its members was killed, is still under investigation by US military authorities. There does indeed seem to be substantial evidence both of the shooting of civilians and of a subsequent attempt to cover up what happened.
The impact of the chain of events at Haditha is difficult to predict at present, but it is probable that it will be contrasting: relatively small in Iraq and across the middle east, but considerably greater western Europe and the United States.
This was also the case with the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal. The reasons are much the same. The widespread dissemination of propagandistic videos, DVDs and websites generated by insurgent sources, as well as the repeated coverage in establishment middle-east networks such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, have long convinced many people across the region that rumours of routine torture of prisoners were accurate. Indeed, the reports of many short-term detainees confirming the practice of abuse meant that such behaviour by US guards has been taken as read.
Thus, when the western media reported the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, this did little more than reinforce even more strongly what was already believed by millions of people in the middle east. The same will almost certainly apply to Haditha.
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The imbalance of reporting between regional and western media outlets is one of the most striking features of the Iraq war. The latter have been far more reluctant to report the killing of Iraqi civilians. It is a pattern repeated in the coverage of many other areas of the conflict, as is already evident in responses to the killing near Baquba on 7 June of the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Some columns in this series have referred to a few examples of the treatment of Iraqis that have penetrated the wall. An early example was on the eve of the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, when several days of bombing by US forces of Fedayeen militia in Nasiriya killed around 230 civilians (see "Broken lives, bitter hearts", 8 April 2003).
The following column reported: "In one incident last Monday, within a few hours of the US advance into the centre of Baghdad the International Herald Tribune reported one incident: 'Caught in the crossfire, according to a chilling account by an Associated Press reporter, were a number of pedestrians, including an old man with a cane, looking confused. When he failed to heed three warning shots by the Marines, they killed him. A red van and an orange-and-white taxi were also riddled with bullets after they failed to heed warning shots'" (see "Afghan lessons, Iraqi futures", 11 April 2003).
More recently, Tom Lasseter, a highly experienced correspondent working for Knight Ridder newspapers and embedded with an 82nd airborne division in Samarra, witnessed a comparable event (see "Order, peace elusive in city of Samarra", 15 February 2006). He reported that the bodies of two insurgents were recovered by the unit after an exchange of fire, and the American sergeant then ordered the corpses to be strapped like deer to the hood of one of the unit's vehicles. "The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood of the Humvee and tied them down with cord. The dead insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along. Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses glide by and glared at the Americans" (see "Iraq's burning season", 23 February 2006).
The killing field
These are three of innumerable incidents over the last three years in which many Iraqi civilians have died. At the same time, killings such as those at Haditha apparently involving the systematic murder of civilians as an act of reprisal may be far less common than other incidents of more random shooting. To understand how an event like Haditha could have happened, and the behaviour of the perpetrators, three factors seem especially relevant.
First, the United States marine corps is considered something of an elite force within the US military, yet one particular one aspect of its history is deeply embedded in its current culture. This is the destruction of the marine-corps barracks at Beirut international airport by a massive truck-bomb in October 1983 during the US deployments in Lebanon that followed the Israeli invasion and siege of west Beirut in 1982. That one bomb killed 241 Americans; 220 of them were marines, the greatest loss to the corps in a single incident since the storming of the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima thirty-nine years earlier in the closing months of the Pacific war. The memory of the Beirut bombing has remained potent, and at the very least has ensured that the marine corps' relationship with the middle east remains uneasy.
Second, the marines have experienced some of the heaviest casualties of all the US forces in Iraq, most notably in the two assaults on Fallujah in April and November 2004. Moreover, the nature of personal protection and the high standards of battlefield medicine backing up US forces in Iraq mean that a much higher proportion of seriously wounded marines survive attacks, but frequently carry terrible injuries that affect them for life.
These combat injuries, almost as much as the deaths, have their impact on behaviour (see "The American military: all stressed out", 8 April 2004). The awareness of what has happened to their comrades and what might be the result of suffering assault may help to make the marines and army personnel in Iraq more trigger-happy and ready to use their massive firepower advantage in combat with insurgents more frequently, inevitably leading to heavy civilian casualties. This is particularly the case with the marines, as they have so often been at the forefront of counter-insurgency operations.
Third, the unit involved in the Haditha incident was on its third tour of duty in Iraq and had apparently been involved in Fallujah at the end of 2004. One consequence is reported to have been a high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse, a situation that carries strong echoes of Vietnam. In one of the many ironies of the Iraq war, the insecurity and chaos now permeating much of Iraq has allowed it to become a major trafficking route for heroin and cannabis (see Sean Boyne & Christopher Aaron, "Conflict and porous borders open up Iraq to drug traffickers", Jane's Intelligence Review, June 2006 [subscription only]).
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
A collection of Paul Rogers's Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris
(October 2005)
The primary source is Afghanistan, with transit routes involving Pakistan and Iran. Much of the drug trafficking goes on through Iraq to Syria and Turkey (and some further on to Europe); there are also markets in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. All this is in addition to a marked increase in drug use in some parts of Iraq itself. The trend makes it almost certain that heroin and related drugs are likely to be far more readily available to US ground forces in Iraq than three years ago indeed one of the supply routes is reported to go through Baghdad itself.
These three factors are in no sense mitigation for what happened in Haditha, but taken together they do help to offer some explanation. If and when cases come to trial before a court of law, then the individuals involved in perpetrating atrocity will not be able to avoid facing their legal and moral responsibility. At the same time, it is notable that the people actually court-martialled in the wake of the exposure of Abu Ghraib were all at or near the bottom of the chain of command.
The behaviour of the marines in Haditha stems from the nature of their mission and the manner in which it is being carried out (see James M Skelly, "Iraq, Vietnam, and the dilemmas of United States soldiers", 25 May 2006). Regime termination was followed by occupation and then by counter-insurgency, in the face of which the United States is still absolutely determined to maintain control in Iraq. The price that is paid for this cycle of engagement and ambition includes the intense pressure experienced by American soldiers, and especially the US marine corps. There may clearly be issues of individual guilt involved, but the originators of the policy in Iraq also bear a heavy responsibility, one that goes right through the chain of command to the Pentagon and on to the White House.
