Noam Chomsky has argued, in For Reasons of State as well as elsewhere, that My Lai, when put in its proper context was only a minor incident, yet it became the symbol of everything wrong with America’s war on Vietnam. The same can be said for Haditha. Worse atrocities have taken place in Iraq, worse crimes have been perpetrated by American soldiers, so one more massacre should not matter that much, should it? Why has the Haditha massacre captured the imagination of the world press and the American public when earlier outrages did not?
I think it is because Haditha, like My Lai, is so undeniably a warcrime and as significantly, it went against everything Americans like to think they stand for. Earlier misdeeds could always be excused away as “regretable errors”, “fog of war”, “a few bad apples”, etc. But here it is very clear that there were no excuses for what happened. Where even Abu Ghraib could be excused as “hijinx” and “fratboy behaviour” (conveniently ignored much more horrible things than naked human pyramids happened as well), it is nigh impossible to do so when US soldiers deliberately select innocent people and execute them, behaving like Nazis in occupied Poland.
Also, American soldiers just do not kill civilians in cold blood, that goes against everything yer average American believes in, which is why My Lai came as such a shock and why Habitha is the same. Again, Abu Ghraib was much less problematic to explain away. Torture as a last ditch attempt by the good guys to get the villain to reveal where he put the bombs that would kill hundreds of innocents is a long cherished staple of pulp tv and action movies, the idea that a bit of roughing up of obvious baddies is no big deal. Easy enough to ignore the fact that something more than roughing up was going on or that the victims were not necessarily villains. But killing people in cold blood? That’s unamerican, that’s what the bad guys do.
Even so, it has taken quite a long time for this massacre to reach the public’s awareness. It happened in November of last year, but was only starting to gain mass circulation in March (when I first posted about it) but only now has become well known enough for Bush to have to speak about. Much thanks for bringing this story to light should go to congressman John Murtha, without whose speech on the massacre this may have remained obscure. He has paid for it in attacks by wingnuts talking about how unamerican it is to mention that US soldiers engage in massacre, not noticing it is those that it is actually those that betray America’s ideals.