A Massacre and an Omen

There is an argument after the recent Haditha atrocity perpetrated by American soldiers in Iraq that it is unimportant because, as Daniel Henninger writes, "Of the some 150,000 U.S.-led troops there, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the U.S. combat commander in Iraq, said ‘99.9% of them perform their jobs magnificently.’" Well, 99.9% seems like an impressive number; in how many cities do you find only 0.1% of residents who have had police records? These bad seeds will be prosecuted and the matter closed, despite some attempts at a cover-up, as a solved criminal case.

Right? Well, I wonder if it has occurred to anybody that the reason why these other soldiers act as friendly and obedient servants to the provisional government in Iraq is that they have not fortunately had any of their comrades killed? Indeed, that’s what triggered the company’s rampage: "Kilo Company was part of the Third Battalion. At 7.15am on November 19 last year, as a column of Kilo Company Humvees drove down the Hay al-Sinnai Road in Haditha, a bomb exploded under the last vehicle – the ‘tail-end charlie’ – killing the driver, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas." The Marines are known for their fierce loyalty to one another, though perhaps not for their powers of discriminating between the innocent and the guilty. As the violence in Iraq continues, what is to prevent a few of these 99.9% of magnificently performing government employees, when provoked in the same way or even in some other less violent manner, from committing similar mass murders? How many of them are actually loose cannons ready to go off?

Henninger complains that these 99.9%, "after all they’ve been through, will deeply resent the clear inference they lack ‘core values’." Let us grant that these guys are under a lot of stress. They cannot "win" this anti-guerrilla war that they are now involved in. They cannot even predict where the enemy will strike next or where another bomb will go off. Nobody wants them there, neither the Iraqis nor the increasing number of Americans. They feel unwelcome, an unpleasant feeling, I agree. And they cannot quit their jobs; apparently, it causes imprisonment. Further, the death of a colleague is traumatic. What to do, the Marines will think, the next time it will happen? How about slaughtering a few families to release tension and show how much they hate the inferior Iraqi scum? All Iraqi scum, not just the actual insurgents.

Don’t worry, though, ethics training will come to the rescue! The soldiers will be instructed in the intricacies of this vast sub-discipline of philosophy. Maybe they will spend an entire semester discussing supererogation, as I did this spring, with great interest. Well, maybe not. Maybe the ethics officer will show them pictures of children and tell them: "These? No kill, alright?" (I imagine the soldiers scratching their heads in honest confusion), and pictures of suicide bombers, saying: "These kill, OK? OK." as which point the soldiers will breathe with relief.

Henninger continues his musings, in which I detect neither coherence nor even a thesis: "The missions in Iraq and Afghanistan grew from the moral outrage of September 11. U.S. troops, the best this country has yet produced, went overseas to defend us against repeating that day." So 9/11 produced moral outrage, and that was great. I would say that it was appropriate, though most of the targets of the outrage were misplaced. But OK. Now here is an atrocity committed not by an outlaw terrorist group seeking misguided and misdirected revenge or to influence American foreign policy, but by the official occupying army. The significance of this difference is that the terrorists were out of sight, hidden who knows where on the other side of the world. The Haditha murderers are part of the ever-present foreign occupation force. This event, too, inspired some outrage among the Iraqis, and its potential targets, legitimate or not, are right there. Is this outrage the best that country has yet produced? Or are we to expect better?

It may be argued that the US presence in Iraq does more good than it does evil. The sectarian violence is claiming many more lives these days than the US troops take. Maybe the American soldiers are helping to keep the peace. It is clear there is much positive sentiment in Iraq about their new liberties such as freedom of speech, if not about the economy or personal safety, yet so many foreigners, who do not speak the country’s language, worship their God, or understand its politics, walking around with machine guns cannot inspire confidence to the Iraqi citizens. Haditha will make Americans even less welcome. They are sitting ducks already; they will only become more uncomfortable. Now what consequences will there be if the troops pull out right now? I’ve scoured the Internet for any informed predictions, and my conclusion is that no one has any idea. The best source of data I found is this new collection of polls of Iraqi citizens. These are telling. It appears that these folks are most concerned to avoid any permanent US presence in their country. This sentiment is so strong that "A substantial portion of Iraqis support attacks on US led-forces, but not attacks on Iraqi government security forces or Iraqi civilians" in order to put pressure on them eventually to leave. And if the attacks on US troops intensify, which seems likely if they are not pulled out the moment their presence becomes more harmful on the net, it is almost certain that more soldiers will go berserk and commit awful crimes. Even if the number of those who snap is only 1%, 1,500 heavily armed men can kill a lot of women and children. Whoever’s in change of this war, for heaven’s sake, let them not into temptation.

The Iraqis want the occupation to end as soon as possible, most favoring a 6-months to a 2-year timeline, though with only 2% believing that "It is no longer necessary to have US-led forces in Iraq: Iraq can take care of itself." The major fear is that violence will increase if the US pulls out too soon. "Interestingly," the report continues, "there is a fair amount of consensus that if US-led troops were to withdraw, there would be substantial improvement in the performance of the Iraqi state. Overall, 73% think there will be an increase in the willingness of factions to cooperate in Parliament, including majorities of Kurds (62%), Sunnis (87%) and Shia (68%)."

Thus at the very least, Americans should insist that the federal government design no central plans for Iraq and indeed withdraw in the next 2 years at the most, as the Iraqi majority prefers. How to foster peace during that time? First, every Iraqi citizen should be armed, preferably with automatic weapons (concealed carry should certainly be widespread), and the people should rely for protection less on the government and more on themselves by doing such things as cooperating in the policing of their own neighborhoods. Some of the bandits might even be converted into private security guards. The Iraqi authorities are, disappointedly, adamant that "only the government is authorized to have weapons," an attitude which is both counterproductive and is a decrease in the freedom to own guns as compared to pre-war Iraq which had a culture of gun ownership. Is it that the government is afraid of the citizens? Second, the only lasting order is one that arises from liberty. Entrepreneurship and investment (particularly into security) should not be hindered in any way; the oil industry and all other state-run enterprises should be carefully privatized; all trade barriers lifted, and so on with the free market. (Who knows, maybe there is an Austrian economist somewhere in the Cabinet, waiting for his chance to tell the government what not to do.) The resulting economic progress should reveal to the religious and ethnic groups in Iraq just how useful they can be to one another.

The Haditha murders, Henninger says, will "feed the dark, inward-turning sentiments" of the American public. That public, so incapable of maintaining moral outrage. The national purpose is being subverted by the Americans' returning to their private lives. And Henninger simply cannot conceive of Arabia without US troops doing... something, I guess, I don't think he knows what. Thankfully, our author's lack of imagination is not my concern.

June 10, 2006

Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University.

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