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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Military / Deceit and Disgust

Deceit and Disgust

by John Cole|  June 1, 20069:29 am| 33 Comments

This post is in: Military, War, Outrage

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More information continues to slowly dribble out in the Haditha mess:

The U.S. military investigation of how Marine commanders handled the reporting of events last November in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where troops allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians, will conclude that some officers gave false information to their superiors, who then failed to adequately scrutinize reports that should have caught their attention, an Army official said yesterday.

***

The promotion of a top Marine general also has been put on hold.

Bargewell has pursued two lines of investigation: not only whether falsehoods were passed up the chain of command, but also whether senior Marine commanders were derelict in their duty to monitor the actions of subordinates. The inquiry is expected to conclude by the end of this week, the official added. He said there were multiple failures but declined to say whether he would characterize it as a “coverup,” as alleged recently by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine.

It will take a while to figure out how much of the inaction was through false reports, or how much was through negligence, although this report seems to make it pretty damned clear that at the very least, junior officers filed false reports. Either way, the cloud seems to get bigger around the Marines surrounding the case. This part of the WaPo piece just seems like Deja Vu all over again:

One of Bargewell’s conclusions is that the training of troops for Iraq has been flawed, the official said, with too much emphasis on traditional war-fighting skills and insufficient focus on how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. Currently the director of operations for a top headquarters in Iraq, Bargewell is a career Special Operations officer and therefore more familiar than most regular Army officers with the precepts of counterinsurgency, such as using the minimum amount of force necessary to succeed. Also, as an Army staff sergeant in Vietnam in 1971, Bargewell received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest honor, for actions in combat while a member of long-range reconnaissance team operating deep behind enemy lines.

If anyone has the energy (I, most assuredly, do not), it would be interesting to look up the number of times leadership has ‘discovered’ we are not spending enough time training for a counterinsurgency over the past three years. And FYI- we are now approaching the same length of time in Iraq as we, as a nation, were involved in WWII.

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33Comments

  1. 1.

    Punchy

    June 1, 2006 at 9:55 am

    Three words that will haunt Rummy forever: Not Enough Troops.

    Training an issue? Well, when we now have the Navy and Air Force doing ground work in Iraq (how long was THAT training?), that’s a clear sign that Rumsfeld has absolutely no idea what size force he needed, and needs, to do anything.

  2. 2.

    chefrad

    June 1, 2006 at 10:09 am

    Training for a cakewalk was deemed superfluous. They thought they’d be in and out so fast that investigating mistakes would look like nit-picking.

  3. 3.

    Punchy

    June 1, 2006 at 10:17 am

    Training for a cakewalk was deemed superfluous.

    Agreed, but it was clear to EVERYONE (except Rumsfeld???) that by June/July 2003, it wasn’t a cakewalk. They’ve had 3 years to increase the troops to Shinseki levels, but that would require Rumsfeld to acknowledge he had it wrong from the beginning.

    And nobody is allowed in the Bush Team to admit any mistakes. People are dying every day SOLEY based on Rumsfeld’s hubris and arrogance.

  4. 4.

    gringoman

    June 1, 2006 at 10:21 am

    Since there appears to be no escape from “Murtha the Old Marine”, not even on Memorial Day, here’s an “editorial”…….

    Interesting on what’s become of Congressman Murtha, who spent less time in Vietnam than I did—although granted, he was military, unlike me, and knew how to play that old “war hero” card so very, very, very useful in U.S. politics. He’s become the Democrats’ go-to drama queen on questions of war and peace and how to attack Bush (who once snubbed him, according to reports.)

    It’s the media-enabled theatrics which are so suspect. If there is a criminal case against these young Marines—and let’s assume there is, without knowing all the facts—the Marines will court martial accordingly. Everyone knows that. Murtha the Old Marine has to know that. Yet now he seems increasingly like a deranged old grizzly,improperly medicated, as he keeps chewing on that chewed-up bone (but not too deranged to enjoy the media spotlight and adulation from the grateful who wouldn’t be caught dead in the uniform of the country that fattens them.) Even on the solemn occasion of Memorial Day. To what purpose, aside from anti-Bush rage and Democrat lust to regain position and office (and avenge a perceived slight from the White House)?

    Which raises the question yet again: Is today’s Libstream intelligent, or just desperate and tone deaf?
    Are polls and poll shakers and $500 an hour “consultants” convincing it that Americans will react “correctly” to this orgy of American Guilt and shame about the one sector of today’s post-FDR U.S. entitlement society that truly sacrifices and understands responsibility? There used to be a time, on the other extreme, when Americans focused on the war crimes of the enemy. That ended, of course, with the Vietnam War, when the World Left turned on the U.S. which was no longer pals with the “workers’ states.”

    Do the Democrats and their media really think this will play—despite Republican failings (and the DemoPub mutual surrender of the U.S. border to Mexico and the Business/Illegal Alien Lobby—presided over by George Bush, our “Texan,” i.e. our Connecticut Yankee in cowboy boots?

    Do they really think that an old Murtha and his media enablers, exploiting the noble ‘Duty, Honor and Country,’ will be excused from the duty and honor of focusing on the daily unspeakable atrocities of the enemy, instead of grandstanding exclusively on what is, by most accounts, the atypical and alleged, of his own country? They gorge on aberrations (if proven) of the more disciplined sector of U.S. society. Have they no sense of shame left for what the enemy is doing to Iraqis, the daily carnage, cold, calculated, deliberate? One more question: Have they no sense of shame left about themselves?

    =========================================
    Gringofoto. Mekong Delta, 1973. Face to face, at last, with the Vietcong, down in that Delta, somewhere below My Tho. (Black and white original.)

  5. 5.

    Ancient Purple

    June 1, 2006 at 10:25 am

    Do the Democrats and their media …

    Well, you killed every last ounce of your credibility with that lead in.

  6. 6.

    John Cole

    June 1, 2006 at 10:31 am

    RIP- This Thread

    Born, 6/1/2005 at 9:29 AM
    Killed, 6/1/2005 at 10:21 AM by Gringoman’s driveby.

  7. 7.

    Vladi G

    June 1, 2006 at 10:34 am

    Judging from Balloon Juice commenters, the Republican line of attack on this appears to be “But Murtha’s a TRAITOR!! Sure, everything he said was pretty much right, but HE’S A TRAITOR!!!” Good luch with that.

  8. 8.

    Vladi G

    June 1, 2006 at 10:35 am

    Good luch

    Must be hungry. That should obviously say “good luck”.

  9. 9.

    p.lukasiak

    June 1, 2006 at 10:41 am

    If anyone has the energy (I, most assuredly, do not), it would be interesting to look up the number of times leadership has ‘discovered’ we are not spending enough time training for a counterinsurgency over the past three years.

    Look! a jackalope!

    This had nothing to do with lack of training in counterinsurgency. This is the failure of the Marine Corps to instill one basic lesson:

    You don’t kill civilians in cold blood. You don’t stand by and allow other Marines to kill civilians in cold blood. And if you witness or know about Marines killing civilians in cold blood, you immediately report as far up the chain of command as necessary. Men in Marine uniforms who kill civilians in cold blood are not Marines, they are criminals — they are not “part of your team”, and you owe them no loyalty. Standing by and not reporting the murders makes you part of the atrocity, and unfit for the US Marine Corps.

    How is it possible that so many Marines either participated in or stood by and watched and did not report, the cold-blooded murder of civilians.

    Lack of counter-insurgency training? No. Lack of training in simple human decency? Yes.

  10. 10.

    Punchy

    June 1, 2006 at 10:41 am

    RIP- This Thread

    We’ll keep it on-message as long as possible, or until Darrell accuses Murtha of treason/lying/manipulation/being old/looks like Huckleberry Hound/unpatriotic/wears panties, etc.

  11. 11.

    DecidedFenceSitter

    June 1, 2006 at 10:55 am

    [Armchair Psychology]Fairly easily p.lukasiak, all it needs is a mixture of Group Think combined with the Bystander Effect.

    Combine that with young, highly trained in the arts of killing, high-strung young men, and it is a powder keg.

  12. 12.

    canuckistani

    June 1, 2006 at 11:04 am

    It’s clear to me. Marines couldn’t have killed civilians, because gringoman spent longer in the Mekong delta than Murtha.

  13. 13.

    Larry

    June 1, 2006 at 11:06 am

    we are now approaching the same length of time in Iraq as we, as a nation, were involved in WWII.

    Traditional Military Conflict:
    You win when your military planning takes the enemy’s Capital.

    Insurgency:
    You lose when your military planning takes place in the enemy’s Capital.

  14. 14.

    John S.

    June 1, 2006 at 11:20 am

    And FYI- we are now approaching the same length of time in Iraq as we, as a nation, were involved in WWII.

    Wow. I mean, WOW. Look at what we accomplished by the end of WWII versus where we are in Iraq. There is simply NO comparison or parallel that can be drawn between the two.

    I guess the refrain of our older generation rings true…when it comes to war, they just don’t make ’em like they used to.

  15. 15.

    fwiffo

    June 1, 2006 at 11:31 am

    And FYI- we are now approaching the same length of time in Iraq as we, as a nation, were involved in WWII.

    It just makes me think — and I’m not trying to draw moral analogies or comparisons to any current events — the first half or so of the 20th century was really goddamn bloody. During a handful of years covering the second world war, fifty million people were killed in war, war related famines, genocides and wholesale slaughtering of whole populations. When you see the in-your-face horror of modern war, it’s really hard to wrap your head around the idea of something orders of magnitude larger. The closest glimpse we get into something like that these days are the civil wars and mass killings that occur every few years in Africa, but the world has built up a pretty powerful resistance to giving a shit about that part of the globe.

    Lack of counter-insurgency training? No. Lack of training in simple human decency? Yes.

    I think that shows a real lack of understanding of the horror of the sitation that these soldiers are living in. When train people to kill people, but put them in an impossibly difficult situation when it comes to knowing just who they’re supposed to be killing, and who’s trying to kill them, it’s only a matter of time before some snap. They’re only human. That in no way excuses or forgives the behavior, but even good people can go bad given the right circumstances. Everyone, even soldiers, are held to the legal and ethical standard of “the reasonable person.” “The reasonable person” is completely unflappable — real people are more frail. These soldiers were almost certainly normal, good people before the war, and now they’ll have to pay for what they’ve done, and worse, live with themselves.

    Killed, 6/1/2005 at 10:21 AM by Gringoman’s driveby.

    Sigh.

  16. 16.

    The Other Steve

    June 1, 2006 at 11:36 am

    Ok, we’ve got a conflicting report with the one mentioned yesterday. This one coming from out of the Conservative Torygraph of London. Now I don’t know if the goal here is to undermine support for the war in Britain, and therefore Blair, or not. But it’s a different eye witness account of conditions.

    ‘Marines are good at killing. Nothing else. They like it.’

    In January, shortly before the first published reports emerged about US marines methodically gunning down men, women and children in the Iraqi town of Haditha, The Daily Telegraph spent time at the main camp of the battalion under investigation.

    So he claims to have been there.

    He mentions that they were living at the Dam, in order to keep it secure. Washing facilities were at the top, and the lavatories were at the base.

    Conditions were bad, morale was low…

    The day before my arrival one soldier had shot himself in the head with his M16. No one would discuss why.

    People didn’t use the official facilities.

    Instead, a number had moved into small encampments around the dam’s entrances that resembled something from Lord of the Flies.

    And the kicker… This was part of the group thrown into Fallujah, when Bush was trying to prove he was tough back in 2004.

    It had undergone three tours in Iraq in two and a half years.

    More than 30 of its members had died in the previous one, the majority when the unit led the major attack on Fallujah, then at the heart of the insurgency.

    And finally he talks about a US engineer there to help keep the dam functional, and how he felt the troops didn’t help his task because they treated all his Iraqi workers like potential saboteurs. He leaves us with this, the title…

    He was keeping a secret dossier of breaches he said he had witnessed, or learned of. He planned to present it to the authorities when he returned to the US.

    “Marines are good at killing,” he said. “Nothing else. They like it.”

    This is rather bizarre, and contradicts the story from yesterday, and says it was filed in January.

    He has a book, Black Knights: On the Bloody Road to Baghdad, which is apparently about his embed experience with a US Tank company.

  17. 17.

    The Other Steve

    June 1, 2006 at 11:39 am

    gringoman’s tirade is interesting. He’s trying to enforce his own Politically Correct standard on the rest of us. Yet his blog claims he’s trying to escape political correctness.

  18. 18.

    fwiffo

    June 1, 2006 at 11:49 am

    political correctness

    God, if there were one phrase I could magically strike from the lexicon of history, that might be it. Honorable mentions go to “thrown under a bus”, “truth to power” and “support the troops.” Only the world of blogs could give the impression that “all your base are belong to us” was an underutilized expression.

  19. 19.

    Northman

    June 1, 2006 at 11:50 am

    Training isn’t about “not enough troops”. Its about how the troops react to situations. Training a modern army like the US has for counter-insurgency is almost impossible. The US army is designed to fight other, somewhat comparable, military forces, where the use of overwhelming force is desirable. The old “shock and awe” doctrine. Changing from that to fight an insurgency is probably impossible, and they still run into Martin van Crevald’s paradox of modern war:

    “he who fights against the weak and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force, however rich, however powerful, however advanced, however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat…”

    Figure a way around that, nd you may have a chance of success in Iraq.

  20. 20.

    The Other Steve

    June 1, 2006 at 12:12 pm

    Figure a way around that, nd you may have a chance of success in Iraq.

    As I said back in 2004…

    Stalin new how to make it work.

    He just didn’t allow himself to be bothered by politically correct concepts like cruelty.

  21. 21.

    The Other Steve

    June 1, 2006 at 12:13 pm

    That’s a ‘Stalin knew‘… I forgot the k. So sue me.

  22. 22.

    Faux News

    June 1, 2006 at 12:41 pm

    R

    IP- This Thread

    Born, 6/1/2005 at 9:29 AM
    Killed, 6/1/2005 at 10:21 AM by Gringoman’s driveby.

    I agree John, however I must add that I sense The Force is strong with this “Gringoman”. Perhaps you can persuade DougJ to take this young lad under his wing as an apprentice.

    I hope to see more good work from this “gringoman” in the near future.

  23. 23.

    radish

    June 1, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    Uh, folks, stuff like that Telegraph article is why Murtha is speaking out about Haditha. I think I commented about this here a while ago. Murtha knows a hell of a lot more about what’s going on than we do, and if he’s freaked out it’s for good reason. Rummy is breaking the Army and the Marines, including the entire NG, and is about to get started on the Navy (hell, the Coast Guard too for all we know). That’s not mentioning the total and complete collapse of our moral standing.

    All you bozos who are questioning his patriotism and his agenda and whether it’s a good idea to start planning a pullout be advised that we are in for a whole lot more of this kind of news.

    Whether you learn anything from it is up to you…

  24. 24.

    82ndAbnVet

    June 1, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    As long as the local population supports the insurgency, either actively or passively, it really doesn’t matter how well trained the troops are in ‘counter-insurgency’. As long as the insurgents can operate freely among the population, then they will always be able to set up ambushes and IEDs (what they used to call booby-traps in Vietnam) and then slip away and fight another day if things get too hot. And they’ll always be able to recruit new members to replace loses… That is probably some of the frustration these Marines were feeling, to watch one of their buddies being killed by an IED, and knowing those in the neighborhood were in all likelyhood fully aware of it and the insurgents who planted it yet bothered to say nothing. That kinda sh*t happens one too many times, and people snap.

  25. 25.

    ppGaz

    June 1, 2006 at 2:29 pm

    It will take a while to figure out how much of the inaction was through false reports, or how much was through negligence

    But that should not stop us from screaming about it now!

  26. 26.

    Northman

    June 1, 2006 at 2:43 pm

    That kinda sh*t happens one too many times, and people snap.

    And when they do snap, they give the locals even more reason to support the insurgents Before they may have been passive, or even coerced or terrorized into silence. After, the survivors and the families will support the insurgents willingly and provide the replacement recruits.

    Consider something like the pregnant women killed at a checkpoint. That’s not even really somebody “snapping”, but whatever her families feelings about the American forces before, it takes little imagination to figure out what they think now.

  27. 27.

    Wickedpinto

    June 1, 2006 at 4:13 pm

    And FYI- we are now approaching the same length of time in Iraq as we, as a nation, were involved in WWII.

    and 1/2 of 1% the number of dead in this amount of time 60 years ago.

  28. 28.

    bud

    June 1, 2006 at 4:49 pm

    There isn’t any “training” that you can do to keep this kind of shit from happening. Period. They knew it was “wrong” when they did it, and that’s why it’s been convered up (I’m assuming the gist of the story is true).
    It’s like demanding that some high school have regular classes on… something… to prevent murder, just because a classmate strangled his girlfriend.

    The best thing they could do, again, assuming that the courts-martial find them guilty, is to do a Danny Deever: hang them in front of their regiment. Unfortunately, that could never happen, simply because the same people who are in high dudgeon over this (for their own political purposes) will never allow “such cruelty”.

    Deterrence.

    Abridged version of conversation with actual “pointy-end” Iraq vet:
    “You take fire from a building. You do the usual Army stuff, except that you don’t do what makes the most sense – call in arty on the position- and finally get in position and kick in the door.

    What do you find? A window with brass scattered all around it, and a room with 3 women and 5 kids, all of whom play dumb, except for the mutters and smirks. You’d love to just shoot the whole bunch, but you don’t, because…? Because you know that the Army will kill you.”

    It works. It just needs reinforcing.

    And as for St. John the Murtha? He’s a publicity-seeking, ethically challenged… politician. But I repeat myself.

  29. 29.

    Andrew

    June 1, 2006 at 5:13 pm

    and 1/2 of 1% the number of dead in this amount of time 60 years ago.

    It’s a rounding error, really, compared to what we’ve been through before. Heck, more people died in an hour or two during various Civil War battles than have in Iraq.

    No big deal.

  30. 30.

    Perry Como

    June 1, 2006 at 5:27 pm

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5039420.stm

    The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may have been responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent Iraqi civilians.

    The video appears to challenge the US military’s account of events that took place in the town of Ishaqi in March.

    The US said at the time four people died during a military operation, but Iraqi police claimed that US troops had deliberately shot the 11 people.

    A spokesman for US forces in Iraq told the BBC an inquiry was under way.

  31. 31.

    Wickedpinto

    June 1, 2006 at 9:16 pm

    This is taking longer, this is more thorough, and this is less deadly because we are doing things right.

    This stuff happens, there is a criminal element in every part of life, I bet lawyers prolly have a higher crime rate within their profession than Marines, and the broad military.

    We don’t even know if this stuff has happened yet.

    CHILL! anti-war people. I know you oppose the war, thats fine, but don’t shit on your fellow citizens, unless you only think that people who agree with you deserve respect, until the truth is out.

  32. 32.

    Sherard

    June 2, 2006 at 6:24 am

    This statement:

    And FYI- we are now approaching the same length of time in Iraq as we, as a nation, were involved in WWII

    Is moronic. The post-invasion “occupation” has been compared to post-war Germany and Japan on NUMEROUS occasions. The fact that the US entered WW2 in 1942 and it was over in 1945 does not speak at all to the long term (continuing to this very day) occupation of Germany and Japan.

    Please explain the stupidity behind that idiotic statement.

  33. 33.

    Sherard

    June 2, 2006 at 6:37 am

    This is such total bullshit:

    They’ve had 3 years to increase the troops to Shinseki levels, but that would require Rumsfeld to acknowledge he had it wrong from the beginning.

    Good idea, provide the insurgents with more targets. The idea that more troops was ever the answer is ridiculous. Unless you could blanket the entire country with what essentially would constitute the entirety of the US military, 150,000 troops is no different than 200,000 or 250,000.

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