One of the Marines charged with murdering civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005 knew that only women and children were huddled in a back bedroom in a house there, but he opened the door and shot them anyway, a squadmate testified Tuesday.
“I told him, there’s women and kids in that room,” Lance Cpl. Humberto M. Mendoza said of Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum. Tatum’s response was, “Well, shoot them,” Mendoza said.
[…] Mendoza’s testimony could undermine Tatum’s defense and suggests that at least some of the shootings that day purposely targeted unarmed civilians.
As with any investigation uncovering the facts will exonerate some suspects and condemn others. Regardless, the contours of what happened at Haditha are by now well known. Hit by a fatal IED attack, a company of American troops spread out to catch the bombers. In the process the Marines shot a significant number of innocent Iraqi women and children, unarmed and hiding in their homes.
Nobody is arguing that American soldiers are monsters because they killed innocent people at Haditha, merely that American kids are human. This is just what happens in counterinsurgency wars, and it is not a mistake. A few marines reacted this way because some of us can only take so much harrassment from enemies who won’t stand and fight before we lash out at someone.
The insurgents know this. They provoke us because each Haditha makes life harder for us and easier for them. Now, as a result of Haditha and fatal misunderstandings that happen every day in every district, an overwhelming majority of Iraqis think it is just fine to attack Americans. The troops we train by day shoot us at night. For an occupying force the situation has become untenable.
Oddly enough Glenn Reynolds and I agree 100% on this particular point – America never had a chance in Iraq unless the gloves really, really came off. Yes, you can win an insurgency war. If a resistance band bothers you, slaughter the whole village and string up the corpses to warn the neighbors. Flatten towns, kill off fighting age males, terrorize the survivors and we probably could have owned Iraq. Indeed.
So why didn’t we do that? Oh right, it would have made us worse than f*cking Saddam. Since America won’t become ancient Persia (put down the lotion, Glenn, it ain’t happening) and neither the Sadrists nor the Sunnis had any intention of rolling over for a western occupier, the game had no win state. Haditha was not an illustration of American awfulness, but it wasn’t an aberration either. It just illustrates of why modern armies, constrained (for good reason) by modern rules of conduct, usually lose wars of occupation.