“Anyone who expresses shock at the thought of U.S. Marines slaughtering women and children is just trying to score political points.”
Look, there are two options here. You’re either appalled by this, or you’re fucked in the head. End of story.
…remember, this is what we’re talking about:
At 5 p.m. Nov. 19, near the end of one of the most violent days the Marine Corps had experienced in the Upper Euphrates Valley, a call went out for trucks to collect the bodies of 24 Iraqi civilians.
The unit that arrived in the farming town of Haditha found babies, women and children shot in the head and chest. An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times. A group of girls, ages 1 to 14, lay dead. Everyone had been killed by gunfire, according to death certificates issued later.
That’s what right wingers are defending when they say, “insurgents often hide among the population,” or, more generally, “in wartime, shit happens.”
You think there were insurgents hiding behind the babies, or that group of little girls? You think shooting the old man in the wheelchair nine times was a necessary act of war?
Peter Daou has more, including this bit, which captures something I’ve been wanting to write about:
In their rush to ascribe malicious motives to anyone who draws attention to the horrors in Iraq, these people ignore the obvious, i.e. that the greater the aberration, the more newsworthy, not the less. In other words, it’s because the war’s critics have faith in the character of our troops and our nation that they are so deeply troubled by such grotesque deviations from the norm. It is the war’s critics, not its blind supporters, who assume the best about our military and who harp on stories like Haditha because it is contrary to everything they believe about America. The contrast is stark between those who rise in condemnation and those who shrug off a few slaughtered women and children.