6/28/2006

A matter of responsibility

While the Pentagon scurries around trying to determine the who, what and why of U.S. Marines allegedly rampaging in Haditha last November slaughtering 24 civilians including 10 women and children, we all know who is really responsible. We are. We sent those young men to war.

 Did you expect that they would be playing tiddlywinks while carrying lethal weapons in dark, perilous streets in search of invisible insurgents who attack them with equally lethal weaponry before melding in with the local community?  This is what happens in war.

 War is the vilest and most depraved state in human behavior. Anyone who served in the military and was required to learn the lessons of inflicting quick, harsh death to others knows that war is as evil as anything devised by man.

 That squad of Marines, mostly 19, 20, 21 year olds, witnessed more tragedy in one day of combat in that previously unheard of Iraqi town than most of us will experience in a lifetime. They have been undergoing such horror for days and days, months and months, as they combated a virtually unseen enemy. And they took fierce tolls in their ranks.

 Of course this is no excuse for acting like maddened butchers and wiping out innocent civilians, but it has been happening throughout history. Soldiers may bear the brunt of the pain and tragedy of combat, but war always includes havoc for civilians who through no fault of their own happen to get in the way.

 We all know what happened on September 11, 2001 when nearly 3,000 innocents in America going about their peacetime tasks at the Twin Towers in New York and at the Pentagon in Virginia and on a flight over Pennsylvania, were murdered in cold blood by terrorists. That’s what started the current sequence of events that resulted in Haditha.

 The American reaction was to eventually target Saddam Hussein and the 25 million Iraqis, after what amounted to just a feint at going after the prime malignancy behind the attack, Osama bin Laden. 

In time the worst happened. We had strategic bombing of civilians in Baghdad. We had Abu Ghraib, street murders, beheading of abducted civilians and now captured American soldiers, suicide murders and cars loaded with munitions exploding as soldiers drove by or as civilians gathered in busy marketplaces. Even those in holy places at religious services became targets.

 When you measure the bloodbath going on in that ancient land, it really doesn’t matter who did what to whom in the sheer insanity of events. It is totally inexcusable but absolutely expected. It is the stark, predictable human behavior at war.

We have witnessed this savagery towards civilians for years in Israel. A Palestinian wearing a belt of explosives blows himself up amid a gathering of civilians and dozens die. Israel retaliates sending a missile into the streets of Gaza or the West Bank intended to kill terrorist leaders and innocent civilians die. The world watched and clucked their collective tongues but did nothing for years.

Worse civilian tolls were taken during the Holocaust as Germans systematically slaughtered Jews and other non-Aryans and moral Christian nations looked away and avoided doing anything until Germany started threatening their interests.

Who can tell what kind of world we would have today if free nations stood up to the Nazis when Hitler started killing innocent civilians?  Perhaps there would have been no World War II. Perhaps Jews would not have been decimated and have sought relocation in Palestine. Perhaps there would have been no internecine conflict in the Middle East. Perhaps no reason for the rise of bin Laden.

 Who knows? But you cannot rewrite history.

 Could it be that humankind is adrift between beautiful acts and unadulterated barbarity? We see it all the time. So maybe we shouldn’t get all lathered up about Haditha, just another weigh station along the bittersweet human highway. Let’s not even try to figure it out, because history proves it can never be stopped.

 As humans we are incapable of calculating how to settle disputes without taking up arms and trying to slaughter each other. Tests have proven that you can train animals by shocking them or hurting them in some way when they misbehave. Soon enough they learn and become obliging.

 It is a lesson that humans have yet to master. We keep butchering each other and then demand to know how this could have happened. We have not learned to recognize our own hateful tendencies when at war.

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