Sadly, the Haditha massacre is only a small scale [View All]

mirror of the whole war against the people of Iraq.

What those dehumanized individuals did in Haditha is only one bloody drop in barrels of human blood. A couple hundred Vietnamese men, women and children slaughtered at My Lai helped the people of the US see what was being done to millions in Vietnam. It put a face to some of the horror of what was being done by cold-hearted monsters like McCain from a distance and in particular by the representative of multinational capital who sent them to that war. The blood spilled at Haditha, up close and personal, is no less emblematic of the larger war. The purpose of this invasion, like all others, is to terrorize the people of that land into submission, and this is just one example. Maybe Haditha will wake up the people of the US, as did My Lai, eventually. Maybe.

But this was not an "exception." This form of terrorism was the purpose of the horrifyingly named "shock and awe" beginning of this war, and of every cruise missile launched or bombing or Apache helicopter mission. Every participant in this war of conquest has as much blood on their hands as those who murdered the innocents at Haditha or My Lai. The just don't see their victims, and this is the only difference between them and those at Haditha.

And yet they are all equally innocent. They cope, or not, as best they can. They follow orders, or not, as best they can. They do what their circumstances compel them to do. They do the best they can, or not. They were trained to kill and to regard "them" as less than human, and they were trained well. Those Marines at Haditha are no different than people like McCain who murder innocents at a distance, other than for actually seeing what they had done.

Those who see what they have done will be forever scarred, and those who refuse to see what they have done will be less human as a result. They are victims as well, all of them. They will live with shame, if they face the truth of their actions, or they will live half lives surrounded by a shell of delusion.

The truly guilty are those who sent them. They are the true monsters. They are the ones who declared that extending corporate power was justification for mass murder on a scale that only war can accomplish. They were the ones who deciding on indoctrinating the people of the US and in particular those who would serve. This particular massacre is one of many, not only inevitable, but almost trivial in the larger picture, which was nothing other than premeditated slaughter on a grand scale.

While it is easy to feel outrage at those committed this particular atrocity, and justified, it is might also be a time to cry for them and what they have lost.