Guardian,Fallujah-"In the line of fire "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1353092,00.html
Leader
Wednesday November 17, 2004
The Guardian

It is only a few days since a dozen US television networks refused to broadcast the film Saving Private Ryan because its violence and bad language were deemed too much for public consumption. So it was ironic as well as shocking to see graphic footage - not a Steven Spielberg remake of the carnage of D-Day, but authentic pictures - showing a US marine killing an injured and unarmed Iraqi at close range in a Falluja mosque on Saturday. It is right that the US military has launched an investigation. Its findings should be delivered quickly and with the maximum possible transparency.

It is true that war is a dirty business - one reason why opponents of the Iraq invasion warned so strenuously against it. It is equally true that no people has a monopoly on morality - confirmation of that came yesterday with news of the cruel, and presumably premeditated, murder of Margaret Hassan. Reports from Falluja say the marine in the mosque shooting had earlier experienced Iraqi fighters "playing dead" or corpses being booby-trapped. But there is no excuse for what looks like the illegal execution of a wounded enemy combatant.

Such incidents have always taken place in battle. But this one, unusually, was caught live on camera. It may yet come to rank alongside the infamous photograph of the execution of a terrified Vietnamese in Saigon in the 1960s. The Falluja image is all the more extraordinary since it was captured by a cameraman "embedded" with the marines, who seem to have regarded the killing as so normal that they did not try to conceal it. It takes little effort to imagine its impact - without the self-censorship that kept the actual moment of death off our TV screens - on Arab and Muslim viewers.

The US, backed by Britain, went to war in Iraq for reasons it presented as being about right and justice - even if its critics never accepted those arguments. America's record has already been tarnished by the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison. The fear must be that more brutal truths will be exposed as the smoke clears around Falluja. War crimes must be swiftly and severely punished.