Iraq isn't the new Vietnam - It's Worse

A fairly scholarly post on RedState.org caught my eye the other day. In it the author attempts to deconstruct the comparisons between the Haditha and My Lai massacres, claiming that the view of Iraq as our "New Vietnam" is merely the result of the Perverse Wishful Thinking of the Anti-War crowd and nothing more.

As details of the Haditha tragedy have emerged over the weekend, the anti-war movement has latched onto this incident as evidence of their long-cherished theory that Iraq is a Middle Eastern version of Vietnam. The searing memory of this conflict remains a powerful force in our national psyche, and so the effort to equate it with Iraq has been going on for three years (go here and keep scrolling). At first, Iraq was a quagmire. Now it is an outright failure. Regardless of what is actually happening on the ground, we have failed. It's over and we need to bring those troops we all support so much home. Haditha, the new My Lai, is proof positive of this truth.

But I think his entire premise is incorrect, Iraq isn't our Vietnam -- it's Northern Ireland and we're the British.

Yesterday I wrote about Haditha in relation to the increased stress multiple rotations and anti-depressants are putting on our soldiers, today I take a broader tact looking at it in context to the overall war.

The Vietnam conflict was one that we inherited from the French, and was obstensibly fought between the communist leaning northern state and the south. Battle lines were fairly well drawn, if the loyalties of even our southern allies were somewhat unclear. Our primary enemy, the NVA, employed guerilla tactics but also fought while wearing uniforms. The Vietcong did not.

There were terrorist acts, including indiscriminate bombings.

There were atrocities committed by our forces in the "Fog of War", and there were cover ups of those events.

Let's review a few of the basic facts about Haditha so far.

WASHINGTON -- A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of Marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killing of civilians, congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual Marines' defenses said they thought the investigation could lead to charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the case could be the gravest involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.

Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in crossfire between Marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has been started to find whether the events were covered up.

To this our Redstater makes the following claims.

This is what we know so far, and it is important to note at this point, we have no official reports. We have not heard anything from the Marines themselves. We just have early indications that the contents of the reports are very bad.

We have a report about the report - which, oh by the way, is well over six month's late.

And as distressing as these indicators are, they have not been enough for the anti-war crowd, which is "getting out in front" of the Haditha story by pre-empting the reports with their second-hand version of events in the hopes of shaping the public's perception of the episode. This campaign seems to me to have a three-fold purpose. For starters, claims are being made that there was a cover-up at Haditha that could extend to the highest levels of US military command, as Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) so irresponsibly insinuated on a Sunday talk show.

The author, but of course, ignores the fact the John Murtha has long been a strong confidant of many of the military rank and file. He also ignores that Murtha's comments, based on information he received from his milatary contacts that "There has to have been a coverup of this thing, No question about it" were echoed by Republican Senator John Warner on the very same program. Warner stated "There is this serious question . . . of what happened and when it happened, and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it"

To the author Murtha, being a Democrat, is "irresponsible" to say these things, while Warner being a Republican, well - isn't. Yeah, right.

These suggestions serve to undermine commanding generals, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace, and so to reduce their authority and effectiveness.

During his appearance on "This Week" Murtha specifically stated that he felt certain that General Pace was Not involved, but that exactly who was involved and how far up the chain of command the decision went still needed to be determined. The only person imparting motive here - is the author.

And then there are the troops themselves--to have committed such an atrocity the armed forces must be, to once again borrow from Mr. Murtha, "broken" by the neglect and exploitation of that corrupt command. Who knows how far this rot has spread. Finally, there are the Iraqis. They've been oddly silent on Haditha. Several articles this morning present them as so hardened and demoralized by the ongoing challenges facing their new nation that they hardly care about Haditha.

Maybe they've been hardened to the idea of American soldiers wrongly attacking innocent civilians between it's simply that commonplace occurance. According to reports from the Red Cross, 70 - 90% of persons taken into custody in places like Abu Ghraib, (not to mention Gitmo and other "Black" detention sites) were innocent and had been "arrested by mistake".

We used White Phosphorous incendiary devices on innocent people in the city of Fallajah - by comparison Marines shooting 12 civilians execution style in retaliation for the death one Marine via IED is relatively quaint. That's Old-School. Like the good 'ole days when Saddam killed over a hundred people in response to a assasination attempt. Y'know that thing he's currently on trial for?

Here's what Iraqis have to say about it.

"So what if more innocent people were killed?" Abbas said of the reported massacre in Haditha. "Dozens of them die daily."

"We have a Haditha every day. We have a Fallujah and Karbala every day,'' said Muhanned Jasim, a local merchant, citing two of the many landmarks for civilian death in the war, the 2004 U.S. offensive in Fallujah and insurgent bombings in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala.

"Were they the first . . . Iraqis to be killed for no reason?" Jayih said. "We're used to being killed. It's normal now to hear 25 Iraqis are killed in one day."

After three years of car bombs and suicide bombs - what's th e big deal? More innocent people died today in Iraq than in Haditha six months ago.

And what does our RedStater have to say about this? Incredibly - he blames Saddam.

I wonder if most Iraqis have better things to do than belly ache about the incident? Sure, there are always individuals standing on street corners who will bear out "expert" Juan Cole's theories, but are the majority of them really so utterly disenfranchised or are they simply realistic about what can happen when you completely transform a country through military force? It's not pretty, but Haditha is a Sunni town, and there may be a sense among the Shi'ites and Kurds that what goes around comes around. Furthermore, the "apathy" articles seem to be saying "Look what we have done to them" as if life under Saddam was some sort of utopia--ignoring the fact that much of the disillusionment of the Iraqi people stems from three decades of Saddam's tyranny. It will take time for the population to expect anything but brutality from those in positions of authority--but swift justice for any wrongdoing at Haditha might go a long way towards restoring their faith.

Excuse me but Saddam is no longer in power, and hasn't been for over three years. The U.S. had a golden oppurtunity to break down that cynicism when we tore down the statue of Saddam, but blew it. We've been there long enough to set our own standard for how well "justice" will be metted out - and melt away that cynicism by doing what we say we're going to do and showing integrity. But the truth is American integrity was flushed down the toilet when President Bush decided to ignore Saddam's declaration that he had no WMD's or ties to al Qaeda (which he didn't) and to ignore the UN inspectors who said the same thing, and invade anyway.

Our problem in Iraq is one of credibility and integrity. We have neither. Both have been flushed and no amount of continually broken promises from this Administration and this Secretary of Defense are going to get back what has been lost.

Like the Northern Ireland situation a peaceful solution can't be reached when one (or more) of the parties involved simply can't be trusted. We happen to be one of those parties. Northern Ireland mirrors Iraq in that it was an unprovoked invasion by a far more powerful force, which was none the less held at bay by a determined terrorist force with strong ethnic ties - for decades. Internal sectarian tensions remained high, and it was long argued that if the external forces were to withdraw the violence between religions factions (Catholic/Protestant rather than Sunni/Shia/Kurd) would escalate out of control.

It took the intervention of the neutral third party to help bring the political wings all to the table. At that time that third party was the United States, spearheaded by Senator George Mitchell and President Bill Clinton.

Like in Northern Ireland the violence in Iraq will not end until the U.S. forces genuinely begin to leave and a trusted framework is established which will allow the Sunni's, Shia, and Kurds to work out their issues and differences peacefully.

Exactly what credible third party exists who can help mediate this situation remains the unsolveable puzzle of Iraq. Is it Germany? France? Russia? Syria? Iran? The American strategy thus far has been to shut all credible and powerful allies, except England, out of the equation. The last thing that this Administration will accept is Help. To them it's an admission of "defeat", and we can't have that even if we are in fact already defeated (in winning over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people), and even if this method (which has been endorsed strongly by John Kerry and was successfully used to solve the nearly intractable Bosnian Conflict) just might be the only way to ultimate "victory".

The author correctly notes that the scope and scale of Haditha pales compared to My Lai.

A word on My Lai for those, like me, who did not live through it. In March of 1968 as many as 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed in a violent slaughter following a booby-trap attack on American soldiers. The cover-up was immediate and effective for more than a year, but eventually the story came out and lead to a lengthy court-martial. The episode demoralized our soldiers, and destroyed public confidence in the military and the mission in Vietnam.

Haditha isn't My Lai. 500 people died in My Lai and only one court marshall - of Lt. Calle - was ever convened. Calle was clearly used as a scapegoat. Just as Sgt Graner and Lindi England have been used to sweep Abu Ghraib under the carpet.

But in terms of scope and impact Abu Ghraib was closer to My Lai, and in some ways it was worse. It changed the entire tenor of the campaign from Liberation to Occupation. It was only after Abu Ghraib that the insurgency truly found it's legs. Thousands of innocent people were involved with Abu Ghraib, snatched from their homes without cause or justification - some were tortured, beaten, and killed. (At least 26 of those deaths have been investigated as criminal "Homocides" involving abuse) This didn't just happen at Abu Ghraib during the "night shift", it also occured at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, it occured at Gitmo and it occured at various other detention faclilities under the control of Task Force 6-26.

WASHINGTON - More than two months after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq shocked the world, an official memo described how military intelligence officers witnessed further prisoner abuse in Baghdad but were threatened to prevent them from reporting it.

The memo was the most recent in a collection of government documents released Tuesday. It was dated June 25 and written by Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, who directs the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lowell described how two DIA officers, assigned as interrogators to a special operations unit designated as Task Force 6-26, witnessed evidence of prisoner abuse while working at an unnamed "temporary detention facility" in Baghdad.

The extensive collection of government documents suggests that abuse of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere was more widespread and systematic than senior officials have admitted publicly. The officials repeatedly have tried to characterize abuse last year at Abu Ghraib as an isolated series of incidents. A small number of low-ranking soldiers already have been prosecuted or are awaiting trial in these cases.

The documents released Tuesday, however, reveal that senior U.S. officials, who claimed they were unaware of the abuse, were repeatedly informed of accusations of abuse through official channels. They also suggest that these and other reports of abuse failed to trigger investigations into what increasingly appears to have been a widespread pattern of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

So is Haditha the last straw for the Camel's Back?

Not hardly, the Camel of U.S Integrity has been crushed under the weight of all this bullshit for quite some time. It's not climbing out any time soon. Someone else, a neutral third party, is going to have to help make a splint before this wound begins to heal - or else it'll stay smashed for decades.

Vyan