Blame for Haditha Lies at Bush's Feet

By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted June 8, 2006.

Like many Americans, I have followed the events unfolding around the deaths of 24 Iraqis civilians in the Iraqi village of Haditha, and the roles and responsibilities of U.S. Marines in their deaths, with a mixture of anger, frustration, shock and horror. I start this essay with the premise that all are innocent until proven guilty, and will maintain that posture until the facts surrounding the incident have been fully investigated.

As a former Marine Corps officer, I have to admit to a certain bias in favor of the Marines. I personally believe all of the involved Marines should be punished to the full extent of the law if found guilty of the crimes they have been accused of. There simply is no excuse for the systematic murder of civilians.

However, the crimes that the Marines have been accused of, and the behavior required to carry out such crimes (both from the enlisted Marines and their officers) run so counter to the very fabric of the Marine Corps I was a member of that I have a hard time accepting the charges at face value. Many of my peers still serve in the Marine Corps today as battalion commanders, regimental commanders, or senior staff officers.

This is not a "new" corps of Marines that has somehow lost its way since I left active duty. This is my band of brothers, fellow warriors imbued with a spirit of service and sacrifice that endeavors not only to persevere on the field of battle, but also never bring shame or dishonor to the 232-year tradition that binds all Marines together.

War is a hard business, and those who wage war have to be hard people if they are to survive. The niceties of civilian life are set aside, and men (and, increasingly, women) are called upon to engage in action which runs counter to everything they have been taught as human beings and American citizens -- to take human life, effortlessly and efficiently, with little or no regard for those being terminated.

A target is just a target, and any delay in taking that target down can and will result in your becoming a target yourself. In war it is literally kill or be killed. Most civilians will never -- and therefore can never -- understand this phenomenon, and the mental and physical trauma it inflicts on those involved. Combat hardens a person and changes those who have engaged in it forever.

Because war is in and of itself so horrible, and the act of waging war so dehumanizing, there is a real danger of those involved suffering a complete breakdown of human sensibility, becoming so traumatized by the act of killing that they become desensitized to human suffering and death. Death becomes a narcotic, and the act of taking human life a drug that must be consumed over and over again.

War is a destructive force, no more so for those who participate in it as combatants. War becomes an addiction, and human detritus a common occurrence. As Michael Herr, the acclaimed writer who chronicled the Vietnam War in his book, "Dispatches," wrote: "Charging someone with murder in Vietnam is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500." In war, death becomes a daily fact of life.

The proclivity to become addicted to dealing death is one of the major reasons behind the laws of war. Adherence to the laws of war goes far beyond any legal obligation; once the bullets start flying, legal niceties go out the window. Adherence to the rules of law doesn't come from a sense of right and wrong that exists on the battlefield, but rather as a result of rules and procedures being drilled into the minds of those who wage war over and over again, until these rules, like procedures for fighting through an ambush, are branded into the minds and muscle memory of those pulling the triggers.

The rules of war are adhered to not because someone is thinking about doing the "right thing" on the field of battle, but because of the discipline which ingrained these rules into the very fabric of the warriors waging combat, and the leadership which continued to emphasize these rules once the forces became engaged in combat. The main reason it is so hard for me to believe that the Marines of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment did what they are accused of doing in Haditha is that it runs counter to the discipline and leadership I know they were subjected to. If Haditha in fact occurred, something went very, very wrong.

It is far too easy to place blame, when things do go wrong in war, on a "few bad apples." The fact is, every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine in a theater of combat is a potential "bad apple" if denied the discipline and leadership necessary to maintain a certain standard of conduct in conflict. Every American who has seen the movie "A Time to Kill" knows that he or she, just like the Samuel Jackson character in that movie, would take the law into their own hands and kill anyone who subjected a child of theirs to the torment and suffering inflicted on the young girl in the movie.

Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein" (Nation Books, 2005).

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