Iraq: ending the willful killing of innocents
It seems quite clear by now that willful, unprovoked killings of Iraqi innocents by US soldiers are not, as claimed by US officials, isolated incidents by a few bad apples. The murders and massacres by US soldiers appear to be commonplace and mostly go unreported or uninvestigated, except for a small number of cases. This is a tragic repeat of how the US military behaved against Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War.
Only a small number of possible war crimes by US soldiers have been investigated by the US government.
The US military has recently completed its initial investigation into the killing of 24 innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha in November 2005. It said that the evidence they have so far support the allegation that US soldiers deliberately killed the twenty four people.
Unofficial, independent investigators have pieced together a likely version of what happened in Haditha that fateful November. It appears that US soldiers ran amok after the killing of just one colleague from a roadside bomb. In revenge they deliberately killed 24 nearby civilians who were totally unrelated to the bombing. Among those shot were girls aged 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, an infant and an old man in a wheelchair. Many of them were in their nightclothes.
It also appears to the independent investigators that US military officials had lied and tried to cover up the incident.
The Haditha horror has frequently been compared to the US militarys massacre of unarmed Vietnamese villagers in My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War. After US soldiers found no insurgents at the location, they proceeded to wipe out the entire village in cold blood. In total about 500 were willfully killed, including women, children, babies and the elderly. Some were tortured or raped before they were murdered. There too the US military attempted a cover-up.
In Mahmudiya in March 2006, a 14-year old girl was raped and murdered, and her 6-year old sister and parents shot. The accused perpetrators, four US soldiers, are now being investigated by the US military.
US soldiers were investigated for possibly willfully killing 11 Iraqi civilians in March this year in Ishaqi. Most of the killed were found handcuffed. Among them were four women and five children. The youngest killed was six months old, the oldest, 75 years old. The US military concluded that their soldiers were not guilty of any crime. However the Iraqi government was highly dissatisfied with the verdict and is now conducting its own investigation.
In April this year in Hamdania, an Iraqi civilian was allegedly shot in cold blood by US soldiers.
Reports strongly indicate that US soldiers also committed many murders in Fallujah in 2004 but there has been no investigation so far.
There is a widespread belief among Iraqis that US troops kill civilians with impunity and regularity, and Iraqis are unable to do anything about it. It appears to them that there have been many murders or massacres that do not get reported or investigated. Some US soldiers who have witnessed the misdeeds of their colleagues reported them, but frequently nothing happens. Some Iraqi witnesses refuse to reveal information to investigators for fear of being killed by US soldiers in retaliation.
Can anyone expect objectivity if the US itself investigates possible misdeeds of its own people when they are fighting a difficult, vicious war with very high stakes? The answer is obvious. The Iraqi government wants to do its own investigations on all the reported murders of its civilians but the Americans have not allowed them.
How many murders, rapes, massacres and other atrocities against Iraqi civilians have the US military actually perpetrated? Most likely we will never know. However we have a guide from history - the Vietnam War. Recently declassified US military documents now show that US military atrocities and massacres of Vietnamese civilians were far more than the public was previously informed of. The documents now show that there were 320 substantiated incidents and 500 unconfirmed allegations. The actual story is most likely bigger. The war crimes were perpetrated not by a few bad apples but by every division of the US military operating in Vietnam. The crimes have mostly gone unpunished.
The Iraq carnage so far is staggering. Since the Iraq invasion began in 2003, two hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have died due to the war. This does not include the Iraqi military. Twenty thousand US soldiers have been killed, maimed or injured for the same reason.
Iraqis have now become inured to the atrocities around them after so many civilian killings every day.
What would end the willful killing of the innocents? The first step would be to get all US and foreign troops out of Iraq immediately and unconditionally. Let Iraqis themselves solve their internal problems. If they need help from outsiders, they will invite them of their own free will. This is the necessary condition for a truly free and democratic Iraq— if that is the real intention of the powers-that-be in Washington and London.
