‘You just keep moving, you shoot and go’
[Excerpted from the full story at StartTheRevolution.org. ~Ed.]
By ROBERT C. KOEHLER | Tribune Media Services | May 25, 2006
As we stare with sudden revulsion at the apparent cold-blooded murder of Iraqi civilians in Haditha — at least 15, maybe twice that number, killed by Marines avenging a buddy, including a 3-year-old girl, and men shoved into a closet, and a man kneeling in prayer — let us have the wit not to feign shock.
The massacre in this farming town on the Euphrates, about 150 miles northwest of Baghdad, may not be precisely part of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s official mission, but neither is it an aberration. Indeed, it is, as Iraq vet Charlie Anderson said to me, a “foreseeable consequence” of an occupation that from day one was clumsy, brutal and clueless. As it grinds into its fourth year, with thousands of GIs caught by stop-loss orders in a tour of duty without end, and with all claims of noble purpose long since abandoned by our government like burned-out tanks in the desert, the frustrations and hatreds generated by our presence continue to intensify.
What happened in Haditha six months ago — two days after Rep. John Murtha introduced his brave, lonely resolution to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq — shatters every argument of the stay-the-course crowd and throws the dithering cowardice of Congress into stark relief. The longer we force our exhausted troops to stay not the “course” but the lie, the more dangerous the occupation becomes, for the Iraqis, for us, for the world.