My Lai Redux

Haditha Massacre

I really, honestly hope it isn't what it looks like. I hope this character assessment is more accurate and that something else happened here, but I'm losing that hope rapidly.

But what this conflict showcases for the United States is something it doesn't want to face up to. The US doesn't want to acknowledge that it's lost the moral authority to intervene in the world's problems anymore and worse, it doesn't want to acknowledge that the blame is squarely with the policy makers and I'll tell you why: Those guys that committed the massacre are children. If not biologically, then ethically and emotionally.

They are not psychologically equipped or prepared to face what they do day in and day out and as a result, they are becoming trigger-happy. They live in a world where their enemy looks completely innocuous before they explode or pull a gun. They, in turn, become murderous as a survival mechanism.

Couple this with the tension of wartime activities and the reality of what happens when people have guns in their hands, and this is what you get.

No one in the Capital or in the Joint Chiefs seem to think that psychological attention needs to be paid to the people we send out there to make sure they can make good decisions and that they aren't damaged to uselessness by what they experience. They don't prepare them and they don't de-condition them. We apparently learned little from Vietnam.

While the immediate fault still and always lies with the killers, nearly equal blame can be laid at the feet of those who treat them like fucking hammers. They are not, and never will be, tools. Rather, they shouldn't be, but they are.

No one on the Hill cares about them. Despite sharing culpability, this will be coined an isolated incident and swept under the rug as quickly as possible.