Austin Bay On Haditha's Diplomatic Fallout

[Annie]

Links at site:

http://www.austinbay.net/blog/index.php?p=1137

6/3/2006
Haditha Diplomacy

— site admin @ 7:49 am

I traded emails Friday with Dr. Demarche (formerly of the DailyDemarche) and Mark Safranski (of zenpundit) The good doctor of diplomacy occasionally posts on this website—and his posts always draw comments (usually emails) from the foreign service community. Mark’s blog is a nexus of geo-strategic discussion.


As Eric Umansky pointed out on the latest Blog Week in Review, the alleged atrocities in Haditha, Iraq are a huge story, a critical story, and an expanding story. The justice system will arrest, prosecute, and –if they are convicted—sentence war criminals. Haditha, however, has extraordinary political and geostrategic implications. Both Demarche and Safranski had been thinking about Haditha. I asked Dr Demarche and Mark Safranski about those implications, and particularly, the diplomatic elements involved.


Here are their responses.

Haditha, and what is says about us.
by Dr. Demarche

Much of the world’s media is rejoicing in the death of twenty-four people in a small town in Iraq– not because those people are dead, of course, but because it gives them a chance to point at the United States and call us an out of control Goliath further trampling the already downtrodden peoples of the world. How, diplomatically speaking, can we respond to the deaths in this village?

First and foremost, we must continue to do what we have only belatedly begun to do- fully investigate the allegations and pursue the matter as far up the chain of command as it goes. If our Marines are guilty of intentionally killing civilians, and if there was a concerted effort to cover up the killings those culpable must be held accountable. The investigations must be complete and transparent, there can be no room for doubt (though of course regardless of the outcome there will always be some delusional conspiracy theories).

Human beings under intense pressure may “snap” and lose control, it happens all the time in situations far less intense than combat. Nations, however, may not “snap.” Nations are held to standards that exceed those of individual men, America above all others. Our message must be that we will vigorously pursue the truth, no matter how much to our disliking it may be, and that we will punish any and all parties involved. And we must do so. There is no alternative.

The war in Iraq has revealed many ugly truths about the world we live in- from the failure of the U.N. to enforce the many sanctions levied against Iraq to the discovery of Saddam’s mass graves, the insurgents crossing the border to kill aid workers and the “torture” of Abu Ghraib, the lack of any support in the Arab world for a free Iraq and the ready willingness of politicians of every stripe in many nations to use the War to advance their own agendas- all are stains on our collective conscience. Haditha cannot be another.

Our only recourse as a nation is to search for the truth of what occurred in Haditha, and then to face that truth. While we should inform the world that this our intention, we must not, however, do this for the rest of the world; our goal should not simply be to still the clamoring. We should do this because it is right, and that is one of the key tenets of the concept of America- we will always do what is right, to the best of our ability. Our diplomatic message should be just that- we are in Iraq because it is the right thing to do, and we will discover the truth about Haditha for the same reason.
​

Dr Demarche’s diagnosis: “face the truth, do what is right.”

Next up: Mark Safranski.

Diplomacy and Haditha


By Mark Safranski


The shocking charges of wanton murder of Iraqi civilians, including women and children, by U.S. Marines at Haditha have prompted many people to leap to conclusions well ahead of those provided by military investigators or prosecutors. As with many incidents, opinions seem to be driven by the overall view one has held about the invasion of Iraq or about America itself. British journalist and noted anti-American fundamentalist Robert Fisk slammed U.S. troops as “ the Army of the Slums” while Richard Pyle, former AP bureau chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War, has already equated events at Haditha with My Lai. Congressman John Murtha, himself a Marine veteran and antiwar activist, was in the lead of convicting the accused soldiers in the press.


Our eagerness as a society to deal with the political fallout of Haditha creates the temptation to ensure that the investigation of alleged war crimes produces the “ right” results to appease a diverse audience of onlookers and critics. Our long term diplomatic interests are best served by allowing justice to take its course unimpeded by the overt political machinations that clouded My Lai and with the greatest possible level of transparency. Abu Ghraib was a genuine travesty but other inflammatory charges made against troops fighting Islamist insurgents have often proven completely false. Israelis did not massacre civilians during the battle of Jenin, American troops did not intentionally desecrate al Qaida dead in Afghanistan or flush a Quran down a toilet. With this in mind, and the awareness that every army in every war contains soldiers who “snap” and commit crimes, we should let watch the judicial process unfold, sternly punish any soldiers found guilty and compensate the families of any innocent victims. Even if their deaths only resulted from normal “collateral damage” according to the laws of war.


To do more than this would be to invite the contempt of the enemy and the multiplication of Islamist “Black propaganda”; to do less would be to fail to live up to our own ideals in the eyes of the world.​

 

[NATO AIR]

I'm pleased to know Mark Safranski, hell of a guy and his blog is one of the best. The diplomatic fallout of this is going to make or break the war on Iraq from here on out.

 

[Annie]

And why it will cause so much diplomatic angst, when it shouldn't be in that rhelm yet. Michael Yon:

http://michaelyon-online.com/wp/hijacking-haditha.htm

Read the whole thing

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
Hijacking Haditha

...I was recently a panelist on a Fred Friendly Ethics in Journalism seminar that will air on PBS later this year. On the panel was Max Cleland, a former Senator who had been grievously wounded in war, and there was a retired General, two other military officers and a cast of media luminaries. The moderator posed a hypothetical situation in which a war crime occurred, and asked what I would do. My answer was that I would release the information, which clearly disturbed the General. But I would release it in context. There is a difference. That was hypothetical, but in real life I was present when our soldiers accidentally killed a taxi driver in Mosul. I wrote about it in a dispatch titled “Monday.”

Rolling out before sunrise, the initial fighting killed a taxi driver. The firing was brief and precise. A small amount of glass and glass-dust poofed into the air, and from what I saw, there is little doubt that the driver’s death was sudden and painless.

So far as local sources can tell, the driver might have been merely caught in the confusion and he was the only person killed at that time. The event depressed the mood of some of the men, although a few took the, “Man, that’s bad, but shit happens in war,” position. I kept asking American officers throughout the day, “Was he really a bad guy?” The soldiers could have said that the dead man was a terrorist, and that they had gotten him. There is so much going on that it would have been difficult for me to know the difference without checking with the hospital and others. But instead they told me, “We think we killed the wrong man.”

I said to the commander, “You know I will write about this, don’t you?”

He answered, “Mike, you can write about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think we made a mistake, but you were there. You saw what happened. We are still not certain that he is not a cell-member, but we have no proof that he was and my gut tells me he was innocent. I think it was a bad target.”

I wrote about the death of the taxi cab driver in the context of the larger mission because that is how it happened—in the context of a larger mission.
The signs are clear, but without context they are essentially meaningless.

I was present on a day in Baquba when there was a controlled blast of some captured munitions, and somehow the guard towers had not been informed of the upcoming explosion. When the blast occurred, there were children playing near the perimeter, and they flushed and ran. A young guard fired on the children, killing one. He thought they had triggered the blast, something children had often done. I sat up in that same guard tower a day or so later. Soldiers will always talk during nighttime guard duty. The men in his platoon were very upset about the incident, as was the soldier himself. He made the wrong decision, but despite that he had not been warned about the explosion, and that Baquba was a dangerous place where we regularly were losing soldiers, he might never forgive himself.
What would happen if I took out my pen to write?

I’ve written often about soldiers and children and the bond between them that develops in the most unlikely situations, often with devastating consequences for both groups. In the dispatch Killing for God, the focus was on the trend among insurgents in Mosul to actually target children, using soldiers as bait.

An American soldier told me today that he has been telling kids to stay away from his unit so they won’t be killed. This is harder, on all parties, than it might seem to anyone who hasn’t seen firsthand how much the kids here love the soldiers. The sound of heavily armored trucks rumbling through the streets has the same effect on these kids as the tinkling bells of the “ice cream man” back home. Imagine having to tell kids to run the other way when they hear the ice cream truck on a summer afternoon.

It is hard to define the context in a place where the enemy regularly tortures and beheads people, and murders children on a daily basis, and this seems to raise scant ire. They can kill a dozen kids, or come to a classroom and murder a teacher in front of young students, and still be called “rebels,” or “freedom fighters.” I call them terrorists. A smart Australian recently told me during an interview that “terrorist” is not a subjective term; after all, terror is their principle weapon, and so the term is accurate.

Accuracy is important to defining context, but so is proportion. When a few of our rogue elements ran wild, creating the Abu Ghraib debacle that we cannot seem to outrun, the story, which is a horrible black mark on our military and our nation, seems to have been put on a permanent loop, albeit one that leaves out most of what might in fact be the most important news of all...