There's not a whole lot to say about the slaughter in Haditha. Outrage? Sure, I'm outraged, though I've turned up that flame so many times in the past couple of years that I've left little more than a flicker. The event was a sick carnival of horrors, and the LA Times account makes me feel more ill than anything.
This is war. A marine is extinguished by a bomb and his friends -- his brothers -- snap. They take all their fear and all their helplessness and all their rage and regain control in the only way they possibly can. You can blame them, but they, as individuals, are largely beside the point. You put human beings in a killing field and eventually a few of them will revert to beasts.
This is why war is hell. Because it isn't clean, because humans wage it. And when humans descend to hell, a few always become demons. American troops have massacred innocent Iraqis, not by accident, but on purpose. This is a barrel of gasoline dumped on the already-flaming insurgency. This will ricochet across the Arab world. We will become more hated than we already are. Al Qaeda will have another item to add to their list of casus belli. Our country can't afford to further inflame anti-American sentiment -- but doing so was as inevitable as morning dawn the moment we entered Iraq.
The Bush administration has many failings, but in the long run, their most dangerous blind spot will be the one they had for anti-Americanism. No hated country is ever safe, and we are truly loathed, more so every week. It was all predictable, it could all be foreseen. But the Bush administration refused to see it. They believed they could fight a perfect war, and didn't consider or didn't care what would happen if they couldn't. But they proved unable to alter the nature of combat, and now the very portion of the world we needed to mobilize against the murderers in their midst see us as ruthless monsters.
