Abusing Iraqi
Civilians
By Bob Herbert
07/10/07 "The
New York Times"
--With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of
the Iraq war, The Nation magazine is coming out this week
with an article that goes into great and disturbing detail
about the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians by some U.S.
soldiers and marines.
The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that
have gotten substantial press coverage, like the massacre in
Haditha in November 2005. Instead, based on interviews
conducted on the record with dozens of American combat
veterans of the war, the authors address what they describe
as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have
abused or killed Iraqi civilians - men, women and children -
with impunity.
The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive
behavior born of panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded
violence by G.I.'s are believed to have cost the lives of
thousands of innocent Iraqis, the article says. The soldiers
interviewed said they believed that only a minority of U.S.
troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll of
their actions has been huge.
The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and
fearful in an alien environment in which the enemy hides
among civilians and uses acts of terror as the primary
tactic. "The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive
enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with
their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many
troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis," said the
authors, Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for
The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.
Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand
Junction, Colo., said in the article: "I guess while I was
there, the general attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another
dead Iraqi. You know, so what?"
For a lot of troops, he said, that attitude tended to morph
into a debilitating sense of guilt after their return home.
Kelly Dougherty of Caņon City, Colo., who served in Iraq as
a sergeant with a National Guard military police unit,
remembered investigating an incident in which a military
convoy ran over a boy, about 10 years old, and his three
donkeys. When she and others from her unit arrived at the
scene, the boy was lying dead by the side of the road. The
donkeys had also been killed.
"We saw him there," she said, "and, you know, we were upset
because the convoy didn't even stop. They really, judging by
the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down."
Accidents, even those caused by recklessness, are bad
enough. More disturbing are the incidents described in the
article in which G.I.'s routinely abused civilians. Among
the worst abuses have been the shootings of innocent
civilians and the improper arrests that have occurred in the
course of raids carried out by soldiers and marines looking
for insurgents.
There have been thousands of such raids. An extraordinary
number of them - the vast majority, according to the
interviews for article - were exercises in futility,
yielding nothing but grief and terror for the innocent
families whose homes were invaded.
"So you have all these troops, and they're all wound up,"
said Army Sgt. John Bruhns of Philadelphia, who participated
in many raids while serving in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. "And
a lot of them think once they kick down the door there's
going to be people on the inside waiting for them with
weapons to start shooting at them."
In most cases, there is nothing more than a terrified family
on the other side of the door. In instances in which unarmed
civilians are shot and killed in raids, which happens
frequently, it's not unusual for G.I.'s to plant weapons by
their bodies and to arrest survivors on false charges of
participating in the insurgency, the article says.
"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Joe Hatcher, who
served with the Army's Fourth Cavalry Regiment in Iraq. "If
you kill someone and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em."
The article emphasizes the extreme stress that G.I.'s are
operating under in Iraq. A byproduct of that stress is the
tendency to stereotype and dehumanize all Iraqis. What the
soldiers find out, after they get home, is that in
dehumanizing the people they supposedly were fighting for,
they often end up dehumanizing themselves.
There is no upside to this war. It has been a plague since
the beginning. But it's one thing to lose a war. It's much
worse for a nation to lose its soul.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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