Taking Out the Garbage (Man)

The army has charged a lieutenent with premeditated murder in connection with the killing of an Iraqi boy last August.

I posted on this a week or so ago, but don't feel like looking for the link--however, this was not unlike last weekend's killing of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque. Perhaps it's even more egregious--the soldier in Fallujah can offer a defense of combat stress, which has got to be a lot worse than the words themselves imply. The particulars of the case noted above are quite a bit worse: soldiers fired on a garbage truck, erroneously assuming it was an insurgent vehicle laying down IED's. After discovering their error, some of the wounded were treated, but the lieutenant in question ordered two soldiers to shoot a young boy to "put him out of his misery"--while a relative of the boy, who spoke some English, begged for medics to treat him instead.

There are few things that epitomize the Iraq disaster as much as this--an incident grounded in misinformation, bad judgement, excessive violence, and tragedy for all parties in question. Once again, I'm less inclined to blame the indicted soldier--without condoning his action--and instead, thing blame should rightly rest with the people who ordered him there in the first place. War does awful things to people, which is why it should NEVER be undertaken on a whim.

And I don't think anyone has seriously made the case that Iraq wasn't a discretionary conflict.

Yet, even as soldiers are indicted for what are either criminal acts, genuine tragedy, or, more likely, a combination of both, I doubt the press has even scratched the surface when it comes to revealing the truth about the horror of modern warfare. Something tells me that the few cases we know anything about are more than matched by hundreds of other incidents that are euphamistically referred to as "the fog of war." Not-so-smart bombs and/or misidentification of targets, friendly fire accidents, wholesale slaughter from the air or ground in the course of the advance and/or occupation are likely as normal as the sun rising in the east. We haven't heard about them only because the information management--or, perhaps more appropriately, micromanagement--has been so intense. In other words, the "fog" of war is more like a deliberate smokescreen, thrown up by a government that no longer trusts the public (even as it claims a "mandate" from what is now the second-closest election of my lifetime).

When the public finally awakens to the horrors perpetrated in its name, I think there will be a great deal of soul searching...or, maybe I should say I HOPE there will be a great deal of soul searching. Otherwise, you might as well set out the "Closed" sign.