Doug Lorimer
US military investigators have concluded that US marines may have deliberately massacred up to 24 unarmed civilians, including seven women and three children, last November in the western Iraqi town of Haditha, US House of Representatives armed services committee chairperson Duncan Hunter told reporters on May 20.
The investigation, which is being conducted by the Naval Criminal Instigative Service (NCIS), was forced on the Pentagon after Time magazine published an account in March of the November 19 incident in Haditha that contradicted the Marine Corps command's version. This had claimed that a marine and 15 Iraqi civilians had been killed by a roadside bomb. It also claimed that "gunmen attacked the [Marine] convoy with small-arms fire", sparking a firefight that resulted in the death of "eight insurgents".
However, a video filmed by a local Iraqi investigative reporter showed that the official account of what happened could not have been true, and a subsequent investigation by Time magazine revealed that the Iraqi civilians had been deliberately killed by marines.
"It's much worse than was reported in Time magazine", legislator John Murtha, a former marine colonel and Vietnam War veteran, who has been a consistent ally of the US armed forces in the US Congress, told reporters on May 18. He said that the NCIS investigators had found that after one marine had been killed by a roadside bomb, a dozen marines had gone into nearby "houses and killed women and children".
"It shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they're out in combat", Murtha said, repeating the call he made last November for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
The May 21 London Telegraph reported that "Pentagon officials confirmed that 24 civilians, rather than the previous given figure of 15" had been killed, adding that the "incident, although on a vastly smaller scale, has prompted comparisons with the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, in which several hundred Vietnamese villagers, mainly women and children, were killed by American troops".
It also reported that the "Bush administration fears that the growing scandal over the shootings could lead to war crimes trials and a wave of international condemnation that will further diminish support for the Iraq war in the run-up to the mid-term congressional elections" in November.
The real war
While the corporate media, particularly their TV news broadcasts, give the impression that the Iraq war mainly consists of terrorist-style car bombings indiscriminately directed against Baghdad residents, Pentagon statistics reveal a very different picture.
According to figures released by the Pentagon on January 22, there were 34,141 attacks launched by Iraqi resistance fighters in 2005, up from 26,496 attacks in 2004. In a March 15 report on Iraq to the UN Security Council, US ambassador John Bolton, citing these Pentagon figures, said that "almost 80% of all attacks are directed against coalition forces", i.e., against US and other allied foreign occupation troops.
These attacks are most sustained in Iraq's western Anbar province. CNN reported on May 19 that "coalition forces have engaged insurgents in the area every day since May 7, the military said". The heaviest fighting has been in Ramadi, the 400,000-strong capital of Anbar province, 110 kilometres west of Baghdad.
"The sheer scale of violence in Ramadi is astounding", Associated Press reported on May 22. "One recent coalition tally of 'significant acts' — roadside bombs, attacks, exchanges of fire — indicated that out of 43 reported in Iraq on a single day, 27 occurred in Ramadi and its environs, according to a Marine officer who declined to be named because he's not authorized to speak to the media.
"And that, he said, was 'a quiet day' — when nothing from Ramadi even made the news."
The AP report continued: "Guerrillas attack US troops nearly every time they venture out — and hit their bases with gunfire, rockets or mortars when they don't. Though not powerful enough to overrun US positions, insurgents here in the heart of the Sunni Muslim triangle have fought undermanned US and Iraqi [puppet] forces to a virtual stalemate ...
"Small teams of insurgents open fire and coalition troops respond with heavy blows, often air strikes or rocket fire that's turned city blocks into rubble."
"We don't have control of this", US Army Sergeant Britt Ruble, crouching behind the sandbags of an observation post in Ramadi, told AP. "We just don't have enough boots on the ground."
According to a report in the May 21 Time magazine, "War planners in Iraq say just getting a handle on Ramadi demands three times as many soldiers as are there now. Several US commanders say they won't ask superiors for more troops or plan large-scale operations because doing so would expose problems in the US's strategy that no one wants to acknowledge. 'It's what I call the Big Lie', a high-ranking US commander told Time."
Overstretched US military
Evidence that the guerrilla war being waged by Iraqi resistance fighters is putting enormous strain on the overstretched US war machine was provided by a May 13 Associated Press report that US troops "with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness".
In 1997, Congress ordered the US military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. AP reported that an investigation of Pentagon records conducted by the Harford Courant, a Connecticut daily newspaper, had found that fewer than one in 300 soldiers were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005.
The newspaper found that since 2004, US soldiers were being sent into combat despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed anti-depressants with little or no mental health counselling or monitoring.
"I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on antidepressants, when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal", Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, told the Harford Courant. "You're creating chemically activated time bombs."
The US Army's top mental health expert, Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, told the Harford Courant that some deployment practices, such as sending soldiers diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by the lack of availability of troops to successfully wage a counterinsurgency war in Iraq.
There are currently 133,000 US troops deployed in Iraq. In addition, according to the Congressional Research Service, there are an additional 130,000 US troops involved in direct support roles in neighbouring countries. Total US casualties, dead and wounded, since Washington launched its war to conquer oil-rich Iraq in March 2003 now exceed 20,000.
New cabinet
On May 20, US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki, a leader of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shiite religious parties that holds the largest block — 41% — of seats in the Iraqi parliament finally announced his cabinet of 39 ministers — five months after elections were held for the new 275-member parliament.
The reason for the long delay in selecting a new ministry was explained by the British Independent in a May 22 report from Baghdad, which noted that "each ministry becomes the fief of the party that holds it. The ministries are, in practice, patronage machines employing only party loyalists. They are milked for money, jobs and contracts. Ministers cannot be dismissed for incompetence or corruption, however gross, because it would lead to the deal between the parties and communities unravelling."
Most of the ministerial posts have been taken by the UIA. Six ministries were allocated to the Kurdish Alliance, the coalition of pro-US Kurdish parties, while four were allocated to the Iraqi Accordance, a coalition of Sunni-based religious parties. The only opposition to the new cabinet came from the 10 MPs of the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, widely regarded as the parliamentary voice of the Sunni-based Iraqi resistance movement.
On May 22, US President George Bush declared: "As this new unity government takes office, it carries with it the hopes of the Iraqi nation and the aspirations of freedom-loving people across a troubled region."
However, the May 22 Los Angeles Times reported that "Iraqis of all backgrounds struggle to gin up enthusiasm for their long-awaited government ... They are keenly aware that most of their political leaders spend their days locked in the heavily fortified Green Zone, shielded from the rest of the country by foreign soldiers and strict checkpoints."
It cited as typical the views expressed by Alaa Mahmood, a 25-year-old Shiite college student in Mosul and mother of three children. "I don't trust the new government. I don't expect anything from them. They should start the real work and expel the occupiers."
From Green Left Weekly, May 31, 2006.
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