Society + Culture,

Once upon a time, as a historian, I wrote about My Lai in my history of the Cold War.  I now consider what the "incidents" at My Lai, Haditha, and Ishaqi have in common -- first, the response of the Pentagon and the military, which from My Lai to the present remains recognizably the same (and which I run through in some detail).  Second, that the victims were largely or totally noncombatants.  I then try to put the 24 dead Iraqis from Haditha, which is now the focus of all Iraq news, back into the larger frame of the Iraq war, which is (as all wars now are) a war of civilian death.
 
In doing so, I reconsider the Pentagon terms, "collateral death" and "collateral damage," and suggest that in wars like the Iraqi one, the "collateral deaths" are those of combatants; that the central reality of such a war is the killing of civilians and that, unless we grasp this, we really can't understand what's going on.
 
I write, in part: 
 
"Those 24 dead noncombatants are not, in fact, an 'incident' at all, nor 'isolated,' nor -- another of those My-Lai-and-now terms -- an 'aberration.' Make no mistake, they are the essence of this war. From the beginning, the continual slaughter of civilians, as well as the destruction of civilian property and livelihoods, has been the modus operandi of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. That most of it didn't happen eyeball-to-eyeball with revenge on the brain certainly made little difference to the many victims, nor should it make too much difference to us."
 
This is a different approach to the news from Haditha.  Hope you find it of interest.

Editor Note: See Tom Engelhardt excellent commentary on  "Collateral Damage, The 'Incident' at Haditha" http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=88850  (And don't miss the "sidebar" at the end of the dispatch, "Talking about Haditha Talking Points," including "Post-Haditha Math" and "Prejudgment at Haditha. ")

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