Tens of Thousands

Baghdad Numb to Reports of Massacre

After three years of war that has been fought in their streets and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, people in Baghdad could spare little more than subdued expressions of sympathy Sunday after hearing reports of a U.S. Marine massacre of 24 men, women and children in a faraway western town.

"We are tired of this news. I don't want to hear about more killings," said Ismael Abbas, a 37-year-old express-mail courier, chuckling slightly in acknowledgment of the callousness of his words. He added, "The only news I care about is when a car bomb explodes in my neighborhood. I just check if my family is okay."

Like most in Baghdad, he counts his personal toll from the war: a brother and three cousins killed last year when a mortar round -- most likely from insurgents -- fell on their neighborhood in the eastern part of the city.

"So what if more innocent people were killed?" Abbas said of the reported massacre in Haditha. "Dozens of them die daily."

Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment are under investigation for allegedly storming at least three homes in Haditha on Nov. 19, turning their guns and grenades against civilians including a 76-year-old amputee who used a wheelchair, and girls and boys ages 14, 10, 5, 4, 3 and 1. Five men, four college students returning home for the weekend and their taxi driver, were also killed in the rampage, which allegedly came in retaliation for a roadside bombing in the neighborhood that killed a Marine.

U.S. Marine commanders in Washington have warned Congress of grave findings when two military investigations into the killings are concluded in coming weeks. Some U.S. military officials have said they are bracing for a scandal like that surrounding Abu Ghraib, when the disclosure of torture and humiliation of naked Iraqi prisoners disillusioned many Iraqis who had welcomed the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in violence since the U.S. invasion in 2003, many from insurgent bombs and execution-like killings in the intensifying sectarian violence, making TV broadcasts most days a montage of sprawled corpses and weeping families. A fraction of the deaths are caused directly by U.S. fire.

"We have a Haditha every day. We have a Fallujah and Karbala every day,'' said Muhanned Jasim, a local merchant, citing two of the many landmarks for civilian death in the war, the 2004 U.S. offensive in Fallujah and insurgent bombings in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala.
An antiques seller in central Baghdad, Jasim hadn't heard the news of Haditha, he said, because he no longer has electricity to power his television.

"We live in darkness,'' he said, fanning his face as the sweat rolled down. "What's the big news about Iraqis getting killed? We're powerless to change the situation."

Ghasan Jayih, a pharmacist, said he could pinpoint when he stopped caring: in November 2004, when gunmen shot and killed his best friend as the man drove home from his job as an interpreter at a U.S. Army base. "When I lose the friend of my childhood, it means nothing else can matter to me."

"Were they the first . . . Iraqis to be killed for no reason?" Jayih said. "We're used to being killed. It's normal now to hear 25 Iraqis are killed in one day."

There's more from the article but you probably get the point. I just wonder when the Culture of Life folks are going to lament the killing of "tens of thousands" of Iraqi civilians as a result of the U.S. invasion. I wonder when the Party of Life and its ministerial water-carriers are going to deplore the moral relativism that excuses the deaths of "tens of thousands" in Iraq so that our military and political leaders could...um...what exactly? True, most of these deaths are not directly attributable to American soldiers or its sophisticated weaponry, but we're responsible all the same. The massacre in Haditha is a microcosm of the whole war. At the prompting of a few blood-thirsty media personalities and mislead by a political elite bent on demonstrating it's will and war power, U.S. voters permitted, and in many cases if phone calls to C-Span were any indication, lauded the bombing, invasion, and occupation of a country whose citizens harbored us no ill will and with whom we were not at war. Innocents. But whether of rational fear or irrational patriotic fervor run amok, we are now responsible for that country's subsequent disintegration, mayhem and bloodshed. To defend it now and celebrate its executioners on the basis of a supposed aim of "liberation" or on behalf of a good-faith belief in the country's WMD possession, and not admit our country's moral error, is to engage in moral relativism at its worst.