Cambridge, Mass.
“DEALING with the reported massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, last fall may actually turn out to be an easy case for the military. After all, American troops don't need refresher training to know that killing children at point-blank range is wrong.
The hard cases are the ones that happen nearly every day: these are the grindingly routine judgment calls, the snap decisions soldiers have to make when their foes (like suicide bombers) refuse to wear uniforms.
In the spiraling violence of Iraq, American troops are constantly learning on the job. Their actions must be closely monitored, especially the bellwether of civilian harm. Yet the military consistently denied the value of tracking civilian casualties. It therefore had no early warning system.
What's more, the military's institutional procedures helped keep the reality of abuses at a distance. The mechanism to make war more humane — the law of war — paradoxically limited understanding of war's impact.
Such a legalistic lens can create a blind spot. Investigations are not routine; they occur when the system suspects a problem. With civilian casualties invisible, it's harder to find a problem to suspect.
This spring, though, the military began investigating civilian deaths not simply to assess culpability but to enhance effectiveness. This groundbreaking approach builds on efforts, begun last year, to track incidents involving civilian harm at checkpoints and during convoys. Commanders were told to investigate the most serious of these incidents.
Why? To minimize civilian harm. The effort appears to have succeeded. Since January, Iraqi civilian deaths in these situations have been reduced from four to one per week. American forces have finally begun using meaningful metrics to improve their tactics and guard their professionalism.
If Haditha spurs outrage, it should be directed in the right place. Determining culpability is the best we can do after the fact. But prevention is a far better goal. The military didn't start analyzing checkpoint shootings until well into the war. Had it acted sooner, arithmetic suggests we could have spared hundreds of Iraqi lives.…
To learn from Haditha is to learn to notice not just the alleged massacres but the steady stream of civilian deaths that for too much of this war have remained invisible.
Maybe, just maybe, we've stopped recruiting for the insurgency.…
Unfortunately, our problem hasn't been blindness, but an outright refusal to look.
Nor did the problem start in Haditha, but with the first massacre of Falluja. Where our troops may have honestly believed they were shot at, but the physical evidence established nothing but rock throwing.
Refusal to look led to the second massacre in Falluja and the third which was a massacre of Iraqi policemen, some at pointblank range and the phisical evidence as well as the survivors tales established that not one of them fired at our troops.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how that lead to the ambush and lynching of the contractors, and the first and second battles of Falluja.
Maybe, finally, we've stopped ignoring reality.
Maybe, just maybe, we've stopped recruiting for the insurgency.…
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