Published: 03 June 2006
I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials - an old friend - told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me an American military document showing the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds".
What kind of trauma? Indeed, what kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.
It is no good saying "a few bad apples", all occupation armies are corrupted. But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still uncovering the mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole villages. We know of rapists killers of the Russian army in Chechnya. We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched wile their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words "Mai Lai" are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were bad and the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is the US. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq and they have innocent blood on their hands.
I suspect that part of the problem is that we never really cared about the iraqis - which is why we refused to count their dead, enumerating only our own losses. And one the Iraqis turned upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cards gooks and cowardly evil subhumans whom the Americans once identified in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet. Remind yourself that these people are muslims and they can all become little Mohammed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further along the road from those promiscuous air strikes which we are told kill terrorists but too often turn out to be wedding parties.
I think it has become a habit this sort of thing. Already the horrors of Abu Ghraib are shrugged away. OH, that! It was abuse - not torture. And then pops a junior officer in the US charged for killing an Iraqi army general by stuffing him upside-down in a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest. And again it get few headline. Who cares if another Iraqi bites the dust? When a young American seeks political asylum in Canada, a colleague turns up to give evidence on his behalf. "Terrorist had put babies on the road of Fallujah to stop American vehicles and then blown them up. So now he said the soldiers were ordered not to stop of babies.
For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honourable of creatures doing endless battle with the killers of 11 September of 7 July because we love our country and our people - so much?
And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy.
I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections - before their "liberators" murdered them.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...icle624173.ece