Notes for next time
By 
The public notice of the death of William Calley involved for me an odd coincidence, in that yesterday before I had heard about it I stumbled onto a column I wrote 18 years ago about the Haditha massacre in Iraq. Here’s the summary of that event from Wikipedia:
The Haditha massacre (also called the Haditha killings or the Haditha incident) was a series of killings on November 19, 2005, in which a group of United States Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians.[1][2] The killings occurred in the city of Haditha in Iraq‘s western province of Al Anbar. Among the dead were men, women, elderly people and children as young as 1, who were shot multiple times at close range while unarmed. The ensuing massacre took place after an improvised explosive device exploded near a convoy, killing a lance corporal and severely injuring two other marines. The immediate reaction was to seize 5 men in a nearby taxi and execute them on the street.[3]
An initial Marine Corps communique reported that 15 civilians were killed by the bomb’s blast and eight insurgents were subsequently killed when the Marines returned fire against those attacking the convoy. However, other evidence uncovered by the media contradicted the Marines’ account.[1] A Time magazine reporter’s questions prompted the United States military to open an investigation into the incident. The investigation found evidence that “supports accusations that U.S. Marines deliberately shot civilians”, according to an anonymous Pentagon official.[4] Three officers were officially reprimanded for failing to properly initially report and investigate the killings. On December 21, 2006, eight Marines from 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines were charged in connection with the incident.[5][6]
By June 17, 2008, six defendants had their cases dropped and a seventh was found not guilty.[7] The exception was former Staff Sergeant, now-Private Frank Wuterich. On October 3, 2007, the Article 32 hearing investigating officer recommended that charges of murder be dropped and Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of two women and five children.[8] Further charges of assault and manslaughter were ultimately dropped; Wuterich was convicted of a single count of negligent dereliction of duty on January 24, 2012.[9][10] Wuterich received a rank reduction and pay cut but avoided jail time.[11][12] Iraqis expressed disbelief and voiced outrage after the six-year U.S. military prosecution ended with none of the Marines sentenced to incarceration. A lawyer for the victims stated “this is an assault on humanity” before adding that he, as well as the Government of Iraq, might bring the case to international courts.[13]
Here is the column I wrote in June of 2006:
This column was originally going to be about a couple of law professor-pundits, Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds, who specialize in defending the Bush administration. My learned colleagues are now busy claiming that the supposed “media frenzy” regarding the apparent massacre of civilians in Haditha is a product of liberal bias, rather than of a sense of professional obligation to report a major news story.
But in the end it’s not very interesting to point out that Bush administration dead-enders are willing to defend anything it does. (Professor Hewitt in particular seems past praying for: If President Bush came out in favor of compulsory late-term abortions for the wives of NASCAR drivers, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hewitt found something to praise in the proposal).
What’s more interesting are the following comments from Peter Beinart, editor in chief of the New Republic. After noting that Americans can be as barbaric as anyone, Beinart argues that “what makes us an exceptional nation with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact.” While it’s true “we are capable of Hadithas and My Lais,” America is nevertheless almost unique among nations because, when we confront such atrocities, we are “capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again.”
What’s disturbing about this claim is that illustrates how a person in a position of considerable public influence can simply concoct an imaginary past to suit the propaganda needs of the present war.
Consider three of the best-known atrocities committed by American troops during the Vietnam War. (I say best-known rather than well-known, since the vast majority of Americans have only heard of one of them at most. So much for our supposed national willingness to “acknowledge what happened.”)
*My Lai. Remarkably, Beinart invokes this massacre of between 200 and 500 Vietnamese villagers by American troops as an example of “bringing killers to justice.” In fact, with one exception, none of the many soldiers and officers responsible for committing and covering up this mass murder were ever convicted of anything. The one exception, Lt. William Calley, was pardoned by President Nixon [ETA: Gerald Ford actually pardoned Calley. ETA2: Calley was never pardoned. He was essentially released in the midst of litigation over his conviction, as soon as he became eligible for parole. H/T commenter Bilo] after spending three years under house arrest.
*Tiger Force. For several months in 1967, a platoon of elite soldiers known as Tiger Force went on a frenzied killing spree, during which its members murdered hundreds of civilians, and engaged in such barbarities as wearing necklaces made out of human ears. A four-year investigation of the unit by the Army was suddenly called off, reportedly at the highest levels, in November 1975 — the same month in which Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense and Dick Cheney was named President Ford’s chief of staff. Despite overwhelming evidence, no charges were ever brought in the matter.
*Thanh Phong. In 1969, thirteen villagers were killed in the village of Thanh Phong, during an operation led by Bob Kerrey, who would eventually become a Medal of Honor winner, a U.S. senator, and a presidential candidate. A great deal of evidence suggests the villagers were massacred by Kerrey and six other soldiers. The Thanh Phong incident was never investigated by the military.
All wars are terrible, but guerilla wars in particular practically guarantee that, as in Vietnam, atrocities against civilians will become commonplace; that most such incidents will never be investigated; and that those which are investigated will rarely lead to punishment.
Indeed, the only reason we know about My Lai, Tiger Force, Thanh Phong, and now Haditha is that in each case unusually dedicated journalists refused to accept the official version of these events, which without exception absolved American troops of any wrongdoing.
That right-wing ideologues peddle jingoistic nonsense about American exceptionalism is only to be expected. That the editor of a prominent liberal magazine should do so as well helps explain how we’ve managed to entangle our troops in yet another nightmarish guerilla war.
I don’t want to be too hard on Beinart, in that unlike so many cheerleaders for the Iraq war he truly repented of his initial support, and even managed to get enough distance from it to have some critical perspective on what drove it in the first place, which was the wrongheaded idea of American exceptionalism. Here’s something he wrote just a few months after the Haditha massacre:
We can’t be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That’s why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force — because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it’s why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time.
The startling thing here is Beinart’s ability to see through the myth of American exceptionalism, and yet to fall right back into it in the context of something like the Haditha massacre, which I doubt even one in hundred readers of this blog, or one in 10,000 ordinary Americans, even remembers. (I had forgotten about it completely, and I wrote a newspaper column about it).
Nationalism is a kind of mental disease, to which all nations are prone to greater and lesser extents, by the very fact that they are nations. Americans are especially vulnerable to it, which is something to remember the next time — and of course there will be a next time — that the very serious people who have gone to the best schools decide that our exceptionalism both requires and justifies killing large numbers of foreigners, for their and our own good.