Brutal truth.

The story of Haditha is finally emerging in its ghastly entirety, just the kind of tale this sort of conflict inevitably produces. A war of hostile occupation, fueled by a generalized distaste and even hatred of the people being occupied; a war with no discernible strategy or end point, in which soldiers are sent on patrol after pointless deadly patrol until their hopelessness and anger tears them apart from within. This is a brutal act, but it’s enormously easy for someone like me to sit safe at home and moralize — if I were there on patrol, I don’t know what the fuck I’d be doing, and let’s face it, neither would you. We are all responsible for this crime, because we have been unwilling to restrain our government from committing the larger crime of invading Iraq and compounding that crime with the evils that have proceeded from the occupation. I say “unwilling” because we are free to make our voices heard. If we demanded an end to this war, it would be over.

One of our biggest problems as a society, in my opinion, is that we let ourselves off the hook too easily. It’s part and parcel of the prevailing trend in modern American politics — separate the voters from the costs of major policy decisions and you will gain their tacit support. This is especially true of anything involving our all-volunteer military. For the first time ever (I believe), our forces have been deployed in a major conflict for an extended period of time without the support of a national mobilization. In essence, the money to fund the deployment is entirely borrowed — another first. We are just barely aware that there’s a war going on, and yet the administration, members of Congress, and political pundits intone Churchillian rhetoric about the long struggle ahead, etc., etc., as if to sell the American public on a flattering image of itself as a defiant, heroic people facing incredible odds (like Britain during the blitz) without the inconvenience of, well, any actual sacrifice… unless you are among the unlucky minority with family members in the military.

And when the inevitable happens — when it becomes clear that our soldiers are cracking under the stress of multiple tours of duty and shooting civilians like Cheney shoots caged quail — how do we react? Well, the military begins by blaming the messengers, calling the journalists who follow the stories traitors and dupes of al Qaeda, etc. After about 3 or 4 months of that, when they’re forced by mounting evidence to admit to some portion of the ugly truth, it becomes the individual soldiers’ fault. They then apply the dubious remedies of courts martial and sensitivity training slide shows, while the administration and its various flacks encourage us to look at the bigger picture (it took an endless war to get conservatives talking about “context”). But there’s one thing Bush’s cousin Tony Snow won’t tell us at the daily briefing — we are more responsible for those deaths than the soldiers who pull the trigger. This is the result of a criminal foreign policy, and because we enjoy the unparalleled freedoms of American democracy, we must also accept the responsibility for what our elected officials get us into.