THOUGHTS ON FALLUJAH, IN SLATE:
The very job of a rifleman is to close with and destroy his enemy—in essence, to kill the bad guy before he can kill you. But what separates the Marines from the rabble is their professional discipline—what a Harvard political scientist called the “management of violence” in describing the U.S. military. And so, this incident stands out for two reasons. First, it shows a breach of discipline, albeit under very stressful circumstances. But it also shows the extent to which the U.S. military will throw the book at one of its own. Already, the entire 1st Marine Division staff is involved with the case, and the top U.S. commander in Iraq said Tuesday that “[I]t’s being investigated, and justice will be done.”
On the same day as this story, the tragic news broke that CARE International worker Margaret Hassan had been executed by her captors in Iraq. Already, there have been cries of moral equivalence. One Iraqi told the Los Angeles Times: “It goes to show that [Marines] are not any better than the so-called terrorists.” Al Jazeera fanned these flames of anti-American sentiment by broadcasting the shooting incident in full while censoring Hassan’s execution snuff tape. (U.S. networks refused to air actual footage of both killings.) There is a simplistic appeal to such arguments because both events involve the killing of a human being and, more specifically, the apparent execution of a noncombatant in the context of war.
Yet it is the differences between these two killings that reveal the most important truths about the Marine shooting in Fallujah. Hassan was, in every sense of the word, a noncombatant. She worked for more than 20 years to help Iraqis obtain basic necessities: food, running water, medical care, electricity, and education. The Iraqi insurgents kidnapped her and murdered her in order to terrorize the Iraqi population and the aid workers trying to help them.
By contrast, the Marines entered a building in Fallujah and found several men who, until moments before, had been enemy insurgents engaged in mortal combat. A hidden grenade would have changed everything, and the Marine would have been lauded. As it turned out, the Iraqi was entitled to mercy, but Hassan was truly innocent. There is no legitimate moral equivalence between a soldier asking for quarter and a noncombatant like Hassan.
There is another key difference that reveals a great moral divide between the Marines and insurgents they fought this week in Fallujah. The insurgents choose the killing of innocents as their modus operandi and glorify these killings with videos distributed via the Internet and Al Jazeera. They recognize no civilized norms of conduct, let alone the rules of warfare. The Marines, on the other hand, distinguish themselves by killing innocents so rarely and only by exception or mistake.
Nice that someone’s noticing.
UPDATE: More here, in a must-read post by military blogger Baldilocks.
Meanwhile, in Baghdad the reaction to the shooting is “good riddance.”