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As I go through a list of New York
Times articles on the Haditha massacre, in which Marines
murdered 24 Iraqi civilians, the following phrases keep popping
up: "unprovoked attack," "unprovoked murder,"
"unprovoked killings."
This is presumably to counterpose
the Marine's actions at Haditha to the more reasonable attacks
in Iraq by U.S. armed forces--the attacks that are "provoked"
by the behavior of Iraqis toward them. But can we make such a
clean distinction?
Defenders of the Iraq occupation
will say "no" for their own reasons. They'll say--these
guys are under a lot of stress fighting a shadowy insurgency,
that the "enemy" can be anywhere, and when soldiers
see their buddies killed right beside them, it's only natural
that they lash out. To quote the Chicago Tribune's Mike
Dorning, U.S. soldiers face "a foreign population in which
friend, foe and bystander may seem indistinguishable."
I'll try to give my own answer
to this question by way of analogy. If someone conducts an armed
invasion into your house and shoots you in your sleep, it is
clear, is it not, that it is an unprovoked attack.
Now, let's say you violently
resist the armed home invader and, in the ensuing melee, he kills
you--did you provoke him to attack? Is a condition of the home
invader's attack being "unprovoked" that the homeowner
submit peacefully to the home invasion? No, it would still be
an unprovoked attack. The action of the homeowner, on the other
hand, would be a provoked attack, i.e., an attack provoked by
the home invader.
The problem with the term "unprovoked
attack" is that it deliberately obscures the larger picture--that
the entire U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq itself is an
unprovoked attack by a foreign army on the Iraqi people. All
U.S. armed action in Iraq is provocative in this sense; all Iraqi
reactions to it are provoked by the occupation.
It is shameful that we should
even have to explain this, so numbed are many people in this
country to the idea that the U.S. is perfectly within its rights
to operate hundreds of military bases around the world and invade
any country at will, and that it isn't legitimate for anyone
to resist it.
The top military brass lies
when it says that massacres like Haditha are the exception. The
entire U.S. military machine is a machine for violently enforcing
U.S. will abroad.
Soldiers (even more than U.S.
civilians if that's possible) are trained in methods that dehumanize
Arabs and Muslims to make it easier to kill them. Massacres of
Iraqis--civilians and resistance fighters alike--are built into
the situation.
Military occupations almost
always become total wars on the occupied population, because
the majority seethe with hatred against the occupiers and eventually
resist by whatever means at their disposal. Within that group,
a significant minority are provoked to such outrage that they
decide to take up the gun against the occupier.
This is why the U.S. soldier
cannot distinguish between friend and foe--occupying armies have
very few friends--or collaborators, in the common vernacular.
As the Haditha scandal develops, expect to hear stories about
many more Hadithas.
Of course, everything would
go a lot more smoothly if the Iraqis would just accept heavily
armed U.S. troops tramping through their streets, wrecking their
infrastructure and shooting their family members. If Iraqis could
just stop "provoking" American soldiers, then perhaps
these damnable massacres wouldn't occur anymore.
Alternatively, the resistance
could identify itself a little better to American troops--perhaps
wear green uniforms or wave little flags. During the American
revolution one British officer complained: "Never had the
British army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose; they send their
riflemen five or six at a time who conceal themselves behind
trees, etc., till an opportunity presents itself of taking a
shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat.
What an unfair method of carrying on a war!"
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