My Lai revisited....in Iraq....

Only this time, there was no Hugh Thompson to redeem his country’s uniform or indeed his country’s people……

The US army has again proved the truism that there no atrocity in war (or invasions), all war is atrocity…..

A marine division in the Hadith region in Iraq has been found to have massacred three families, killing them in cold blood…..all of the family members (there was no discrimination between men, women and children, no matter how old or young) were shot (execution style) multiple times…..all because insurgents had killed one of their colleagues….it was a reprisal killing, no matter if they had to kill innocent people (in any case, in my view, the insurgents are innocent as well, fighting for their freedom)…. The report came to light after a TIME report was brought out after the journalists got hold of a video and a testimony of the massacre (the video was post-massacre)

It’s a classic case of how barbarism becomes the norm in any battle or war especially a protracted one….one of the marines even emailed one of the pictures of the massacre (that one of his colleague took) to his friend….what kind of sick person does that?

The credibility of the US, which was always an illusion anyway, is set to suffer another crippling blow as this is considered even serious than Abu Gharib, according to lawmakers (though what yardstick is used to compare atrocities, any atrocity, escapes me)….My Lai changed the way the American people viewed the Vietnam war, lets hope Hadith does something that will end the suffering of the Iraqi people. If it dosnt, it will not be anything new.....History is littered with atrocities that are conviniently forgotten or made to be forgotten.....

To me, the US military never had any credibility, especially after I had studied modern history…so to people like me, the only emotion that this incident (which is most probably one of numerous) evokes is one of immense tragedy and the uselessness of it all….the people of Iraq are suffering greatly and all we do is wonder if the ratings of Bush will slip by 5% or 7%.....sometimes I think we have become so used to horror that we forget to put things in perspective and our ‘just world hypothesis’ is something that takes over very quickly……

So my only hope is that more and more people understand is that its not the USA in particular or its rogue army that is the perpetrator…..any invasion, any riot, any war has its own Abu Gharib and its Fallujah and its Hadith…..

Read the Time article here….