Here’s the new MyLai

A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines “killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.

From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.

One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. “The Americans came into the room where my father was praying,” she said, “and shot him.”

On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.

Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps’ own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.

I thought Abu Ghraib would be the My Lai of Iraq. Turns out, it’s probably more along the lines of the mining of Haiphong or bombing Cambodia. I don’t know if there was a Tet offensive that shattered public opinion against the war (we seem to have dripped over the line rather than jumped). Turns out, I didn’t need to search for a metaphorical My Lai in Iraq because we had a direct replication. The hooded-on-a-box guy will be the image that remains, like the screaming naked Vietnamese girl running from the napalm.

“This one is ugly,” one official told NBC News.

Ugly? No. Abominable. Inhuman. Unforgiveable. Executing a woman who is leaning over in prayer is not ugly, it is depraved. It may be a symptom of people stretched past their breaking point, given impossible tasks in impossible conditions, and I hold everyone from the soldiers who did it up to the C-in-C responsible. These soldiers, unlike the loser rabble that went on a rampage at My Lai, were considered the best of the best. Hand picked volunteers. And they snapped.

I’m sure the 101st Fighting Keyboarders will accentuate the “rogue unit” angle and the small number of executed. Even so, they will be accepting the un

    exceptional nature of the United States (it’s a paradox for their worldview, and I predict they will ignore it rather than go insane trying to reconcile our unexceptional exceptionalism). In any event, this is a war crime. Something you see in Darfur or Serbia or … Iraq.

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