The Sandbox

North Korea is threatening a test of a long-range missile capable of reaching the United States.  Condi Rice is threatening to shoot it down.  Aside from the sovereign/moral/political ramifications, this is just technically stupid.  The possible outcome to the North Korean test are:

Missile Failure (Good for us, bad for them, fairly likely)

Missile success (Bad for us, Good for them, possible)

If you add in our attempt to shoot it down you eliminate the Good outcome of missile failure and add a bad and a worse outcome:

Intercept success (Bad for us/Bad for them, possible)

Intercept failure (Very, very bad for us/very good for them, possible)

Who is it that keeps describing Condi Rice as "brilliant?" 

Who doesn't think this is a good thing?  I'm sure it won't be long before the Fringe Right (Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News) will claim that liberals are mourning Zarqawi.  Possibly, they'll find some fringe-lefty who will say something stupid to back up their rantings, though they didn't bother finding anyone who really did drool over the Haditha massacre.  Instead, they just said, over and over, that liberals were drooling over the massacre.  No, we aren't drooling.  Unlike any of the fringe right (Coulter, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Fox News) I actually did serve in the military.  So did many, many liberals.  We don't enjoy seeing people we identify with die.  Or come back maimed for life.  And we don't like seeing the service embarrassed and humiliated by out of control elements.  We knew it would happen.  We knew it was part of the cost of war, but we didn't and don't welcome any of it.

Zarqawi is/was an enemy to all, a murdering bastard of the lowest order.  Now he's dead.  Good riddance.  Of course, he isn't Osama Bin Laden.  Was not part of the 9/11 conspiracy.  His dying is not a victory of the "war on terror" because his ascendancy was only as a result of the US invasion of Iraq. 

The current news in Iraq is that, oddly, the killings at Haditha are not big news.  Why?  Probably because only in America do we believe we don't do that kind of thing.  The religion of war in this country includes the premise that we somehow fight cleaner and more nobly.  In fact, war brings out the worst in everyone and in any army there will be a few people worse than the rest.  When control is lost, when leadership drifts away, the worst rise and atrocities happen.  What makes this bad for us, though, is the long period of covering up or ignoring the problem.  Every other killing in Iraq, no matter how justified or tied to military necessity, will be questioned.  Can all this be blamed on Bush?  Andrew Sullivan says yes, and he gives a pretty compelling argument:

From the moment George W. Bush exempted U.S. military forces from the Geneva Conventions if "military necessity" demanded it, he sent a message. From the moment George W. Bush refused to accept Donald Rumsfeld's repeated offers to resign after Abu Ghraib, he sent a message. From the moment, George W. Bush appended a signing statement to the McCain Amendment, arguing that as commander-in-chief, he was not subject to the ban on torture and abuse of military prisoners, the president sent a message.

Those messages – in a tense and dangerous war, where bad things will always happen – made a difficult situation one where abuse and war crimes were almost bound to take place. And command responsibility in the military goes upward. The president cannot fill the role of being commander-in-chief in order to declare "Mission Accomplished" and then choose not to fill the role when his troops commit war-crimes and torture and atrocities. In what George W. Bush himself calls a "responsibility society," he has ultimate responsibility for the forces he commands. And there is a direct and obvious line between his decisions to break decades' long adherence to the Geneva Conventions and the pandemic of torture, and now incidents of war crimes, that have plagued this war and stained the honor of this country.

To say this is not to be, as Glenn Reynolds argues, "pathetic and poisonous." It is to face the fact that this president has formally lowered the moral standards for American warfare – in writing, and by his actions. He was given a chance to stop this with the McCain Amendment, and he dodged it. He is now reaping the whirlwind. We all are – not the least the vast majority of great and honorable soldiers whose profession has been stained by a derelict defense secretary and a torture-condoning president. The troops deserve so much better. So does America.

We don't know, yet, exactly what happened in Haditha.  We do know that Pentagon is prepping congress for the possibility that events are really as bad as has been reported, that Marines went on a rampage killing innocents, old men, women, children.  And the evidence indicates there was a cover-up.

Knowing just this, there are things that can be said.  Such as:

This was inevitable.  Part of the cost of war is that, as purpose lags and leadership decays, monstrous acts happen.  Even among the "good guys."  You have nineteen-year-old kids with awesome firepower, in a foreign country where you can't tell who your friends are.  And every once in a while some unseen group kills your buddies.  The amazing thing is that so many servicemen manage to stay disciplined and professional.

However, that doesn't excuse a murder rampage.  Saying, "oh, they were under a lot of pressure," insults all the other servicemen who handled the same kinds of pressure without losing their humanity.

In any case, we've lost.  This opens up every other suspect death to question.  Denials will no longer have any weight.  If the participants are not convicted, America will be seen as monstrous.  If they are convicted, it will be assumed that they are just the scape-goats for some higher-up who is getting away with it.  If higher-ups are convicted, the same assumption will merely be moved up one level.

In one of the homes, the men were separated from the family, and killed.  A nine-year-old boy witnessed his father's death by American troops.  He is quoted:

Nine-year-old Khalid was in the house.

“This is my father!” he screams. "God will take my revenge!"

 Perhaps Khalid will become a terrorist, perhaps just live in rage.  Maybe he will become a journalist.  Whatever he does will always be informed by that hate, though.  A hate that is growing with every action we take.

Apparently, any time a senior Al Queda member is killed, he is automatically promoted to “Al Queda number2″. I assume there are better benefits with that.