Haditha and the poverty of reason on the left

The Belmont Club:

The Nation goes out and says yes there was a war crime committed in Haditha and yes the guilty party was George W. Bush.

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None of it would matter if "the agenda" coincided with the facts which are presumably known, or sufficiently known, or known in a larger sense to the Nation. But the coverage of Katrina provides an interesting example of things that were "known" which were really not. Not that it matters now. One internal problem with the Nation's narrative, which will be invariant to any outcome of the investigation immediately jumps out. The assertion that it was all "willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis" is immediately contradicted by a recitation of how it was 'covered up' -- "the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors". Note to whoever is in charge of sending messages of terror to the Iraqis: terror is no good unless you publicize it; if you conceal your message with false stories, or blame roadside bombs and worst of all, if you pay money to survivors then you are missing the point. Any halfwit knows that the right way to sow terror is to leave corpses hanging from lampposts, skulls piled before the city gates or decapitate victims in a studio and distribute the video through Al Jazeera.

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Has the Nation even comprehended that the enemy in Iraq's very strategy is a war crime? From the failure to wearing identifiable uniforms to the deliberate attacks on non combatants, not in response to provocation, but as a target because of their innocence, the enemy's strategy is to terrify and frighten people into accepting their tyranny. If the enemy had worn identifiable uniforms as required by the Geneva Convention, it is unlikely that any civilians in Haditha would have been killed by the Marines. This fundamental refusal by the enemy to follow the laws of war is the primary cause for civilian deaths at the hands of US troops. That the Nation is not interested in the war crimes of the enemy tells you a lot about the standards of that publication when it comes to commenting on war crimes.