Marine's wife paints portrait of US troops out of control in Haditha
The marine unit involved in the alleged massacre at Haditha had drug and alcohol problems and had suffered a "total breakdown" in discipline according to the wife of one of the battalion's staff sergeants in Newsweek magazine.
"There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing [violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."
The picture emerging is that the US forces are coming apart under the relentless pressure with some marines now entering their third tour of duty in Iraq.
The Third battallion lost seventeen men in ten days in Fallujah and it is said that their morale had plummetted by the time they entered Haditha."We are in trouble in Iraq," Barry McCaffrey, a retired army general who played a leading role in the Iraq war, told Time magazine. "Our forces can't sustain this pace, and I'm afraid the American people are walking away from this war."
The Newsweek account described a gung-ho battalion that had staged a chariot race, complete with captured horses, togas and heavy metal music, before the battle for Falluja in late 2004. The marines were given loose rules of engagement in the vicious urban warfare that followed.
"If you see someone with a cellphone," said one of the commanders was quoted as saying, half-jokingly, "put a bullet in their fucking head".
At one point in the battle, a marine from the 3rd battalion was caught on camera shooting a wounded, unarmed man as he lay on the ground. However, the marine involved was later exonerated.
It has been claimed that incidents like Haditha are more commonplace than we have been told and that the lack of press on the ground has meant that such incidents have largely gone unreported.
Thaer Juma, a lawyer and director of a non-government organisation in Baghdad, said: "These crimes are happening every day in [the western Iraqi cities of] Haditha and Ramadi, but the international community knows nothing about them because there are media blackouts on the operations, and there are no international humanitarian NGOs to record these transgressions."The first thing that any Occupying Force has to supply is order. It is quite clear that the US/UK forces have failed to provide this basic amenity.
However, if these reports are true, it would imply that the inability to enforce order in Iraq has meant that disorder is now breaking out in the ranks of the forces.
Every day, the news from Iraq simply gets worse, the picture bleaker.
There is going to have to come a time when even Bush and Blair accept the inevitable.
This war is lost.
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