'US soldiers killing innocent civilians in Iraq is not news. Just as it was not news that US soldiers slaughtered countless innocent civilians in Vietnam. However, when some rare reportage of this non news from Iraq does seep through the cracks of the corporate media, albeit briefly, the American public seems shocked. Private and public statements of denial and dismissal immediately start to fill the air. We hear, "American soldiers would never do such a thing," or "Who would make such a ridiculous claim?"

It amazes me that so many people in the US today somehow seriously believe that American soldiers would never kill civilians. Despite the fact that they are in a no-win guerrilla war in Iraq which, like any other guerrilla war, always generates more civilian casualties than combatant casualties on either side.

Robert J. Lifton is a prominent American psychiatrist who lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders after his work with US veterans from Vietnam. His studies on the behavior of those who have committed war crimes led him to believe it does not require an unusual level of mental illness or of personal evil to carry out such crimes. Rather, these crimes are nearly guaranteed to occur in what Lifton refers to as "atrocity-producing situations."..

... Having stood with soldiers anticipating that each moving car would turn into a bomb and each passerby into a suicide bomber, I have tasted the stress and fear these soldiers live with on a daily basis. When one of their fellow soldiers is killed by a roadside bomb, the need for revenge may be directed at anything. And repeated often enough, the process gets socialized.

It's about this attitude brought on by the normalization of the abnormal under "atrocity-producing situations" that Dr. Lifton speaks. Unless of course we consider Mattis and others like him to be rare sociopaths who are able to participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional harm.

And it is this attitude that is responsible for the incessant replication of wanton slaughter and madness in Iraq today.

Back in November of 2004, I wrote about 12-year-old Fatima Harouz. She lay dazed in a crowded room in Yarmouk Hospital in Bahgdad, feebly waving her bruised arm at flies. Her shins had been shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her home in Latifiya, a small city just south of Baghdad. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.

Her mother, who was standing with us, said, "They attacked our home and there weren't even any resistance fighters in our area." Her brother had been shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers. "Before they left, they killed all of our chickens," she added, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.

On hearing the story, a doctor looked at me sternly and asked, "This is the freedom ... in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?" How Massacres Become the Norm

Are there such things as 'atrocity producing situations'? Who's to blame for civilian casualties in Iraq?

Anthony Burgess is said to have based the rape scene in his book, "A Clockwork Orange", on an incident in which US soliders raped his wife while they were living in Malaysia during WWII.

While I can't remember many specifics, I know I have read of incidents in earlier wars that are similar to these incidents in Iraq. The similar behavior of invading (or occupying) armed forces is certainly not limited to US soldiers; I read more US history than I have the history of other countries. I do remember a book by muckraking reporter George Seldes, in which he reprinted some letters to home from US troops in the Philippines during the Spanish AMerican War (another US "manufactured" war). One writer boasted about shooting artillery at villagers and watching them run. That was certainly odd action toward the citizens of a country that we were "freeing" from Spanish rule.*

While some no doubt will read these posts as "not supporting the troops" and/or unpatriotic and/or unAmerican and/or anti-American, they are not. The posts are merely acknowledging the human condition. People under stress react in many different ways, and, generally, the greater the stress, the more extreme the reactions can be.


* Some US politician (President McKinley?) said it was the duty of the US to "Christianize our little brown brothers." Either the man was ignorant of Philippine (and world) history or he didn't consider Catholicism to be Christian. Most of the Philippines had been converted to Catholicism for a couple of centuries. The US governed the island until after WWII, and kept military bases there until the 1990s.

I forgot to answer the second question.

"Who's to blame for civilian casualties in Iraq?"

The war is to blame. Whoever started the war started the civilian casualties. Anyone not expecting what has happened in Iraq knew neither Iraq nor human nature. Didn't Colin Powell, during the First Gulf War, say of Iraq, "You break it, you own it"?