Military experts are said to be "stunned" by recent reports of American soldiers committing "atrocities" against Iraq civilians. In response to a recent marine rampage the Pentagon instituted a two hour "training course" to teach soldiers that it isn't cricket to kill unarmed civilians, and congratulated itself publicly for cutting civilian murders to one a week, down from seven a week last year.
The hypocrisy in all this is the pretence that atrocities are an occasional occurrence perpetrated by a few bad apples--that it's possible to bomb and invade a country humanely. But the atrocities committed by a few marines, overcome with fear and rage, are nothing compared to those committed by cool and comfortable pilots on bombing raids. The latter are not counted as 'atrocities', despite the fact that (or because) they are far more common and far more devastating. Whether a child is slaughtered by a deliberate act or by "collateral damage" doesn't matter much to the parent.
The last two decades have seen a flood of novels and memoirs by American and European authors depicting the horrible agony of losing a child. If a novel or memoir were written and published by every parent who has lost a child to "collateral damage" there would be no room in the bookstores for anything else. It's the height of hypocrisy to be horrified by incidents of savagery committed by young boys under constant threat of death--boys inadequately prepared for the quagmire they've been thrown into by a callous and ignorant administration--while far more devastating carnage is dished out daily by those who never have to witness, or pay for, the consequences of their actions.
All modern wars are automatically wars against civilians--against women and children. A declaration of war today is a statement of intent to commit atrocities.
Perhaps the reason Americans seem so comfortable about bombing and invading little countries around the world is that the United States, unlike Europe, has never experienced "collateral damage". If we had ever been bombed and invaded ourselves, had our infrastructure demolished, been subject to foreign soldiers breaking into our homes at night, seen our children slaughtered and our houses destroyed, we would be, I suspect, less gung-ho about war and less cavalier about inflicting these horrors on other people.
It's long past time to admit that the 19th century image of war as soldiers fighting each other on a battlefield with 'rules of engagement' is at best an absurd anachronism. Modern war is simply the wholesale slaughter of innocent people by everyone who engages in it. Pretending that only some child-murders are despicable atrocities while others are humane and lawful is just another symptom of the Bush administration's moral bankruptcy.