Out with a whimper

The New York Times has a wistful post-mortem up today on why murder cases against U.S. Marines for actions they took in Haditha, Iraq unraveled.

It's the kind of piece that makes me wish Cassandra of the now-defunct Villainous Company was still writing for public consumption. Talk about ill-concealed disbelief: Like Lord Cornwallis asking his regimental band to play "The World Turned Upside Down" for the British surrender to George Washington's Continental Army after the battle of Yorktown, Times reporter Paul von Zielbauer and his editors look back through misty water-colored memories of that time when "it seemed the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity."

Those were days that mainstream journalists could understand. Brian DePalma found people to greenlight "Redacted." Their preferred metanarrative was rolling in clover and (as Ann Coulter notes) could still scare up an occasional veteran willing to smear both the people now on active duty and the noncomissioned officers of one generation back who trained them.

Then the axis shifted somehow. Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA) discoverd the perils of walking point on a rush to judgment, and the "Haditha Massacre" narrative began losing traction.

Me being me, I had to find musical hooks in a mess that would otherwise sound like just another episode of "nothing to see here; move along please." This time I had help from the big boys. The NYT article fingers Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware as the mixmaster and disc jockey who cued "Foolish Games" for a press corps that had expected to hear not Jewel, God bless her, but Broooce or Neil Young or even another round of "Teach Your Children" from David Crosby and his bandmates.

Colonel Ware had the temerity to suggest that evidence presented by military prosecutors was "simply not strong enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt." Amazing how linear thinking always seems to rear its head at inconvenient times, isn't it? Moreover, says one Times source with what reads like shock in print but may have sounded more like admiration when he talked to a reporter, Colonel Ware "seems to make his judgments without regard for anything but the law." Imagine.

And get this-- even the scrupulous regard for Islamic custom previously displayed by the Times slips a bit: not because the Times has a problem with insurgents who use civilians as cover in their firefights with American troops, but because Islamic burial custom is such that "relatives of those killed in Haditha refused American requests to exhume the bodies for forensic analysis."

That's not to say that the Times hasn't tried to play the collapse of the murder angle objectively. To the credit of all concerned, the apparent bafflement and seemingly genuine regret of those people who criticize Colonel Ware's judgment are balanced by a coda of support for Ware from a retired Air Force lawyer, although one wonders whether his Air Force affiliation is highlighted as a wink at "he wasn't an infantryman, so what does he really know about what those troglodytes do?"

In any case, whether you're inclined to give the NYT benefit of doubt or not, it's impossible to read the story without a growing sense that Cassandra came even nearer the mark than she knew whenever her regular diatribes against journalistic malfeasance included comic bits from editors who declaimed in French with phrases like "quelle horror!" and "sacre bleu!"

Reporter Paul von Zielbauer must have drawn the short straw. Although his work here will be instructive long after one cell phone service complaint too many gets globetrotting columnist Tom Friedman locked in a room with a vinyl copy of Shaun Cassidy singing "Da Do Run Run" for three days straight, radio righty Michael Savage and other watchdogs of patriotic (not to say jingoist) temperament would seem to be correct: the collapse of the Haditha prosecutions is a story that nobody at the New York Times wanted to write.

Had things gone the other way (rather than moving by the barest of incremental steps toward the benign end of the continuum between benevolent and malicious), convictions would likely have been splashed on the front page of a Sunday edition. Perhaps because Colonel Ware recommended dismissal or reduction of the charges involved, he and the Marine Corps got Saturday placement instead.

UPDATE, Oct. 10: Thanks to whoever on the Watcher's Council nominated this post as a non-Council read of the week. The whole Haditha story continues to unfold.