Many of you will recognize this picture
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from Time magazine's March 27 article "One morning in Haditha." When I first saw the article, I tried to touch her face through the screen. I copied the picture and taped it to the windows of my car and my truck with the caption "Ask me about her." No one did. I have thought about this little girl and her story every day since.
Eman, the 9-year-old pictured, told a grim tale of watching American Marines kill almost her entire family. In cold blood. Time also printed pictures of some of the bodies. One of the bodies is that of a small child, who looks exactly like one of my sons. He lies on his back, twisted in death, with his beautiful little face turned up to the sky.
Discrepancies in Eman's story that have arisen in an interviewhave cast some doubt on her version. Never mind. Maybe someone in her house knew about the bomb. That doesn't give anyone a green light to kill babies, women and innocent men.
What I can't stand is my complicity in these deaths. I have gone to the occasional rally, wrote one letter to the editor two years after the fact. I am living proof, in some ways, of Scott Ritter's assertion that we really don't care about people in Iraq, or anywhere else, for that matter. We care about our creature comforts, about maintaining the most extravagant society ever seen in amazing abundance. I felt like setting my house on fire and standing out in the lawn telling people about Eman and her family as the flames billow up. It is really, really hard to go from grieving over this to believing that electing Democrats is the first step to fixing it. Somebody help me believe that it is.
Anyone who reads Nir Rosen's book In the Belly of the Green Bird knows that it is very unlikely that Haditha is an isolated incident. The callous attitudes and complete unpreparedness that Rosen documents could only lead to widespread atrocities.
Coming to believe that our boys did this is unbearable. To find that not even the decency of the common soldier could pull us out of the mess that the gang of evil have gotten us into is too much for me. I have known for a long time intellectually that this war was lost. I didn't know it in my heart until I saw that dead little boy.