The Unindicted

The indictment against marines who killed civilians in Haditha (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/15/60minutes/main2574973.shtml) does not include the people responsible for putting young Americans in a situation that caused them to fire without looking and taking innocent lives.

It does not include the deciders that started the war. The President and his team came to office with a grudge against Saddam Hussein and a keen desire to manipulate massive oil fields. They twisted September 11 terror, molded intelligence and threatened venomous attack against anyone who disagreed. They destabilized Iraq without a plan to set it back in place. They ignored history, they ignored intelligence and they ignored the American people. They drove our Armed Forces into a snake pit of people pitted against each other, united only in the desire to rid themselves of American occupiers.

A soldier's primary personal mission is to get home alive. The Haditha marines were ordered into a neighborhood to find enemy soldiers hidden among children. They traveled between buildings that could be homes or bunkers, depending on current occupancy. A remote-triggered IED explodes and takes out one of the marines' vehicles and several of their comrades. Like their fathers, charging into Vietnamese huts, they are invaders in a foreign country facing people they do not understand and knowing the next room could contain an armed enemy. Feel the stress, the confusion, the fear, the terror and...

...put it on the head of the administration that put the soldiers in that street that day. Name the Secretaries of Defense and all of their deputies who have never had a plan for stabilizing Iraq and cannot manage an honorable end to this misbegotten war. These are the parties responsible for the massacre that day, the uncounted innocents killed by our bombs, and a lingering legacy of war resulting from our destabilization of Iraq.

The President needs to be held responsible for this war. Congress needs to investigate the true agendas operating in the drive to war, the special interests that have benefited from the war, and impeach any liars and thieves they find along the way.

The Marines of Haditha will serve long sentences for the mistakes they made that day. The people who are responsible for the war that put them in Haditha that day should be their cellmates.