Vanity Fair has published a tragic story that attempts to reconstruct events related to the death of one Marine and twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children on November 19, 2005 in Haditha, Iraq:
When noncombatants are killed, it matters little to the survivors whether the American rules allowed it, or what the U.S. military courts decide. The survivors go to war in return, which provokes more of the same in a circular dive that spirals beyond recovery. Haditha is just a small example. By now, nearly one year later, hatred of the American forces in the city has turned so fierce that military investigators for the trials at Pendleton have given up on going there. That hatred is blood hatred. It is the kind of hatred people are willing to die for, with no expectation but revenge.
[…]
A man cries, “This is an act denied by God. What did he do? To be executed in the closet? Those bastards! Even the Jews would not do such an act! Why? Why did they kill him this way? Look, this is his brain on the ground!”
The boy continues to sob over the corpse on the floor. He shouts, “Father! I want my father!”
Another man cries, “This is democracy?”
Well yeah, well no, well actually this is Haditha. For the United States, it is what defeat looks like in this war.
Side note: two of three 500-pound laser-guided GBU-12 Paveway bombs were duds on that day. That is the same munition used to kill Al Zarqawi, and it was originally developed to attack “many small and moving targets on the Ho Chi Minh trail” in the Vietnam War.
The problem with identifying the enemy reminds me of a particular type of problem in network security during the mid 1990s. Many initially believed that the best way to respond to someone sending denial of service attacks to your perimeter was to respond with similar or even superior floods of packets. The problem with this, as was quickly discovered, was the difficulty in positively identifying the true source of the attacking packets. An IP address is easily spoofed. This problem was then actually made worse when a “smurf attack” was devised. Smurfing meant sending just enough attack packets to a victim network that the systems would start attacking each other. In other words, a clever attacker can sometimes use very little effort to stir up a large battle that they could never win on their own.