On the Fourth of July: A rose for Abeer (By Luciana Bohne Online Journal Contributing Writer )

I read somewhere that the administration of President Bush the First told the Pentagon in the Gulf War: "No My Lais." If that is true, his son, who majored in history at Yale, must have said, perhaps indirectly or by omission, "Two, three My Lais."
Because they are happening.
It's the Fourth of July all over again. I was going to tape the Declaration of Independence to my mailbox (flawed as it may be), but I feared that it would be read as a seditious document and might get me arrested like that Vietnam War veteran recently was, who was nabbed and handcuffed at the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center in Chicago for wearing an antiwar T-shirt while drinking a cup of coffee.
Another impressive victory for the farceurs of the "war on terror"!
It also seems to be My Lai season in Iraq all over again -- a season of unrestrained murder and rape of civilians and of all-out conspiracy to cover them up. And I'm not talking about "al Qaeda in Iraq." I'm talking about the USA in Iraq.
I planted some unpatriotic (they are neither "with us" nor "against us," but, like the lilies in the fields, they toil not and neither do they kill) delphinium and black-eyed susans in the garden, but I could not stop thinking of the rape of a young girl, her murder, and the murder of three members of her family in their own home in Mahmoudiya, a village some 20 miles south of Baghdad.

At first -- and for three months afterwards -- this crime, which occurred on 12 March (My Lai happened on 16 March 1968) and is now known to have involved up to six soldiers from the US Army's 101st Airborne Division, 502nd Infantry Regiment, was ascribed to the Sunni "insurgency" and confined to the oblivion of so many other massacres of civilians blithely normalized under the convenient rubric of "ethnic and religious strife." It did not seem to bother the military authorities that the "Sunni insurgency" alibi was inconsistent with the family's own Sunni identity. Shia, Sunni what's the difference -- they were killed and that was the end of it.
But it wasn't.
"Stuff happens," opined the latter-day Polonius of the Bush-conspiracy-junta to make endless war, Donald Rumsfeld, to explain the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning of the treasures of the National Library in those heady days (for Americans) of the "liberation" of Iraq and the protection of its Oil Ministry and Interior Ministry, with its vast repository of spying data on the citizens of Iraq. "Stuff happens," said the pompous nincompoop, the Secretary of Death, who seems not to want to know that "stuff happening" in occupied territories is the responsibility of the occupying command -- a duty assigned by those "quaint" folks who wrote the Geneva Conventions for the protection of civilians and their property in occupied territories (1949).

And it sure does. "Stuff happens," if no one cares to stop it. Ask Macbeth: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace,” a pace awash in blood.
The "incident" in Mahmoudiya, like the one in My Lai, resurfaced when US soldiers spilled the beans -- to speak in the homespun vernacular of Uncle Polonius Rumsfeld, who often dresses up murder in home-on-the-range witticisms. After a three-month delay, the army was forced to start an investigation because soldiers from the unit came forward. They did so after two soldiers from the same unit, taken captive from a military checkpoint, turned up dead in June.
Feeling, like Macbeth, that they are invincible because "no man of woman-born" can kill them (apparently, they think only the devil and his witches can -- or, a fact arrogantly forgotten, one merely of Caesarian birth), the Bush hierarchy then moved swiftly to find the "bad apples" in a barrelful of rotten ones, especially at the top, on whom to pin sole responsibility for this unspeakable crime. That happened for the 400-plus victims in My Lai. One culprit -- and he was pardoned by Nixon under pressure from that sector of the US public who can't distinguish between a Purple-Heart action and a war crime, as they amply demonstrated once again in the presidential election of 2004 -- fraud included.
They arrested Steven D. Green, 21, now a civilian, former private first class. He appeared in a federal magistrate's court in Charlotte, North Carolina, charged in connection with the Mahmoudiya crime. He faces the death penalty if he's convicted of murder. Green was discharged for a "personality disorder" before the attack became public knowledge.
Comforting to know that the army disgorges such troubled individuals into the complete innocence of the private domain without or before apparently attending to their little "personality disorders"! Of course, Mr. Green is innocent until proven guilty, but, if guilty, it wouldn't surprise me to discover that his mother "gave [the army] a good boy, and they made him a murderer," as one anguished mother of a My Lai massacre participant justifiably cried out at the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley for that monstrosity in which his defense was that he "carried out orders" -- as well he may have done, though it was not a valid defense as those who ordered them knew.
One aspect of Green's career in the army attracts my attention.
He served 11 months with the 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, before being deployed to Iraq -- as did all the men allegedly implicated in the "incident." The 101st was put in charge of Falluja right after the invasion in March 2003. They were indeed greeted as liberators by the pro-American mayor of the town, but they did not return the compliment. Within days, they shot into an unarmed crowd of demonstrators who demanded that troops be removed from a local school. They wounded or killed 17 unarmed people.
Indeed, the 101st were so gung-ho and inept that they swiftly turned Falluja into a seething cauldron of resentment. The 101st were removed from Falluja on 31 March 2004 to be replaced by the Marines -- the transfer occurring just as four mercenaries were notoriously dragged from their vehicle and subjected by a vengeful crowd to a theatre-of-cruelty death, which sealed the fate of Falluja, the City of Mosques. On 8 November 2004, four days after the people of the United States elected (or re-elected or almost elected or whatever happened) Bush for president, the terror of the earth was unleashed on the people of Falluja -- napalm (which the army no longer calls "napalm" but Mark 77 firebombs, an improved napalm), white phosphorus, snipers, hospitals bombed, darkness, lack of water -- and more. Today, Falluja is an ex-city.
You see my drift? Will Green be charged alone? Why should he be charged for the rape and murder of a girl if perpetrators of the rape and murder of a country go untried? They put him there. No. I’m not saying he should not be tried; I’m saying that our leaders are making a mockery of justice. Is it any wonder that our soldiers get criminalized when they see our institutions crumble under the weight of this massive crime that is the attack on Iraq?
Apparently five mates might join Green in the dock. Military officials have confirmed that four members of the 502nd Infantry have been confined to a US base in the vicinity of Mahmoudiya. One more soldier, on active duty, has been arrested after confessing that he participated in the apparently premeditated atrocity.
I am sorry for their mothers as I am for all the mothers with children in Iraq. It is not a happy thought to realize that one's children can never be heroes in an illegal and unjust war or to realize further that they might even come home something quite opposite to a hero. Nor is it easy to live with the burden of knowing that their nights are haunted by the furies of guilt and retribution, their souls permanently singed by the burning memory of what they saw done or have done. Or their children might return impervious to guilt or second thoughts, inoculated against empathy -- imposing their emotional hell on others because they no longer know what love is or can be.
“The sleep of reason begets monsters,” said Francisco Goya, a Spanish painter, who knew something about war
True, many soldiers don't act villainously. They act courageously in physical ways. The same soldiers who went on a murder and rape rampage in My Lai had previously acted with astonishing physical courage towards their comrades, but, at My Lai, they had not the moral courage to say no (with one notable exception). Soldiers show great physical courage when they protect one another other, often at great cost to themselves, and if they protect the civilians of whom they have charge. But finding the strength to act with moral courage in the charnel house that the Iraq invasion inhabits is another matter. Moral courage is something finer and rarer than mere physical courage, which is why mothers of soldiers who resist the slaughter and the war in general are the blessed ones.
Moral courage preserves one's humanity in protecting that of others'. Moral cowardice leads to massacres -- the greater the mass of civilian moral cowards behind the single ones in the field, the more numerous the victims. We might as well share the moral guilt as a nation with those soldiers who commit atrocities in a war we have allowed to happen. It is the honorable, the responsible thing to do. The criminal responsibility, however, lies at the top.
We must bring them to account.
Yesterday was Independence Day in the USA. I remembered Abeer Qasim Hamza, 15. She was said to be "pretty."
And scared.
I will not give you the details of her rape and death. I tried to last night. It gave me nightmares.
I planted a rose in her memory, and if a thorn pricks me and a drop of blood falls to the ground, I shall know that she once lived, just like me, but, unlike me, not for long.
She died young, perhaps green-eyed, as the poet said, and beautiful.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.