Rall, Ted. “The 10,000th Haditha.” Ted Rall, May 30, 2006.

Summary: Congress and the American mainstream media have created an immense uproar about the killing of Iraqi civilians by American marines at Haditha last November, with even conservative pundits concerned about its effects on the goal of winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Some commentators have been surprised and puzzled by the failure of press accounts in Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries to place the same emphasis on the events at Haditha, and by the American antiwar community's apparent lack of interest in using the atrocity to foment opposition to the American occupation.

The explanation is that Haditha is not really exceptional. Atrocities occur all the time in Iraq. They are routine.

Newspapers don't bother to report when the sun rises in the east nor do they assign reporters to cover when dogs bite men. Likewise, says Baghdad newspaper boy Imad Mohammed, Iraqi newspapers haven't mentioned Haditha. Same-old, same-old massacres of Iraqis by American forces are no longer news: “The Americans see a Muslim go into a mosque and just assume he is a terrorist. They either arrest him or blow it up.”

Rami Khouri, editor at The Daily Star in Lebanon tells NPR that Haditha is “not a huge story [in the Middle East]. It's getting a lot of coverage in the United States, obviously, but most people in the Arab world are against what the United States did in Iraq ... They say look, this was a catastrophe from the beginning and they're not surprised that this is happening. They kind of take it in stride because everything the United States is doing in Iraq is seen as morally and politically unacceptable.”

Most of the world's population -- including virtually every Muslim and about a third of Americans -- always believed that the war against Iraq was a genocidal attempt to intimidate the Muslim world and extort its oil at gunpoint. They don't see a difference between Haditha and the thousands of other Iraqis killed by U.S. forces since 2003. Because the entire exercise was morally bankrupt from the outset, sold and perpetuated with countless lies, all of the 200,000-plus civilians and Iraqi soldiers who have died -- whether by bomb or by bullet -- were effectively murdered by the U.S. military.

Haditha, where two dozen were executed, was merely the 10,000th Haditha.

American opponents of the war already know how the Republican script for Haditha will go: A few soldiers will be made into scapegoats, described as “bad apples,” perhaps even imprisoned. Possibly a low-grade officer will receive a black mark for inadequately training or supervising his men. No one in a position of authority will question or challenge any policy. No one will draw any conclusions about the morality of the occupation. The violence will continue. It is apparent to everyone from the outset that nothing is going to change. So why go along with the pretense that Haditha is exceptional?