For some reason, the grunt's love song made the brass cringe:
"I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me . . . as the
bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and
then I laughed maniacally."
Cpl. Joshua Belile had a recording contract and everything, but,
uh-uh. No singing Marine's gonna be regaling America with the sadistic
pleasures to be had in occupied Iraq, no sir, not with all the
atrocity investigations going on these days, and the dirty truth of
our Middle East adventure oozing into the coverage of even the most
administration-sympathetic media outlets.
Last week I wrote a column about horror on the macro level in Iraq:
the likely serious health consequences resulting from widespread use
of depleted uranium munitions, constituting a crime against not just
the Iraqis but the whole world, because of airborne radiation
poisoning. This week, horror on the micro level is once again making
the news, with the arrest of Steven Green, a recently discharged GI,
in connection with the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl,
along with the murder of her parents and 7-year-old sister, four
months ago in Mahmoudiya.
Atrocity damage control requires isolating such events, not just
vertically (keep the blame as far down the chain of command as
possible), but horizontally, so that journalists and the public at
large don't start thinking they see a pattern of barbarism in our
mission to liberate Iraq. A perfunctory investigation followed by
widely publicized punishment needs to end each matter as it comes up.
But suddenly the embedded media aren't so compliant. As we read about
the brutal, premeditated murders in Mahmoudiya on March 12, we're
likely to get a recap of other criminal investigations under way or
recently concluded: the Haditha massacre, a shooting in Fallujah
(eight servicemen charged with murder), another shooting in Ramadi,
the deaths of detainees here and there. Indeed, we might even get a
civilian body count thrown in. The acknowledged Iraqi dead are
apparently up to 50,000 in the mainstream media (even though the
British medical journal Lancet published a study putting the likely
total at twice that - a year and a half ago).
All of which brings me back to Cpl. Belile's derailed recording
career. The song he'd posted on the Internet and hoped to make a
splash with - "Hadji Girl" - tells the story of a GI who falls for a
local girl at an Iraqi Burger King. He accompanies her home but, oops,
it's a trap. The dad and brother, shouting "jihad," brandish their
AK-47s, so he pulls the sister in front of him as a shield and (ha ha)
she's the one who gets shot. Then he returns fire with his M-16 and
blows the rest of the family "to eternity."
Adding to the tenderness of this song, which, according to Marine
Times, the high command has apparently forbidden Belile to record, is
the fact that "hadji" is a racist term, the new slur for Arabs and
Muslims, Iraq war vet Aiden Delgado explained on blackcommentator.com.
"It is used extensively in the military," he said, ". . . with the
same kind of connotation as 'gook,' 'Charlie' or the n-word. Official
Army documents now use it in reference to Iraqis or Arabs. It's real
common." He also said of his Army training: "We sang in cadences. And
the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing
ragheads."
I humbly submit there's no such thing as a benign occupation - that
you cannot subjugate a people without also dehumanizing them. This is
called racism. It's the ever-present undercurrent of our mission in
Iraq and it's as insidious and life-threatening to Iraqis as DU
poisoning, as the story of a real-life "Hadji Girl" in Mahmoudiya
makes clear.
According to the Washington Post and other accounts, the young girl,
Abeer Qasim Hamza, had the extraordinary misfortune of attracting,
with her good looks, the interest of some of the GIs who manned the
checkpoint she was required to pass through several times a day. They
made advances at her. She was afraid, she told her mother. Her
unspeakable tragedy illustrates a basic fact of occupation: Iraqi
civilians are at the mercy of immature young Americans with guns. They
have no rights.
A witness "found Abeer sprawled dead in a corner, her hair and a
pillow next to her consumed by fire, and her dress pushed up to her
neck," the Post said.
Unlike the Marine in the song, the boys from the 502nd Infantry
Regiment weren't lured into temptation by a femme fatale. They were on
the prowl for spoils. Pvt. Green and his buddies, accounts tell us,
allegedly planned the operation in advance: rape the girl, kill her,
set her on fire, kill the witnesses, blame it on the insurgents. It
almost worked.
Only after an act of grotesque counter-barbarism - the torture and
beheading of two American soldiers from the very same unit - did a
guilt-ridden fellow soldier spill the beans about the Mahmoudiya
atrocity, during a post-beheading session with a stress counselor.
John Pike, director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, suggests
that what we're witnessing is not necessarily a spike in GI murders of
Iraqi civilians all of a sudden but, rather, a no-longer-avoidable
pressure to investigate them. "It may be," he told the San Francisco
Chronicle, "that this has been going on all along and it was just not
being reported."
I'd say these murders are an absolutely predictable form of the
"collateral damage" of occupation. Its architects are the ones who
belong on trial, for the rape of a nation.
---
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an
editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You
can respond to this column at
bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web
site at commonwonders.com.
© 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
