Connect: 'Every single day people are killed and thrown in the streets, in the garbage cans. They're scared to death. They don't even have time to think about what happened in Haditha," Hassan Bazzaz, an Iraqi political analyst, told the Los Angeles Times.
There's contempt for humanity: bins with corpses as rubbish. It's not surprising but it's still deeply dispiriting. Watching the still-in-office George Bush and Tony Blair on TV last week induced anger - not just routine derision and fatigue bred by guff and familiarity - but something much more visceral.
They've arrantly abused political power. Surely, by now, they're unquestionably war criminals? There's been "Shock and Awe", Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, "extraordinary rendition", secret CIA "prisons" in Europe, torture in Basra and other outrages.
Last November, there was Haditha. The place is on the Euphrates river. It's a mostly farming community of 90,000 people in the midst of a desert. Farmers there grow dates, oranges and apples in the shadow of palm trees.
On November 19th, 2005 a bomb exploded beneath a troop-carrying Humvee in the city. It killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, a 20-year-old marine from El Paso, Texas. In retaliation, 12 marines allegedly burst into homes and shot 24 unarmed Iraqis, including 11 women and children and an 89-year-old man - an amputee - in a wheelchair. Haditha has since been called "Iraq's My Lai".
In August, 2005 - more than three months before the massacre in Haditha - six US marine snipers were killed in an ambush in the city. Just two days later, a roadside bomb killed another 14 marines and their interpreter. Such heavy losses perhaps made it inevitable that the marines would seek revenge. When they exacted it, however, they exacted it on some of Haditha's most vulnerable people.
Initially, the marines blamed the Iraqi insurgents' bomb for killing not just Miguel Terrazas but 15 civilians also. However, in a rare and welcome achievement for US media, Time magazine claimed it had a video of the alleged incident. The footage showed heavily bloodstained rooms and the bodies of alleged victims wrapped in rugs at their houses and in Haditha's morgue.
Mohammed Basit, a 23-year-old engineering student, said of the house of his neighbour Salim Rasif: "The blood was everywhere in Salim's bedroom. I saw organs and flesh on the ground and a liver on the bed. Blood spattered the ceiling. The bullet holes were in the walls and in different parts of the house. I found an unexploded grenade in the bathroom, which had been set on fire."
One witness, insistent on anonymity, has said: "It was a massacre in every sense of the word." We shouldn't, of course, be surprised. All armies - British, French, German, Japanese, Russian and the rest - have perpetrated similar barbarities. But that doesn't make the horror acceptable. It means, in fact, that in a "war" (in truth, an invasion) based on lies, such brutality was inevitable.
Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld's tripe about US troops being welcomed with flowers? Do you remember how many people believed that trash? Oh, it was trash, all right. Even if Rumsfeld believed it, and that is debatable, it was tripe, trash, twaddle - whatever word you might use to describe it - yet few apologists for the Bush cabal have admitted they were spectacularly wrong.
Why should this be? Sure, nobody likes to be so profoundly wrong. There's a feeling that being so wrong reflects badly on one's ability to read the world. All sorts of excuses have been invented by Bush and Blair apologists to explain how the intention in invading Iraq was decent even if its execution has become a nightmare.
But the intention to invade was never decent. Many people, decent individuals among them, considered it right that the US and Britain should invade Iraq. After all, the ensuing violence wasn't going to last too long and Iraq would become democratic, just like us "civilised" people. Yeah, right! It was always about power and greed. Corpses in bins were practically inevitable.
"Nobody is more concerned about these [ Haditha] allegations than the Marine Corps," said Bush this week. "Those who violated the law, if they did, will be punished." This latter remark (the first is just more platitudinous guff) has a breathtaking insolence to it. Does Bush not realise that most people in the world believe he behaved illegally in invading Iraq in the first place? Then there's that sanctimoniousness about others being "punished". While Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and the rest remain untouched, a dozen marines face punishment, including - theoretically, at least - the death penalty for murder.
Sure, these thugs with guns committed appalling crimes. But what of the thugs who decided to invade Iraq in the first place? Are these people outside the law? It would certainly appear so.
Do you believe Bush, Blair and the rest of the cabal should be punished? They will argue that they didn't personally kill anybody, that their decisions were political ones in the interests of their countries. Do you believe them? Meanwhile the bins gather bodies.